The paranoid style and the infinite hypocrisy of the American right wing

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.

Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”

I’m 66 years old, and for the 58 years that I’ve been aware that the political existed — my first clear political memories are of LBJ’s speech announcing he wasn’t running again, and MLK’s assassination later that same week — the American right wing has been in the grip of an archetypal fantasy. The one nightmare to rule them all was that masked anonymous heavily armed thugs — jackbooted, when people still used that word — would use deadly violence to crush the freedom of Americans to even protest against a tyrannical government, without running the risk and eventually experiencing the reality of a murderous dictatorship, hiding behind the illusion of bureaucratic regularity, and making a sick mockery of the very idea of law and justice.

That was their nightmarish fantasy, but what we can see is that this fantasy has been transformed into another kind of fantasy: an all but explicit sadistic revel in murder and revenge porn. All that was necessary for their nightmare to become their eroticized dream was that the exact sort of government violence that they so feared and despised should be unleashed on their enemies, real and imagined, rather than on themselves.

We are now reaching the point where the only solution — not a final solution, unfortunately — to what has happened to this country is to transform that dream into the living nightmare that they have, through their own actions, made into the vengeance upon them that justice now demands.