essay on psychology in politics (new york)

Politics is personal

Research by political psychologists helps to explain why we vote the way we do—and is informing ways to improve democratic elections

Vol. 50, No. 10 Print version: page 44

• Applied Psychology

The 2016 U.S. presidential election took a lot of people by surprise. But while the election of Donald J. Trump may have been an anomaly in many ways, it wasn’t the “unexpected asteroid strike” it’s often made out to be, says Christopher Federico, PhD, a political psychologist at the Center for the Study of Political Psychology (CSPP) at the University of Minnesota.

“Trump’s election was the culmination of a trend, more than some radical unexpected disruption that occurred on November 8, 2016,” Federico says. “It resulted from a long period of evolution in terms of how and why people in the U.S. identify with different political parties.”

That insight is one of many from political psychologists who over the past few decades have plumbed the factors behind voter behavior and political identities, helping us understand politics on an individual level.

“Historically, political science has focused on institutions such as governments or political parties, and how they constrain the behavior of individuals,” says Federico. “What political psychology brings to the table is … understanding individual motivations and how we make sense of this complex world.”

Beyond offering insights into the political mind, political psychology can have practical applications such as improving ballot design, designing methodologically sound polls and, possibly, creating a healthier, more civil democracy.

The partisan divide

Polarization may be the defining feature of American politics in 2019. It’s not just politicians fighting across the aisle. The general public, too, shows growing antipathy toward those in the opposite political camp. In 1960, only 4% of Democrats and 4% of Republicans said they would be disappointed if their child married someone from the opposite political party, according to a study by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (Almond, G., & Verba, S., Civic Culture Study , 1959–60). By 2018, 45% of Democrats and 35% of Republicans reported they’d be unhappy if their child did the same, according to a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and The Atlantic (Najle, M., & Jones, M., PRRI , 2019).

“Party identification is a monster that is creating these intense divisions,” says Howard Lavine, PhD, who directs the CSPP. “Understanding what goes into that is a major goal in political psychology right now.”

Most political researchers agree that the modern media environment has a lot to do with that hostility. “Once there were three networks that saw it as their responsibility to cover the news events in an objective way. Then people realized they could cover the news in such a way that they could turn a profit,” says political psychologist John Jost, PhD, co-director of the Center for Social and Political Behavior at New York University. Today, we have partisan cable news networks and clickbait “news” websites that feed off of political disagreement. “They’re making money by energizing polarized audiences,” Jost says.

Though the media arguably turns up the volume on partisan conflict, that doesn’t explain why American voters sort themselves so readily into opposing groups. To better understand how that happens, political partisanship is increasingly being studied through the lens of social­identity theory, as Leonie Huddy, PhD, of Stony Brook University in New York, and Alexa Bankert, PhD, of the University of Georgia, describe in a chapter on the subject (“ Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics ,” 2017). Social identity theory holds that a person’s self-concept is based on their membership within a group, whether one’s group is defined by a religious affiliation, political party, gender, propensity to support a particular baseball team—or, sometimes, all of the above.

As soon as you identify as a member of one group or another, it influences how you think about the world. “You like members of that group more than others. You want things to reflect favorably upon your group. You’re biased toward believing things that reflect positively on your group,” says Federico. “Once you’re a member of a group, all kinds of group processes related to social identity kick in.”

Motivated reasoning

In the United States, political affiliation is a strong driver of political behavior, as Huddy and Bankert describe. On the positive side, they write, citizens who identify as strongly Republican or Democrat are more likely to vote and participate in politics. On the other hand, when partisan citizens become angry about politics, they are less influenced by information and less likely to support bipartisan politicians who reach across the aisle to find compromise—a stance that can drive politics in a more extreme direction.

One feature of group identity is that people want to protect and promote their own groups. As a result, partisan identity makes us more accepting of information that supports our beliefs and more critical of information that contradicts them, says social psychologist Peter Ditto, PhD, who studies political reasoning at the University of California, Irvine. Most psychologists agree that people engage in this tendency, known as motivated reasoning or motivated cognition.

And though experts disagree about which side is quicker to use motivated reasoning, some research suggests it’s an equal opportunity bias. In a meta-analysis, Ditto and colleagues concluded conservatives and liberals engaged in motivated reasoning to an equal degree ( Perspectives on Psychological Science , Vol. 14, No. 2, 2019). “This pattern was found in judgments about a host of different political topics,” Ditto says. “The clearest finding from the study was the robustness of political tribalism.”

Researchers are beginning to understand the nuances of the ways group identity influences our political choices. Before the 2016 election, Briony Swire-Thompson, PhD, then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and colleagues asked participants to rate their belief in factual and inaccurate statements Trump made during the campaign. As motivated cognition would predict, Republican participants were more likely to believe the statements if they were attributed to Trump, and less likely to believe them if they were presented without attribution. The opposite pattern was true for Democrats. But Trump voters didn’t accept their candidate’s statements blindly. When inaccurate statements by Trump were presented along with notes that indicated they had been retracted as misinformation, Trump supporters were less likely to believe them—at least initially. After a week, however, participants began to “rebelieve” the misinformation, reverting to their initial assumptions, the authors found. Ultimately, being told the statements were inaccurate had no effect on participants’ voting preferences ( Royal Society Open Science , Vol. 4, No. 3, 2017).

Justifying the status quo

Motivated reasoning can help explain how people on opposite ends of the political spectrum can have such different views of the world. Another theory, known as system justification, describes people’s tendency to defend and justify the status quo—even when it means supporting politicians or policies that appear to be at odds with their own self-interest.

“People are motivated to defend and justify aspects of the status quo because they are part of the status quo,” says Jost, who developed the theory with Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji, PhD ( British Journal of Social Psychology , Vol. 33, No. 1, 1994). System justification seems to have played a role in support for Trump, Jost says, with people motivated to support a traditional American way of life—a theme made plain in Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again.”

To explore how system justification may have factored into Trump’s success, Jost and colleagues analyzed responses from a nationally representative sample of Americans surveyed shortly before the 2016 election. The researchers found that justification of economic and gender-based disparities in society was strongly associated with support for Trump. But after adjusting for economic and gender-related variables, system justification overall was associated with support for Hillary Clinton. In other words, Trump’s victory seems to not only represent a rejection of the status quo of liberal government that existed under President Barack Obama, but also an embrace of the traditional social systems that maintain disparities in wealth and gender, the authors conclude ( Translational Issues in Psychological Science , Vol. 3, No. 3, 2017).

“There are interesting differences in what aspects of the status quo people want to change or to preserve,” Jost says.

Politics & personality

For decades, political psychologists have explored why we are drawn to the views and values of one party over another. Examining data from more than 200 such studies from around the world, Jost and colleagues explored the relationship between political ideology and multiple categories of motivation, including dogmatism, personal need for order and structure, and tolerance for uncertainty. Across studies, conservatives score higher than liberals on tests of dogmatic thinking and cognitive rigidity. To a lesser degree, conservatives also have higher needs for order and structure. Liberals tend to have a higher tolerance for uncertainty and a greater need for cognition, which researchers measured with statements such as “I find satisfaction in deliberating hard and for long hours” ( Political Psychology , Vol. 38, No. 2, 2017).

Jost’s research also suggests that a preference for authoritarian leadership styles is associated with Republicans—and with support for Trump in particular. Since at least the 1960s, research has shown that voters who prefer authoritarian styles are more likely to favor Republican presidential candidates, and 2016 was no different. But Jost and his colleagues wondered how that preference might describe voters who favored Trump over other Republican primary candidates.

They found that Trump supporters scored higher than other Republican supporters on two particular facets of authoritarianism: authoritarian aggression and group-based dominance (that is, a preference for group-based social hierarchies). These voters were more likely to support statements asserting that the country needs more law and order and that some groups are naturally inferior to others (Womick, J., et al., Social Psychology and Personality Science , Vol. 10, No. 5, 2019).

