“You’re Going to Die”: the “Paranoid” Style of Reform Opposition

An AP story on Wednesday quoted Tom Coburn, a Republican Senator and former obstetrician, addressing the reform bill’s Medicare cost-containment provisions, and delivering a message to seniors:  “I have a message for you: you’re going to die sooner.”  Some Democrats, such as Senator Pat Murphy, are clearly frustrated that Republican Senators, having opposed many recent Medicare improvement measures (see MIPPA 2008, which expanded primary care and suspended a scheduled cut in physician reimbursement), now cast themselves as the pro-Medicare party.  And standing with Coburn was Senator McCain, whose ‘08 presidential campaign argued for health reform financed in part with savings from Medicare and Medicaid.

The health reform bills contain interlocking provisions concerning coverage, finance, and delivery reform.  I doubt that any two thoughtful people would agree on every aspect of the current bill.  Comments of two sorts seem in order under these circumstances  (and hopefully are reflected in the posts on this site):  specific comments providing reasoned support or opposition to particular provisions and/or proposing amendments thereto, or general and reasoned comments supporting or opposing the overall package.  Coburn’s comment fits most nearly into the second category, but “reasoned” it ain’t.  It made me think of the classic Richard Hofstadter essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. (H/t to CBC’s Ideas, broadcast on November 28, podcast available here.)  Hofstadter, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Columbia University historian and commentator on American anti-intellectualism, wrote in his 1964 essay of the dark tradition in American politics of outrageous argumentation calculated to see “how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority.”  He was clear that he was not using “paranoid” in a clinical sense, but instead as a label to evoke a “sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.”

Hofstadter was clear that the “paranoid style” was not used only by one movement, or even by only one slice of the American political spectrum.  He argued that examples could be found on the left and the right, and on both sides of many major issues.  It is not Coburn’s position that harkens to Hofstadter’s characterization of irresponsible speakers.  Rather, it is the style of his speech.  Hofstadter explained it this way:

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.

American history is filled with examples of political spokespersons resorting to this sort of extreme speech:

In the history of the United States one finds 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.

Joining all of these examples together are several factors: extreme overstatement; the use of specific “facts” as the basis for factually unsupportable positions; and the apparent intent to inflame rather than reason.  There are of course, examples of such political speech today on the right and left.  It is no longer surprising — although regrettable — to hear simplistic and hateful comments from “entertainers” and “commentators” on cable news and talk radio programs.

But Colburn is not an entertainer.  He is in a leadership position in the United States Senate.  He might speak factually — rhetorical flourishes and all — about aspects of the bill with which he disagrees.  He might forcefully explain why he believes Americans should decide that we’d be better off without this version of health reform.  Instead, he has taken himself out of the discourse, and has used “factual” arguments for the purpose of misleading and inflaming.  He has, in short, removed himself from reasoned debate and embraced the demagoguery decried by Hofstadter.  Americans deserve better from our Senators.