Paranoia?

It’s an American tradition that dates back to the Founders.

By Rich Lowry
http://www.nationalreview.com/
April 16, 2010 12:00 A.M.

Only an overcaffeinated tea partier would believe that the U.S. is on the path from “an open society into dictatorship,” right? Who could think that there are ten simple steps to establishing a police state and “that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States”?

As you might have gathered, these aren’t the words of an unhinged right-winger but an unhinged left-winger: Naomi Wolf, author of the perfervid 2007 book The End of America.

Wolf detected a “fascist shift” in the country, and got some respectful notices (Library Journal: “compellingly and cogently argued”). While a New York Times review of the documentary based on the book didn’t buy it all, it concluded “there is still enough here to make you shiver.”

In the context of the media and the Left’s reaction to the tea partiers, the hypocrisy is manifest: fear of the federal government for me, but not for thee. The deeper point is that paranoia about government is woven into the American fabric, on both the left and the right. Provided it’s properly directed and honed, it’s a healthy reflex.

It wasn’t just book-hawking authors warning of the end of our liberties in the Bush years. Democrats recoiled from the Patriot Act — recently re-authorized without a peep — as a foul reprise of the Alien and Sedition Acts. Howard Dean fumed that it trampled “the rights of average Americans.” Sen. Russell Feingold declared it had made Americans “afraid to read books.”

Well, you might say, there go the Democrats again — weak on national security. But when Pres. Bill Clinton proposed a counterterrorism law in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, many Republicans screamed, too. The late Republican eminence Henry Hyde recalled another GOP House member’s saying, “I trust Hamas more than I trust my own government.”

The baton of paranoia about executive power passes back and forth from one party to the other depending on who is in opposition. The reaction tends to be the same because it is written in our political DNA, inherited from the most glorious paranoiacs the world has ever known — our Founding Fathers.

As Bernard Bailyn demonstrates in his classic, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, our forebears prized the thought of the 18th-century “country” opposition in England, which considered the government a clear and present danger to liberty — corrupt, conspiratorial, and insatiable.

America’s leaders viewed Revolutionary events through this prism. “They saw about them,” Bailyn writes, “not merely mistaken, or even evil, policies violating the principles upon which freedom rested, but what appeared to be evidence of nothing less than a deliberate assault launched surreptitiously by plotters against liberty, both in England and in America.”

This is the taproot of American paranoia. It’s not in status anxiety, or economic dispossession, or racism: It’s in flat-out distrust of governmental authority. As the Patriot Act shows, in America even the statists can summon a robust fear of government. And would we have it any other way? Would we prefer the natural deference to authority of a Japan, or a political culture as favorable to central government as Russia’s?

Now, literal paranoia is a noxious thing; it gives us the domestic terrorism of the New Left in the 1970s or the militia movement of the 1990s. But a bristling skepticism of government and a keen vigilance about our liberties should be treasured national qualities.

How you view particular expressions of them depends on your politics. I considered the Left’s tirade against the Patriot Act overwrought and foolish. But we certainly could have used such implacable suspicion of governmental powers when J. Edgar Hoover was waging his dirty war of domestic spying against Martin Luther King Jr.

A New York Times survey found that tea partiers are wealthier and better educated than the general population, exploding the stereotype of them as rubes. Of course, they’ll still be dismissed as lunatics. But if they’re crazy, it’s in a most characteristically American way.

— Rich Lowry is editor of National Review. © 2010 by King Features Syndicate.