Over the past three decades, Americans who are high in authoritarianism have increasingly shifted into the Republican Party, Federico says. Many left-leaning authoritarians have responded by becoming less politically engaged, he and his colleagues found—paying less attention to politics and choosing not to vote, for example ( The Journal of Politics , Vol. 79, No. 3, 2017).

Of course, political ideology is more than just the sum of your personality traits. Many other factors go into determining one’s political preferences. In a paper with Ariel Malka, PhD, of Yeshiva University in New York, Federico describes how traits such as a high need for certainty and security are associated with right-wing beliefs—but only when someone is also knowledgeable about politics ( Advances in Political Psychology , Vol. 39, Suppl. 1, 2018). “Personality traits are more likely to play themselves out in your political preference if you also know and care about politics,” Federico says.

Voters’ pre-existing biases and prejudices matter, too. For example, there’s evidence that gender discrimination may have been a factor in the 2016 election. In an analysis of nationally representative American National Election Studies data, researchers at Brock University in Ontario found greater sexism predicted support for Trump over Clinton, especially among left-leaning voters, who might otherwise have supported a Democratic candidate (Rothwell, V., et al., Personality and Individual Differences , Vol. 138, No. 1, 2019).

Liberal bias?

The research on politics and personality is not without critics, who have suggested that a liberal bias in the field of­ psychology paints conservatives in a negative light. In recent years, scientists have begun studying this assertion. In one example, psychologist Jay Van Bavel, PhD, of New York University, and colleagues recruited a politically diverse sample of U.S. residents to code 194 original social psychology studies for ideological slant. Then the researchers examined published replication attempts of those studies. They found the average rated ideology of the research was fairly centrist. And they found no evidence that research aligned with liberalism was less replicable or less statistically robust than research aligned with conservatism (Reinero, D.A., in press ).

Research has shown that social psychologists are more likely to identify as liberals. But that doesn’t mean that their science is skewed, Jost says. “The whole point of our research methods is to separate characteristics of the researchers themselves from the findings.”

Still, scientists are human, and they are vulnerable to having their judgments tainted by their political feelings just like anyone else, Ditto notes. “Whenever a field is intellectually homogeneous on some dimension, it opens the door to potential bias—for some findings to be more welcome and thus less carefully scrutinized than others, for certain kinds of behavior or people to be seen as the exception rather than the rule, for basic assumptions to go unexamined because everyone shares them,” he says. “Given the subtle power of political tribalism to influence our judgments, social psychologists would be wise to be vigilant about the potential for our political affinities to shape our scientific conclusions.”

Better ballots

Political psychologists still have plenty to unpack about the ways that personality, prejudice and various other factors influence our political leanings. But understanding election outcomes doesn’t always require deep insights into the human mind. Thanks to the design of the electoral system, factors that seem inconsequential can be enough to tip an election in one direction or another.

In research over several decades, for example, Jon Krosnick, PhD, a political psychologist at Stanford University, has shown that the candidate whose name appears first on a ballot earns 2 to 3% more of the vote, on average—a margin that spells the difference between winning and losing in many battleground states ( Public Opinion Quarterly , Vol. 62, No. 3, 1998). Over the years, lawsuits have been filed in several states to push for rotating names, and Krosnick is testifying about his research in a lawsuit in Florida. “About 90 percent of candidates benefit when they are listed first,” he says.

Yet only seven states have laws that require candidates’ names be rotated from precinct to precinct. The rest use other approaches, such as alphabetical order, or giving priority to the candidate from the governor’s party. In 2016, Trump was listed first on ballots in almost all of the states that he won with narrow margins, Krosnick found—a factor that he believes was enough to deliver the presidency to Trump. “If names had been rotated from precinct to precinct, he likely wouldn’t have won,” he says.

Creating fairer ballots is just one example of the concrete ways that political psychology could influence the political process for the better. But the field has the potential to do even more, Krosnick says, to understand our political motivations and, perhaps, help us move beyond our worst political instincts. “Instead of just trying to understand phenomena like motivated reasoning, we can ask how we can build bridges and create collaboration between people who hate each other,” he says. “If political and social psychology embrace that, we can transform ugliness into solutions.” 

Further reading

Open Versus Closed: Personality, Identity, and the Politics of Redistribution Johnston, C.D., et al. Cambridge University Press 2017

Liberals and Conservatives Are Similarly Motivated to Avoid Exposure to One Another’s Opinions Frimer, J.A., et al. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 2017

False Equivalence: Are Liberals and Conservatives in the United States Equally Biased? Baron, J., & Jost, J.T. Perspectives on Psychological Science 2019

Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science Duarte, J.L., et al. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 2015

Additional reading

Past, present and future

Recommended Reading

• Our personality traits influence our political preferences, but other factors also shape our political ideologies.
• Psychologists are studying political partisanship through the framework of social identity theory, which holds that members of a group are motivated to promote and protect that group.
• People are often motivated to defend and justify the status quo, even when doing so appears to go against their own self-interests.

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EDITORIAL article

Editorial: political psychology: the role of personality in politics.

• 1 Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada
• 2 Department Political Science, Beloit College, Beloit, WI, United States
• 3 Department of Political Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada

Editorial on the Research Topic Political Psychology: The Role of Personality in Politics

Introduction

What is personality.

Why do electors develop preferences for certain political parties and their leaders? Why do some individuals engage in political activism more frequently than others? How can we explain divergent policy preferences among citizens? These, and similar questions, have been studied by political scientists for decades. While much of the literature has focused on factors such as sociodemographic characteristics, partisanship, and ideology ( Campbell et al., 1960 ; Converse, 1972 ; Marsh and Kaase, 1979 ), at last part of our understanding of political behavior must be rooted in individual differences in personality. As Feist and Feist (2009) note, “although no single definition is acceptable to all personality theorists, we can say that personality is a pattern of relatively permanent traits and unique characteristics that give both consistency and individuality to a person's behavior” (p. 4).

Perhaps, the most common way of studying personality has been through the trait approach. Traits, or dispositions, refer to the characteristics that are internal to the person, that are reasonably stable over time and across situations, and that help to explain differences between individuals ( Larsen et al., 2018 ). There are now several different models that help organize various personality traits, with the Five Factor Model (FFM; McCrae and Costa, 1987 ) being the most prominent. The FFM includes the traits of extraversion (e.g., gregariousness, assertiveness, and excitement-seeking), agreeableness (e.g., trust, modesty, warmth), conscientiousness (e.g., competence, self-discipline, and achievement-striving), neuroticism (e.g., anxiety, irritability, and vulnerability), and openness to experience (e.g., ideas, fantasy, and unconventional values). A competing model, the HEXACO ( Ashton and Lee, 2007 ), similarly includes the traits of extraversion, conscientiousness, and openness; however, the HEXACO re-defines agreeableness (e.g., forgiveness, gentleness, and patience) and neuroticism (changing the name to emotional stability) while also adding the sixth trait of honesty-humility (e.g., fairness, greed avoidance, modesty). In contrast to these general traits, the Dark Triad ( Paulhus and Williams, 2002 ) defines the three more malevolent traits of psychopathy (e.g., callousness, impulsivity, antagonism), narcissism (e.g., self-aggrandizement, antagonism), and Machiavellianism (e.g., manipulation, planfulness, antagonism). While other individual traits (e.g., authoritarianism, sadism, etc.) and models (e.g., Light Triad) do exist, the FFM, HEXACO, and Dark Triad tend to be the most common.

Why Does Personality Matter?

