United by Their Paranoid Fears
Again Doug beats others to the buzzer with: "What is 'Come on, they already decided who wins even before it happens'?"
Darnell cheerfully agrees. "The Illuminati figured that out months ago," he says. "That's another one for Doug."
The Illuminati, in case you don't know, was an ancient secret Bavarian society that nowadays gets blamed by various conspiracy theories for just about everything that goes right or wrong and defies easy explanation.
It is an appropriate reference for a time in which Trump has made conspiracy theories between government, the media, Clinton's campaign and "international bankers" into key aspects of his final campaign message.
Of course, some conspiracies are real or, at least, could be. Team Trump has been trying in recent days to put the Clinton campaign on the defensive with an undercover video of Democratic National Committee operatives Scott Foval and Robert Creamer. They appear to be discussing what could be unseemly tactics, such as instigating violence at Trump rallies and arranging for fraudulent voting.
Although evidence of wrongdoing is far from clear in the video -- and the DNC and Clinton campaigns are distancing themselves from the two men -- they have raised another embarrassment for candidate Clinton in the final days of her campaign. When her opponents have little else new to bring up, a good conspiracy can go a long way.
"American politics has often been an arena for angry minds," wrote historian Richard Hofstadter in his classic 1964 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." The paranoid style way predates the United States, he noted, and while it was quite visible in the Barry Goldwater movement in Hofstadter's time, it is "a style of mind that is far from new" or limited to the right or left wings.
Indeed, it is not mental illness, but "the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant," the historian wrote.
Paranoid thinking is a useful shortcut to making sense of a complicated world, a talent that also distinguishes many politicians. But more often than not, it is delusional, moving us away from the real world into the realm of magical thinking.
Our paranoid views can unite us like contestants on "Black Jeopardy" or divide us in the way our current presidential campaigns have. Either way, we voters have to deal with real life, not a game show.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)
(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
