The Apocalypse: A Genuine ‘Made in America’ Tradition

This is the story of a “paralyzed” country, nearing the “precipice of oblivion,” with a president who imposes policies comparable to slavery. The diagnosis of the previous sentence refers to the United States. It comes from the speeches and statements of three Republican presidential candidates: Donald Trump, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, and neurosurgeon Ben Carson. Trump and Carson are leading in the polls.

To be on the brink of an abyss, one step away from both decadence and destruction, is a recurring theme in the history of this country. It happened in the ‘50s, when the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite; in the ‘70s, with the humiliation of Vietnam and the oil crisis; and in the ‘80s, when the Japanese economy was sweeping the United States. In the current decade, it is China.

The apocalypse has tradition, says historian Richard Hofstadter, in a book published in the ‘60s, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Hofstadter wrote about former Sen. Joe McCarthy, extremist groups like the the John Birch Society, and Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. But he could have been writing about Trump, Cruz or Carson.

This is how Hofstadter portrays a paranoid individual: “He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point: it is now or never in organizing resistance to conspiracy.” At another point, he writes: “We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.”

Fantasies are useful in campaigns. They stroke atavistic fears of ruin or invasion: against Communism or alien invasion in the past, and now against immigrants. In English, the word “alien” means extraterrestrial and foreigner.

Fantasies work, but only to a certain point because the U.S. is also the country of optimism. Conservative heroes are not those who frown and announce the seven plagues. It was Ronald Reagan who smiled and announced a new morning in America. This is not a country of sunsets.