At least part of the reason for the enduring legacy of the study of personality is its ability to explain important behavioral outcomes. Individual differences in traits from the FFM, for example, have been associated with outcomes related to health and illness (e.g., Friedman, 2001 ), educational achievement (e.g., Poropat, 2009 ), relationship satisfaction (e.g., Malouff et al., 2010 ), and overall life expectancy (e.g., Hill et al., 2011 ). More recently, personality has also been identified as an important consideration when studying political behavior ( Mondak and Halperin, 2008 ; Mondak, 2010 ; Mondak et al., 2010 ; Gerber et al., 2011a , 2011b , 2013 ). Rather than re-inventing personality structures, these scholars have relied on the existing trait models of personality and applied them to a variety of political outcomes and attitudes including political participation ( Vecchione and Caprara, 2009 ; Mondak, 2010 ), political interest ( Gerber et al., 2011a ), vote choice ( Barbaranelli et al., 2007 ; Schoen and Schumann, 2007 ), political ideology ( Chirumbolo and Leone, 2010 ), political ambition ( Blais et al., 2019 ), and trust ( Mondak, 2010 ). As Dinesen et al. (2016) explain, “individuals think and behave differently politically depending on their personal predispositions, specifically their personality” (p. 56). Likewise, Blais and St-Vincent (2011) write, “if one’s personality influences how often one smiles, what kind of music one likes and how one dresses then why should it not have some impact on whether one finds politics interesting or boring and on whether one believes that it is a civic duty to vote” (p. 406)?

While it’s clear that personality has much to offer in understanding different political outcomes, research in this area is still in its infancy. We examined three prominent political science journals that publish on the subject of political behavior ( Political Behavior ; Electoral Studies ; and Political Psychology ) and three prominent personality psychology journals ( Journal of Personality and Social Psychology ; Journal of Personality ; Personality and Individual Differences ) to get a sense of the prevalence of articles dealing with personality as it relates to political outcomes. Through a keyword search and an analysis of titles and abstracts, we documented the prevalence of personality and politics research for the last 21 years (2000–2020). Though only a crude measure, our data provide us with a glimpse into the prominence (or lack thereof) of personality in the study of political outcomes. Outside of some early focus on authoritarianism and social dominance orientation, explorations of personality in political science journals have remained rather niche. Since 2010, for instance, the pooled data reveal that only about 3% of articles across the three journals addressed questions relating to personality and politics. More importantly, there has been little change over the period examined. At the same time, articles dealing with personality and political outcomes in prominent personality journals have increased only slightly over the past 21 years. Despite this increase, on average, fewer than 2% of articles deal with this topic.

Summary of the Research Topic

A key purpose of this research topic is to highlight the diverse set of questions and approaches that are currently being used in the personality and politics literature. Using a number of different methodologies (surveys, experiments, etc.) our contributors draw on established taxonomies (FFM, HEXACO, Dark Triad, Light Triad), individual traits (authoritarianism, empathy, and openness), and different emotional expressions (e.g., collective nostalgia) to answer a variety of questions relating to tolerance and acceptance of racist speech, attitudes towards welfare recipients, public health compliance, voting for challengers or incumbents, likeability of different candidates, political engagement, and ideology. In this way, this research topic considers myriad of ways that personality can be used to answer important interdisciplinary questions and highlights the importance of personality beyond just the “Big 5.”

Several papers in this issue examine the role of personality in shaping attitudes towards political parties and their candidates. Nai et al. , for example, employ an experimental study in order to better understand the relationship between perceived personality traits and candidate evaluations. By manipulating the personality profile of a candidate in a randomly assigned vignette, the authors are able to disentangle these ratings from the effects of partisanship, and make a number of important contributions. Among other findings, the authors reveal that the general public tends to rate candidates with dark triad traits lower in likability, but that this is reversed for voters who themselves score higher on these darker traits. Bittner , by contrast, engaging with the personalization of politics literature, considers the extent to which the subjective evaluations of the personality traits of party leaders helps us understand the political behavior of electors—specifically their vote choice. Using longitudinal data that spans five countries and a number of decades, Bittner finds that leader evaluations and leader traits matter for vote choice, but not necessarily more than they did in the past. While leaders (and their traits) certainly matter, it is not clear that personalization (as a process) is indeed occurring. Continuing with the role of personality in developing political preferences, Ramey et al. , ask why some electors tend to prefer lesser-known, and therefore riskier candidates, while others favor well-established incumbents. Using the FFM trait of openness, as well as the concept of psychological entropy, the authors reveal that electors higher in openness are more willing to vote for uncertain challengers, but that this is limited to independent respondents who are unable to rely on partisan cues.

The next set of papers considers whether personality can help us understand different attitudes and support for specific policies. Blanchet and Landry , for instance, use the sudden onset of the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to study the relationship between authoritarian dispositions and attitudes towards welfare recipients in Canada. While their results indicate that authoritarianism is indeed associated with more negative views of welfare recipients, their longitudinal data also reveal that the pandemic did not seem to exacerbate this relationship. Harell et al. , by contrast, use the trait of empathy to better understand political tolerance and the acceptance of racist speech. Drawing on observational and experimental data from Canada and the United States, the authors provide compelling evidence regarding the importance of empathy in the formation of political attitudes. In particular, the authors demonstrate that individuals with higher levels of empathy express less tolerance towards groups engaged in exclusionary and potentially harmful speech. Rounding out the question of personality and policy attitudes, Stefaniak et al. , contribution helps contextualize policy differences on the left and right in the context of collective nostalgia. The authors demonstrate that, while both liberals and conservatives long for an idealized view of society, conservatives focus on homogeneity while liberals focus on openness. These differing forms of nostalgia, in turn, translate into protection of in-groups and welcoming of out-groups, respectively.

The final papers explore the relationship between personality and political action. Petersen and Palmer explore the extent to which both the Dark (Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism) and Light (faith in humanity, Kantianism, and humanism) triads are related to a variety of political behaviors including participation and nascent political ambition. The addition of the Light Triad is an important contribution as the political science literature has yet to meaningfully engage with this particular construct. Overall, the authors find that the dark traits hold considerably more explanatory power compared to those of faith in humanity, Kantianism, and humanism. Finally, Blais et al. , draw upon survey data with an embedded experiment to study the relationship between personality (both general and dark traits) and public health compliance. In general, the authors find that prosocial traits (honesty-humility, conscientiousness, and openness) are related to greater public health compliance whereas antisocial traits (Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism) are related to greater defiance. On the experimental side, the authors find that public health messaging that focusses on the severity of the pandemic can have unintended consequences as some individuals, such as those higher in emotionality, respond with greater compliance, whereas others, such as those higher in antagonism, respond with less compliance.

As we end this brief introduction a word of thanks is warranted. The contributors to this collection produced high quality cutting-edge interdisciplinary research during a global pandemic. We are remarkably grateful for their participation, as well as that of each of the reviewers who provided valuable feedback. Our hope is that the papers in this issue continue to push the study of personality and politics into the mainstream, and that the work published here generates a host of new questions to be addressed.

Author Contributions

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Keywords: politics, personality, political behavior, dark triad, big five

Citation: Blais J, Chen PG and Pruysers S (2021) Editorial: Political Psychology: The Role of Personality in Politics. Front. Polit. Sci. 3:737790. doi: 10.3389/fpos.2021.737790

Received: 07 July 2021; Accepted: 12 July 2021; Published: 21 July 2021.

Edited and reviewed by:

Copyright © 2021 Blais, Chen and Pruysers. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Julie Blais, [email protected]

† These authors have contributed equally to this work

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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At the Forefront of Political Psychology pays tribute to John L. Sullivan, one of the most influential political psychologists of his generation. Sullivan’s scholarly contributions have deeply shaped our knowledge of belief systems and political tolerance, two flourishing research areas in political psychology that are crucial to understanding the turbulence of our times. This volume, compiled by three of Sullivan’s longtime colleagues and collaborators, includes cutting-edge contributions from scholars in political science and psychology. The book is divided into three sections; the first two focus on how Sullivan’s work on political tolerance and belief systems influenced generations of political psychologists. The final section offers a more personal look at Sullivan’s influence as a mentor to young scholars, many of whom are now intellectual leaders in political psychology. The chapters featured here elucidate how these students were able to flourish under Sullivan’s tutelage and lifelong mentorship. One of John L. Sullivan’s defining traits is his generosity—as a scholar, mentor, leader, and friend. Over the years, many have benefited greatly from Sullivan’s willingness to share his intellect, insight, and passion for democratic values. This impressive collection will appeal to both students and professors of political psychology, but also scholars of social and political behavior, political tolerance, and anyone who has an interest in the contributions made by Sullivan.

