Beck’s role in paranoid politics

December 18, 2009 in Political Animals | 1 comment

Media Matters has a long but worthwhile article by Simon Maloy, entitled Glenn Beck and the paranoid style:

Long before ACORN was founded, back when Bachmann and Limbaugh were still in grade school, the American right was practicing this “paranoid style” to great effect, discovering communist monsters hiding under every bed and linking American presidents and Cabinet officials to the great communist conspiracy.

And though the Soviet Union has long since disintegrated, the paranoid style has endured. It found a new voice in talk radio and right-wing activism. It also found a new champion who, better than anyone else, emulates and outright replicates the conspiracy-laden rhetoric from 45 years ago—Fox News’ Glenn Beck. In his rapid rise from morning zoo DJ to the frantic Paul-Revere-meets-Don-Quixote voice of modern conservatism, Beck has crafted a rhetorical style that is every bit as conspiratorial and irrational as the ‘60s-era right-wing firebrands who inspired the political movement he now leads.

It’s not just Beck, of course — a few minutes’ reading of any rightwing blog, or listening to any rightwing radio pundit, will reveal that the single most pervasive defining characteristic of the right in the United states is paranoia.

  1. Green Eagle on December 20, 2009 at 4:28 pm

    “the single most pervasive defining characteristic of the right in the United states is paranoia.”
    This has been a defining characteristic of right wing ideology as long as it has existed, and far outside the United States.  As a single example, I would cite the behavior of the German right after World War I- its fabrication of the “stabbed in the back” theory to explain Germany’s loss, and the rise of numerous right wing groups, culminating with the Nazis, based on constantly stoked paranoia about bolshevism.