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Eugene Borgida is a professor of psychology and law at the University of Minnesota. He is a Morse-Alumni Distinguished Professor of Psychology. In addition, Borgida is an adjunct professor of political science and has served as co-director of the Center for the Study of Political Psychology, which he co-founded, and co-editor of the journal Political Psychology . He is a fellow of the Association of Psychological Science (APS), a fellow in several divisions of the American Psychological Association, and an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has served on the board of directors for the APS, the Social Science Research Council, and the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences. Borgida’s research interests include social cognition, attitudes and persuasion, psychology and law, and political psychology. Christopher M. Federico is a professor in the Departments of Political Science and Psychology at the University of Minnesota. His interests focus on mass belief systems, the psychological foundations of political preferences, and intergroup attitudes and behavior. He is also currently the Director of the Center for the Study of Political Psychology at the University of Minnesota. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation. He is a co-author of Open Versus Closed: Personality, Identity, and the Politics of Redistribution (with Christopher D. Johnston and Howard G. Lavine), winner of the 2018 David O. Sears Award from the International Society of Political Psychology for the best book published in the field of the political psychology of mass politics. Joanne M. Miller is an associate professor in the Departments of Political Science and International Relations and of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Delaware. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts and has won awards from the following American Political Science Association sections: Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior; Political Communication; and Political Organizations and Parties. Her interests focus on political psychology, with particular emphases on the processes by which citizens form political attitudes and become politically engaged and on the psychological antecedents of belief in conspiracy theories.

Critics' Reviews

"This volume provides the reader with a comprehensive and carefully drawn discussion of the ideas and influence of one of the most impactful scholars within the ever growing field of political psychology. It is a must-read for those scholars, educators and policy makers interested in the psychology of political and social intolerance." — Jim Sidanius, John Lindsley Professor of Psychology in Memory of William James, Harvard University "In this volume a distinguished group of political scientists and psychologist pay tribute to John Sullivan. Their work builds in important ways on Sullivan’s legacy, updating and extending his seminal insights into political tolerance and ideological reasoning. Perhaps just as importantly, the volume celebrates Sullivan’s role as a valued research colleague and mentor. Its contents are inspiring, informative, and a must-read for political psychologists." — Leonie Huddy, Professor of Political Science, Stony Brook University

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How Much Is “Being Cool” Actually Worth in Politics?

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The New Yorker staff writer Naomi Fry joins Tyler Foggatt to unpack Kamala Harris’s cultural blitzkrieg and how a litany of A-list celebrities and online influencers have helped revitalize the Presidential race. “It’s like the scene in ‘Pulp Fiction’ or something, where Uma Thurman overdoses and then has the adrenaline shot into her heart,” Fry said. To what degree can a candidate turn “being cool” into a winning strategy?

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The New York Area Political Psychology Meeting is a biannual seminar that brings together scholars interested in political psychology to discuss cutting-edge research in the field. The meeting begins at 10:30 am. Three papers are presented and discussed at each meeting. Two papers will be presented in the morning session. We will break for lunch at about 1:00pm (lunch provided). The third paper will be presented after lunch. The meeting should end about 3:30 or 4:00. The paper presenters will take no more than 5 minutes to introduce their paper and provide any background they like. The rest of the time will be devoted to discussion. Participants are expected to have read the papers in advance of the meeting.

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The Common Mind: An Essay on Psychology, Society, and Politics

Professor of Social and Political Theory in the Research School of Social Sciences

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This book is in three sections, with two chapters in each. It begins with questions of psychology: questions to do with what it means to be an intentional agent and, in particular, what it means to be an agent with the capacity for thought. Having sketched an overall view of the intentional, thinking agent, it then goes on to explore the difference that social life makes to the mentality of such agents; in effect, it outlines a social ontology. And, having developed a picture of the mind in society – of the common or social mind – it turns, finally, to the lessons of this picture for the pursuit of social and political theory: for the explanation of what happens on the social scene and for the evaluation of the different ways in which that scene may be structured.

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How Politics Is Forcing Us to Look at Manhood

Personal perspective: the way we see masculinity may drive our political views..

Updated August 28, 2024 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma

• We all have different images in our head about what constitutes masculinity.
• Masculinity is a social construction and it changes in politics and in life.
• The knight in shining armor, the bard, the dad, and the nerd are typical images associated with being a man.

What does being a man entail?

Tim Walz is being called America's dad, and scenes with his family underscore this. Meanwhile, J.D. Vance is talking up his service record, and accuses Walz of stolen valor —Walz spent 24 years in the Army National Guard but did not deploy to Iraq. Donald Trump epitomized the successful 1980s playboy and businessman in New York City and strong currents of masculinity drive his popularity—for example, his fist pump after being shot in the ear during an assassination attempt at a July rally.

Kamala Harris offers a counterpoint as the first woman of color to head a major party ticket.

Both Republican and Democratic conventions, in very different ways, played up the role of men taking power (Hulk Hogan tearing his shirt at the Republican National Convention) and the role of women taking power potentially away from men (Harris talking about reproductive rights for women at the Democratic National Convention). These images are starkly different visions of manhood; the kindly father, the valiant serviceman, and the playboy-businessman. And as a challenge, the assertive woman fighting for women. Wikipedia describes versions of masculinity that trend, for some, to the negative: toxic masculinity, hypermasculinity, and hegemonic masculinity.

When viewing what it means to be a man, it may be best to view masculinity as a social construction. What was true once about what it means to be a man, may not be true today and certainly will not be true tomorrow. In politics , as often in life, one shapes the other. While we cannot fully consider what being a man entails without considering the role of women (and same-sex and non-binary partners, among others), here we are looking at some standard and, hopefully, recognizable definitions of masculinity.

The Knight in Shining Armor

Easily recognizable and clearly heterosexual historically (though no longer), this traditional model of masculinity excels on the battlefield and the playing field, He sweeps women off their feet, saving them from the mythological dragon while scoring the winning touchdown in overtime and sinking the decisive three-pointer at the buzzer. He is the prom king who may have served his country. He is laconic, strong, and handsome.

The glib, poetry-reciting man who woos his intended with soothing tones, sometimes sung under her window, is another version of masculinity (with apologies to Cyrano de Bergerac). Consider the smooth-singing male vocal groups of the 1960s for a more modern version. He is not the prom king but the star of the high school musical. He listens, wears his heart on his sleeve, and may appear vulnerable with his emotions.

Know any dad jokes? This is a newer version of what women (and men) want. He is the coach, the steady guy who comes home on time and is reliable. According to the Pew Research Center, almost one in five stay-at-home parents are dads. Dads are more likely to take paternity leave now than in the past and are increasingly engaged in child care and housework (while still doing less of both than moms). As women have increasingly entered the workforce, having an equal partner at home and work is important. Is this masculinity? Many would say being a responsible family man is the height of masculinity. Men are interested in being parents, according to a 2024 Pew poll. In fact, among those without children and between the ages of 18 and 34, men appear to be more interested than women. The father's role is often emphasized in houses of worship as the role model.

Hello, high tech. Not imposing physically and not overly verbal, the nerd is the smartest guy in the room and is often attractive for that reason. He may be the leader behind the scenes who figures out in the end how to solve problems using his intellect. In a high-tech world, he is often on the inside track.

These images of masculinity (and others) are embedded in our psyche. When we watch the upcoming debates between a strong man and a strong woman (my impression of the two) and between two different visions of masculinity (my impression of the two) in the vice-presidential debates, consider what we are reacting to. Is this an important consideration? Do we feel more comfortable with one than the other concerning masculinity and femininity as the two are often connected? Or does the representation of gender have nothing to do with it?

Geoffrey Greif, Ph.D. , is a professor at the University of Maryland School of Social Work and the author of Buddy System: Understanding Male Friendships .

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The Psychology of Political Communicators

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In this timely study, Ofer Feldman, Sonja Zmerli, and their team of experts shed light on the multiple ways communication affects political behavior and attitudes. Written for students and scholars alike, The Psychology of Political Communicators uses examples from the US, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East to examine the nature, characteristics, content, and reception of communication in three major areas of discourse:

• The style and nature of language used by political actors in the national and international arenas
• The discourse used in nationalist populist movements and during negative campaigns
• The rhetoric of the media as it tries to frame politics, political events, and political actors

Collectively, the essays form a solid foundation on which to understand the different roles language plays in the conduct of politics, the way in which these roles are performed in various situations in different societies and cultures, and the political outcomes of verbal behavior. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of political psychology and communication studies.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1 | 10  pages, introduction, part i | 2  pages, political leaders’ discourse, chapter 2 | 18  pages, the new american electoral politics, chapter 3 | 25  pages, political communicators and control in political interviews in japanese television, chapter 4 | 21  pages, comparing japanese and us leaders’ communication, part ii | 2  pages, populist communication and negative campaigning, chapter 5 | 20  pages, they caused our crisis the contents and effects of populist communication, chapter 6 | 24  pages, populism in self-directed and mediated communication, chapter 7 | 20  pages, fighting with fire, part iii | 2  pages, media discourse, chapter 8 | 20  pages, representations of televised debates in the press and their influence on political candidates, chapter 9 | 20  pages, non-systemic factors underlying rapid change in gender-biased media framing of female politicians, chapter 10 | 19  pages, old traps and new prospects, chapter 11 | 21  pages, “men prefer redheads”, chapter 12 | 9  pages, media ownership.

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You've reached your free article limit for this month. connect to your subscription or subscribe for full access, thanks for being a subscriber, the paranoid style in american politics.

It had been around a long time before the Radical Right discovered it—and its targets have ranged from “the international bankers” to Masons, Jesuits, and munitions makers.

A merican politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content. I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric. The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent.

Here is Senator McCarthy, speaking in June 1951 about the parlous situation of the United States:

How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, which it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men. . . . What can be made of this unbroken series of decisions and acts contributing to the strategy of defeat? They cannot be attributed to incompetence. . . . The laws of probability would dictate that part of . . . [the] decisions would serve the country’s interest.

Now turn back fifty years to a manifesto signed in 1895 by a number of leaders of the Populist party:

As early as 1865–66 a conspiracy was entered into between the gold gamblers of Europe and America. . . . For nearly thirty years these conspirators have kept the people quarreling over less important matters while they have pursued with unrelenting zeal their one central purpose. . . . Every device of treachery, every resource of statecraft, and every artifice known to the secret cabals of the international gold ring are being used to deal a blow to the prosperity of the people and the financial and commercial independence of the country.

Next, a Texas newspaper article of 1855:

 . . . It is a notorious fact that the Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome are at this very moment plotting our destruction and threatening the extinction of our political, civil, and religious institutions. We have the best reasons for believing that corruption has found its way into our Executive Chamber, and that our Executive head is tainted with the infectious venom of Catholicism. . . . The Pope has recently sent his ambassador of state to this country on a secret commission, the effect of which is an extraordinary boldness of the Catholic church throughout the United States. . . . These minions of the Pope are boldly insulting our Senators; reprimanding our Statesmen; propagating the adulterous union of Church and State; abusing with foul calumny all governments but Catholic, and spewing out the bitterest execrations on all Protestantism. The Catholics in the United States receive from abroad more than $200,000 annually for the propagation of their creed. Add to this the vast revenues collected here. . . .

These quotations give the keynote of the style. In the history of the United States one find it, for example, in the anti-Masonic movement, the nativist and anti-Catholic movement, in certain spokesmen of abolitionism who regarded the United States as being in the grip of a slaveholders’ conspiracy, in many alarmists about the Mormons, in some Greenback and Populist writers who constructed a great conspiracy of international bankers, in the exposure of a munitions makers’ conspiracy of World War I, in the popular left-wing press, in the contemporary American right wing, and on both sides of the race controversy today, among White Citizens’ Councils and Black Muslims. I do not propose to try to trace the variations of the paranoid style that can be found in all these movements, but will confine myself to a few leading episodes in our past history in which the style emerged in full and archetypal splendor.

Illuminism and Masonry

I begin with a particularly revealing episode—the panic that broke out in some quarters at the end of the eighteenth century over the allegedly subversive activities of the Bavarian Illuminati. This panic was a part of the general reaction to the French Revolution. In the United States it was heightened by the response of certain men, mostly in New England and among the established clergy, to the rise of Jeffersonian democracy. Illuminism had been started in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, a professor of law at the University of Ingolstadt. Its teachings today seem to be no more than another version of Enlightenment rationalism, spiced with the anticlerical atmosphere of eighteenth-century Bavaria. It was a somewhat naïve and utopian movement which aspired ultimately to bring the human race under the rules of reason. Its humanitarian rationalism appears to have acquired a fairly wide influence in Masonic lodges.

Americans first learned of Illuminism in 1797, from a volume published in Edinburgh (later reprinted in New York) under the title, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies . Its author was a well-known Scottish scientist, John Robison, who had himself been a somewhat casual adherent of Masonry in Britain, but whose imagination had been inflamed by what he considered to be the far less innocent Masonic movement on the Continent. Robison seems to have made his work as factual as he could, but when he came to estimating the moral character and the political influence of Illuminism, he made the characteristic paranoid leap into fantasy. The association, he thought, was formed “for the express purpose of rooting out all religious establishments, and overturning all the existing governments of Europe .” It had become “one great and wicked project fermenting and working all over Europe.” And to it he attributed a central role in bringing about the French Revolution. He saw it as a libertine, anti-Christian movement, given to the corruption of women, the cultivation of sensual pleasures, and the violation of property rights. Its members had plans for making a tea that caused abortion—a secret substance that “blinds or kills when spurted in the face,” and a device that sounds like a stench bomb—a “method for filling a bedchamber with pestilential vapours.”

These notions were quick to make themselves felt in America. In May 1798, a minister of the Massachusetts Congregational establishment in Boston, Jedidiah Morse, delivered a timely sermon to the young country, which was then sharply divided between Jeffersonians and Federalists, Francophiles and Anglomen. Having read Robison, Morse was convinced of a Jacobinical plot touched off by Illuminism, and that the country should be rallied to defend itself. His warnings were heeded throughout New England wherever Federalists brooded about the rising tide of religious infidelity or Jeffersonian democracy. Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale, followed Morse’s sermon with a Fourth-of-July discourse on The Duty of Americans in the Present Crisis , in which he held forth against the Antichrist in his own glowing rhetoric. Soon the pulpits of New England were ringing with denunciations of the Illuminati, as though the country were swarming with them.

The anti-Masonic movement of the late 1820s and the 1830s took up and extended the obsession with conspiracy. At first, this movement may seem to be no more than an extension or repetition of the anti-Masonic theme sounded in the outcry against the Bavarian Illuminati. But whereas the panic of the 1790s was confined mainly to New England and linked to an ultraconservative point of view, the later anti-Masonic movement affected many parts of the northern United States, and was intimately linked with popular democracy and rural egalitarianism. Although anti-Masonry happened to be anti-Jacksonian (Jackson was a Mason), it manifested the same animus against the closure of opportunity for the common man and against aristocratic institutions that one finds in the Jacksonian crusade against the Bank of the United States.

The anti-Masonic movement was a product not merely of natural enthusiasm but also of the vicissitudes of party politics. It was joined and used by a great many men who did not fully share its original anti-Masonic feelings. It attracted the support of several reputable statemen who had only mild sympathy with its fundamental bias, but who as politicians could not afford to ignore it. Still, it was a folk movement of considerable power, and the rural enthusiasts who provided its real impetus believed in it wholeheartedly.

The Paranoid Style in Action

The John Birch Society is attempting to suppress a television series about the United Nations by means of a mass letter-writing campaign to the sponsor, . . . The Xerox Corporation. The corporation, however, intends to go ahead with the programs. . . .

The July issue of the John Birch Society Bulletin . . . said an “avalanche of mail ought to convince them of the unwisdom of their proposed action—just as United Air Lines was persuaded to back down and take the U.N. insignia off their planes.” (A United Air Lines spokesman confirmed that the U.N. emblem was removed from its planes, following “considerable public reaction against it.”)

Birch official John Rousselot said, “We hate to see a corporation of this country promote the U.N. when we know that it is an instrument of the Soviet Communist conspiracy.”

—San Francisco Chronicle , July 31, 1964

As a secret society, Masonry was considered to be a standing conspiracy against republican government. It was held to be particularly liable to treason—for example, Aaron Burr’s famous conspiracy was alleged to have been conducted by Masons. Masonry was accused of constituting a separate system of loyalty, a separate imperium within the framework of federal and state governments, which was inconsistent with loyalty to them. Quite plausibly it was argued that the Masons had set up a jurisdiction of their own, with their own obligations and punishments, liable to enforcement even by the penalty of death. So basic was the conflict felt to be between secrecy and democracy that other, more innocent societies such as Phi Beta Kappa came under attack.

Since Masons were pledged to come to each other’s aid under circumstances of distress, and to extend fraternal indulgence at all times, it was held that the order nullified the enforcement of regular law. Masonic constables, sheriffs, juries, and judges must all be in league with Masonic criminals and fugitives. The press was believed to have been so “muzzled” by Masonic editors and proprietors that news of Masonic malfeasance could be suppressed. At a moment when almost every alleged citadel of privilege in America was under democratic assault, Masonry was attacked as a fraternity of the privileged, closing business opportunities and nearly monopolizing political offices.

Certain elements of truth and reality there may have been in these views of Masonry. What must be emphasized here, however, is the apocalyptic and absolutistic framework in which this hostility was commonly expressed. Anti-Masons were not content simply to say that secret societies were rather a bad idea. The author of the standard exposition of anti-Masonry declared that Freemasonry was “not only the most abominable but also the most dangerous institution that ever was imposed on man. . . . It may truly be said to be Hell’s master piece.”

The Jesuit Threat

Fear of a Masonic plot had hardly been quieted when the rumors arose of a Catholic plot against American values. One meets here again the same frame of mind, but a different villain. The anti-Catholic movement converged with a growing nativism, and while they were not identical, together they cut such a wide swath in American life that they were bound to embrace many moderates to whom the paranoid style, in its full glory, did not appeal. Moreover, we need not dismiss out of hand as totally parochial or mean-spirited the desire of Yankee Americans to maintain an ethnically and religiously homogeneous society nor the particular Protestant commitments to individualism and freedom that were brought into play. But the movement had a large paranoid infusion, and the most influential anti-Catholic militants certainly had a strong affinity for the paranoid style.

Two books which appeared in 1835 described the new danger to the American way of life and may be taken as expressions of the anti-Catholic mentality. One, Foreign Conspiracies against the Liberties of the United States , was from the hand of the celebrated painter and inventor of the telegraph, S.F.B. Morse. “A conspiracy exists,” Morse proclaimed , and “its plans are already in operation . . . we are attacked in a vulnerable quarter which cannot be defended by our ships, our forts, or our armies.” The main source of the conspiracy Morse found in Metternich’s government: “ Austria is now acting in this country. She has devised a grand scheme. She has organized a great plan for doing something here. . . . She has her Jesuit missionaries traveling through the land; she has supplied them with money, and has furnished a fountain for a regular supply.” Were the plot successful, Morse said, some scion of the House of Hapsburg would soon be installed as Emperor of the United States.

“It is an ascertained fact,” wrote another Protestant militant,

that Jesuits are prowling about all parts of the United States in every possible disguise, expressly to ascertain the advantageous situations and modes to disseminate Popery. A minister of the Gospel from Ohio has informed us that he discovered one carrying on his devices in his congregation; and he says that the western country swarms with them under the name of puppet show men, dancing masters, music teachers, peddlers of images and ornaments, barrel organ players, and similar practitioners.

Lyman Beecher, the elder of a famous family and the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote in the same year his Plea for the West , in which he considered the possibility that the Christian millennium might come in the American states. Everything depended, in his judgment, upon what influences dominated the great West, where the future of the country lay. There Protestantism was engaged in a life-or-death struggle with Catholicism. “Whatever we do, it must be done quickly. . . . ” A great tide of immigration, hostile to free institutions, was sweeping in upon the country, subsidized and sent by “the potentates of Europe,” multiplying tumult and violence, filling jails, crowding poorhouses, quadrupling taxation, and sending increasing thousands of voters to “lay their inexperienced hand upon the helm of our power.” Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan. Whereas the anti-Masons had envisaged drinking bouts and had entertained themselves with sado-masochistic fantasies about the actual enforcement of grisly Masonic oaths, 1 the anti-Catholics invented an immense lore about libertine priests, the confessional as an opportunity for seduction, licentious convents and monasteries. Probably the most widely read contemporary book in the United States before Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a work supposedly written by one Maria Monk, entitled Awful Disclosures , which appeared in 1836. The author, who purported to have escaped from the Hotel Dieu nunnery in Montreal after five years there as novice and nun, reported her convent life in elaborate and circumstantial detail. She reported having been told by the Mother Superior that she must “obey the priests in all things”; to her “utter astonishment and horror,” she soon found what the nature of such obedience was. Infants born of convent liaisons were baptized and then killed, she said, so that they might ascend at once to heaven. Her book, hotly attacked and defended , continued to be read and believed even after her mother gave testimony that Maria had been somewhat addled ever since childhood after she had rammed a pencil into her head. Maria died in prison in 1849, after having been arrested in a brothel as a pickpocket.

Anti-Catholicism, like anti-Masonry, mixed its fortunes with American party politics, and it became an enduring factor in American politics. The American Protective Association of the 1890s revived it with ideological variations more suitable to the times—the depression of 1893, for example, was alleged to be an international creation of the Catholics who began it by starting a run on the banks. Some spokesmen of the movement circulated a bogus encyclical attributed to Leo XIII instructing American Catholics on a certain date in 1893 to exterminate all heretics, and a great many anti-Catholics daily expected a nationwide uprising. The myth of an impending Catholic war of mutilation and extermination of heretics persisted into the twentieth century.

Why They Feel Dispossessed

If, after our historically discontinuous examples of the paranoid style, we now take the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country—that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.

Important changes may also be traced to the effects of the mass media. The villains of the modern right are much more vivid than those of their paranoid predecessors, much better known to the public; the literature of the paranoid style is by the same token richer and more circumstantial in personal description and personal invective. For the vaguely delineated villains of the anti-Masons, for the obscure and disguised Jesuit agents, the little-known papal delegates of the anti-Catholics, for the shadowy international bankers of the monetary conspiracies, we may now substitute eminent public figures like Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower, secretaries of State like Marshall, Acheson, and Dulles, Justices of the Supreme Court like Frankfurter and Warren, and the whole battery of lesser but still famous and vivid alleged conspirators headed by Alger Hiss.

Events since 1939 have given the contemporary right-wing paranoid a vast theatre for his imagination, full of rich and proliferating detail, replete with realistic cues and undeniable proofs of the validity of his suspicions. The theatre of action is now the entire world, and he can draw not only on the events of World War II, but also on those of the Korean War and the Cold War. Any historian of warfare knows it is in good part a comedy of errors and a museum of incompetence; but if for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination. In the end, the real mystery, for one who reads the primary works of paranoid scholarship, is not how the United States has been brought to its present dangerous position but how it has managed to survive at all.

The basic elements of contemporary right-wing thought can be reduced to three: First, there has been the now-familiar sustained conspiracy, running over more than a generation, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt’s New Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism. A great many right-wingers would agree with Frank Chodorov, the author of The Income Tax: The Root of All Evil , that this campaign began with the passage of the income-tax amendment to the Constitution in 1913.

The second contention is that top government officialdom has been so infiltrated by Communists that American policy, at least since the days leading up to Pearl Harbor, has been dominated by men who were shrewdly and consistently selling out American national interests.

Finally, the country is infused with a network of Communist agents, just as in the old days it was infiltrated by Jesuit agents, so that the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media is engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans.

Perhaps the most representative document of the McCarthyist phase was a long indictment of Secretary of State George C. Marshall, delivered in 1951 in the Senate by senator McCarthy, and later published in a somewhat different form. McCarthy pictured Marshall as the focal figure in a betrayal of American interests stretching in time from the strategic plans for World War II to the formulation of the Marshall Plan. Marshal was associated with practically every American failure or defeat, McCarthy insisted, and none of this was either accident or incompetence. There was a “baffling pattern” of Marshall’s interventions in the war, which always conduced to the well-being of the Kremlin. The sharp decline in America’s relative strength from 1945 to 1951 did not “just happen”; it was “brought about, step by step, by will and intention,” the consequence not of mistakes but of a treasonous conspiracy, “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.”

Today, the mantle of McCarthy has fallen on a retired candy manufacturer, Robert H. Welch, Jr., who is less strategically placed and has a much smaller but better organized following than the Senator. A few years ago Welch proclaimed that “Communist influences are now in almost complete control of our government”—note the care and scrupulousness of that “almost.” He has offered a full scale interpretation of our recent history in which Communists figure at every turn: They started a run on American banks in 1933 that forced their closure; they contrived the recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States in the same year, just in time to save the Soviets from economic collapse; they have stirred up the fuss over segregation in the South; they have taken over the Supreme Court and made it “one of the most important agencies of Communism.”

Close attention to history wins for Mr. Welch an insight into affairs that is given to few of us. “For many reasons and after a lot of study,” he wrote some years ago, “I personally believe [John Foster] Dulles to be a Communist agent.” The job of Professor Arthur F. Burns as head of Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisors was “merely a cover-up for Burns’s liaison work between Eisenhower and some of his Communist bosses.” Eisenhower’s brother Milton was “actually [his] superior and boss within the Communist party.” As for Eisenhower himself, Welch characterized him, in words that have made the candy manufacturer famous, as “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy”—a conclusion, he added, “based on an accumulation of detailed evidence so extensive and so palpable that it seems to put this conviction beyond any reasonable doubt.”

Emulating the Enemy

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse. (“Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.”)

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through “front” groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy. 2 Spokesmen of the various fundamentalist anti-Communist “crusades” openly express their admiration for the dedication and discipline the Communist cause calls forth.

On the other hand, the sexual freedom often attributed to the enemy, his lack of moral inhibition, his possession of especially effective techniques for fulfilling his desires, give exponents of the paranoid style an opportunity to project and express unacknowledgeable aspects of their own psychological concerns. Catholics and Mormons—later, Negroes and Jews—have lent themselves to a preoccupation with illicit sex. Very often the fantasies of true believers reveal strong sadomasochistic outlets, vividly expressed, for example, in the delight of anti-Masons with the cruelty of Masonic punishments.

Renegades and Pedants

A special significance attaches to the figure of the renegade from the enemy cause. The anti-Masonic movement seemed at times to be the creation of ex-Masons; certainly the highest significance was attributed to their revelations, and every word they said was believed. Anti-Catholicism used the runaway nun and the apostate priest; the place of ex-Communists in the avant-garde anti-Communist movements of our time is well known. In some part, the special authority accorded the renegade derives from the obsession with secrecy so characteristics of such movements: the renegade is the man or woman who has been in the Arcanum, and brings forth with him or her the final verification of suspicions which might otherwise have been doubted by a skeptical world. But I think there is a deeper eschatological significance that attaches to the person of the renegade: in the spiritual wrestling match between good and evil which is the paranoid’s archetypal model of the world, the renegade is living proof that all the conversions are not made by the wrong side. He brings with him the promise of redemption and victory.

A final characteristic of the paranoid style is related to the quality of its pedantry. One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Of course, there are highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow paranoids, as there are likely to be in any political tendency. But respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates “evidence.” The difference between this “evidence” and that commonly employed by others is that it seems less a means of entering into normal political controversy than a means of warding off the profane intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it.

Paranoid writing begins with certain broad defensible judgments. There was something to be said for the anti-Masons. After all, a secret society composed of influential men bound by special obligations could conceivable pose some kind of threat to the civil order in which they were suspended. There was also something to be said for the Protestant principles of individuality and freedom, as well as for the nativist desire to develop in North America a homogeneous civilization. Again, in our time an actual laxity in security allowed some Communists to find a place in governmental circles, and innumerable decisions of World War II and the Cold War could be faulted.

The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent—in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world. It is nothing if not scholarly in technique. McCarthy’s 96-page pamphlet, McCarthyism , contains no less than 313 footnote references, and Mr. Welch’s incredible assault on Eisenhower, The Politician , has one hundred pages of bibliography and notes. The entire right-wing movement of our time is a parade of experts, study groups, monographs, footnotes, and bibliographies. Sometimes the right-wing striving for scholarly depth and an inclusive world view has startling consequences: Mr. Welch, for example, has charged that the popularity of Arnold Toynbee’s historical work is the consequence of a plot on the part of Fabians, “Labour party bosses in England,” and various members of the Anglo-American “liberal establishment” to overshadow the much more truthful and illuminating work of Oswald Spengler.

The Double Sufferer

The paranoid style is not confined to our own country and time; it is an international phenomenon. Studying the millennial sects of Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, Norman Cohn believed he found a persistent psychic complex that corresponds broadly with what I have been considering—a style made up of certain preoccupations and fantasies: “the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary; the refusal to accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human existence, such as transience, dissention, conflict, fallibility whether intellectual or moral; the obsession with inerrable prophecies . . . systematized misinterpretations, always gross and often grotesque.”

This glimpse across a long span of time emboldens me to make the conjecture—it is no more than that—that a mentality disposed to see the world in this way may be a persistent psychic phenomenon, more or less constantly affecting a modest minority of the population. But certain religious traditions, certain social structures and national inheritances, certain historical catastrophes or frustrations may be conducive to the release of such psychic energies, and to situations in which they can more readily be built into mass movements or political parties. In American experience ethnic and religious conflict have plainly been a major focus for militant and suspicious minds of this sort, but class conflicts also can mobilize such energies. Perhaps the central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise. The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular social interest—perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands—are shut out of the political process. Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed. They see only the consequences of power—and this through distorting lenses—and have no chance to observe its actual machinery. A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen. It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him—and in any case he resists enlightenment.

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.

 was DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. His book “Anti-intellectualism in American Life” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1964. This essay was adapted from the Herbert Spencer Lecture, delivered at Oxford University in November 1963.

Many anti-Masons had been fascinated by the penalties involved if Masons failed to live up to their obligations. My own favorite is the oath attributed to a royal archmason who invited “having my skull smote off and my brains exposed to the scorching rays of the sun.”

In his recent book, How to Win an Election , Stephen C. Shadegg cites a statement attributed to Mao Tse-tung: “Give me just two or three men in a village and I will take the village.” Shadegg comments: “ In the Goldwater campaigns of 1952 and 1958 and in all other campaigns where I have served as consultant I have followed the advice of Mao Tse-tung.” “I would suggest,” writes senator Goldwater in Why Not Victory? “that we analyze and copy the strategy of the enemy; theirs has worked and ours has not.

November 1964

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Why this writer says her son deserves a champion like Tim Walz

Karen Zamora

Juana Summers

NPR's Juana Summers speaks with writer Tina Brown, who recently wrote an essay for the New York Times titled: "My Son and Gus Walz Deserve a Champion Like Tim Walz."

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Politics and the English Language

Despite the rank hypocrisy of Orwell’s use of the passive voice, this is one of the most sublimely constructed essays ever published in the English language. I wish The New Republic could claim full credit for this one. But Orwell initially ran the piece in London with Cyril Connolly’s Horizon before publishing it here. The piece perfectly expresses the hardheaded tum that liberalism would take in the postwar years when it lost all patience with the obfuscations that had enabled utopian fantasies to persist. —Franklin Foer, former TNR editor, Insurrections of the Mind: 100 Years of Politics and Culture in America

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent, and our language—so the argument runs—must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to airplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are four specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.

These passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad—I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen—but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative samples. I number them so that I can refer back to them when necessary:

(1) I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien (sic) to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate. —Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression).

(2) Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes such egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate or put at a loss for bewilder. —Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossa) .

(3) On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity? —Essay on psychology in Politics (New York).

(4) All the “best people” from the gentlemen’s clubs, and all the frantic fascist captains, united in common hatred of socialism and bestial horror of the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoisie to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis. —Communist pamphlet

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing; as soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. I list below various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose-construction is habitually dodged:

Dying metaphors: A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically “dead” (e.g., iron resolution ) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are : Ring the changes on, take up the cudgels for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, Achilles’ heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a “rift,” for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying.

Operators, Or verbal false limbs: These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are: render inoperative, militate against, prove unacceptable, make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, serve the purpose of, etc., etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb such as prove, serve, form, play , render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, the fact that, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved from anti-climax by such refunding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion, etc.

Pretentious diction: Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual basic, primary, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgments. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to dignify the sordid processes of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on anarchaic color, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, trident, sword, shield, banner, jackboot, clarion. Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien regime, deus ex machina, status quo, gleichschaltung, Weltanschauung, are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g. and etc., there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in English. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, clandestine, subaqueous and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon opposite numbers [1] . The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, lackeys, flunkey, mad dog. White Guard, etc.) consists largely of words and phrases translated from Russian, German or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use a Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the -ize formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentatory) than to think up the English words that will cover one’s meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.

Meaningless words: In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning [2] . Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly even expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, “The outstanding feature of Mr. X’s work is its living quality,” while another writes, “The immediately striking thing about Mr. X’s work is its peculiar deadness,” the reader accepts this as a simple difference of opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable.” The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: Consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Pétain was a true patriot. The Soviet Press is the freest in the world. The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with the intent to deceive. Others words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well known verse from “Ecclesiastes”:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit three, on page 872, for instance, contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations—race, battle, bread—dissolve into the vague phrase “success or failure in competitive activities.” This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing—no one capable of using phrases like “objective consideration of contemporary phenomena’’—would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier—even quicker, once you have the habit—to say In my opinion it is a not unjustifiable assumption that than to say/ think. When you are composing in a hurry—when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech—it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images dash—as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot —it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking.

Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in 53 words. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the [printer’s] slip alien for akin, making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions, and while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means. (3) if one takes an uncharitable attitude toward it, is simply meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading the whole of the article in which it occurs. In (4), the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink. People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning—they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another—but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you—even think your thoughts for you, to certain extent—and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions, and not a ‘party line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White Papers and the speeches of Under-Secretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases – bestial atrocities , iron heel , blood-stained tyranny , free peoples of the world , stand shoulder to shoulder – one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification . Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers . People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements . Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet régime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find – this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify – that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption , leaves much to be desired , would serve no good purpose , a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind , are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one’s elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this morning’s post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he ‘felt impelled’ to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence that I see: ‘(The Allies) have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany’s social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe.’ You see, he ‘feels impelled’ to write – feels, presumably, that he has something new to say – and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases ( lay the foundations , achieve a radical transformation ) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.

I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned , which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of fly-blown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence [3] , to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor points. The defence of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.

To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a ‘standard English’ which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one’s meaning clear or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a ‘good prose style’. On the other hand it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one’s meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising, you probably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meanings as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose – not simply accept – the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impression one’s words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do. iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active. v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.

I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don’t know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase – some jackboot , Achilles’ heel , hotbed , melting pot , acid test , veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse – into the dustbin where it belongs. [1] An interesting illustration of this is the way in which the English flower names which were in use till very recently are being ousted by Greek ones, snapdragon becoming antirrhinum , forget-me-not becoming myosotis , etc. It is hard to see any practical reason for this change of fashion: it is probably due to an instinctive turning-away from the more homely word and a vague feeling that the Greek word is scientific.

[2] Example: ‘Comfort’s catholicity of perception and image, strangely Whitmanesque in range, almost the exact opposite in aesthetic compulsion, continues to evoke that trembling atmospheric accumulative hinting at a cruel, an inexorably serene timelessness… Wrey Gardiner scores by aiming at simple bullseyes with precision. Only they are not so simple, and through this contented sadness runs more than the surface bitter-sweet of resignation’. ( Poetry Quarterly .)

[3] One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field .

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Guest Essay

Surgeon General: Parents Are at Their Wits’ End. We Can Do Better.

By Vivek H. Murthy

Dr. Murthy is the surgeon general.

One day when my daughter was a year old, she stopped moving her right leg. Tests found that she had a deep infection in her thigh that was dangerously close to her bone. She was rushed off to surgery. Thankfully, she’s now a healthy, spirited young girl, but the excruciating days we spent in the hospital were some of the hardest of my life. My wife, Alice, and I felt helpless and heartbroken. We got through it because of excellent medical care, understanding workplaces and loved ones who showed up and reminded us that we were not alone.

When I became a parent, a friend told me I was signing up for a lifetime of joy and worry. The joys are indeed abundant, but as fulfilling as parenting has been, the truth is it has also been more stressful than any job I’ve had. I’ve had many moments of feeling lost and exhausted. So many parents I encounter as I travel across America tell me they have the same experience: They feel lucky to be raising kids, but they are struggling, often in silence and alone.

The stress and mental health challenges faced by parents — just like loneliness , workplace well-being and the impact of social media on youth mental health — aren’t always visible, but they can take a steep toll. It’s time to recognize they constitute a serious public health concern for our country. Parents who feel pushed to the brink deserve more than platitudes. They need tangible support. That’s why I am issuing a surgeon general’s advisory to call attention to the stress and mental health concerns facing parents and caregivers and to lay out what we can do to address them.

A recent study by the American Psychological Association revealed that 48 percent of parents say most days their stress is completely overwhelming, compared with 26 percent of other adults who reported the same. They are navigating traditional hardships of parenting — worrying about money and safety, struggling to get enough sleep — as well as new stressors, including omnipresent screens, a youth mental health crisis and widespread fear about the future.

Stress is tougher to manage when you feel you’re on your own, which is why it’s particularly concerning that so many parents, single parents most of all, report feeling lonelier than other adults . Additionally, parents are stretched for time. Compared with just a few decades ago, mothers and fathers spend more time working and more time caring for their children , leaving them less time for rest, leisure and relationships. Stress, loneliness and exhaustion can easily affect people’s mental health and well-being. And we know that the mental health of parents has a direct impact on the mental health of children.

All of this is compounded by an intensifying culture of comparison, often amplified online, that promotes unrealistic expectations of what parents must do. Chasing these expectations while trying to wade through an endless stream of parenting advice has left many families feeling exhausted, burned out and perpetually behind.

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