Paranoia, Amnesia, Nostalgia: The Holy Trinity of American Politics
In the face of unintelligible disaster, feelings and hunches seem more reliable — the suspicion, for instance, that things cannot go on this way, and that old practices and institutions are failing to conform to new realities. — Pankaj Mishra, The Age of Anger
In the current era, it sometimes appears that in the absence of a robust system of meaning that offers a perspective for guiding fear, fear itself has become a stand-alone perspective. — Frank Furedi, How Fear Works
A few years ago, I worked at a bookstore in Santa Fe. One day, a married couple came in. This was on a weekday afternoon, maybe, after Christmas. They were in early middle age. Their denim jackets looked pricey. And they didn’t have a weariness about the eyes, so they were well off, but worried. They told me they’d just moved to New Mexico.
“Putin, as far as we can tell, owns America now,” the husband said.
“This is the only place we could move to,” the wife clarified.
What proof they had Putin “owned” America, or why, if that was the case, New Mexico refuged them from his clutches never went explained. They bought their New York Times, then left.
I want to say this kind of interaction rarely happened, but things like this were frequent. It got worse when the raft of anti-Trump books began to pour in from every publishing house. At some point, every time I sliced open a box of new books dozens of titles by different authors warning of the coming destruction of the republic (or what have you) at the hands of Trump and/or Russia stared back up at me. It’s hard to characterize this perspective as anything but paranoid.
It’s a perspective that doesn’t belong solely to hysterical liberals, unfortunately. It thrives on “both sides of the aisle” and beyond. QAnon, Russiagate, pizzagate, whispers of antifa supersoldiers hauling into middle America by the truckload, Jeffrey Epstein’s murder — I haven’t even gotten to coronavirus conspiracy theories yet. Conspiratorial thinking has emerged from the fringes to become an everyday part of American life (and despite what The Atlantic intimates in its special paranoia issue, much of it is for good reason if not always good sense).
But the longer I’ve looked at this paranoid zeitgeist the less I’ve come to see it as only paranoid. Instead, I’ve realized there are three interconnected parts: paranoia, amnesia, and nostalgia. These make up the trinity of American politics — they’re the prism through which we experience our world.
As a trinity, no starting point suggests itself. Rather, each element collaborates with the other and creates a feedback loop. Starting with paranoia, then, is a matter of preference.
I. Paranoia
I’ve already suggested a few conspiracy theories whose ubiquity indicates the mainstreaming of paranoia. And it’s easy to split these along ideological lines. For example, the American left has for the last few years engaged in a rhetorical strategy of paranoia around incipient fascism to galvanize the public (and succeeded only in making Joe Biden look palatable). The corresponding and equally cartoonish paranoia about antifa on the right has arisen at the same time. But partisan divide illuminates little.
Instead, it’s more revealing to think of our contemporary paranoia as official or unofficial. What determines the difference is media (or state) sign off on the conspiracy — not ideology, not veracity. Already, bleedthrough can be detected, as we’ve seen at any White House Press Corps briefing (on both sides of the podium).
But I want to make that distinction to understand what paranoia is doing. Official conspiracy theories appeal to people who generally trust American institutions. Russiagate provides us with the best object lesson for that. The mainstream news outlets, print and otherwise, spent several years convincing the American public that Donald Trump operates as a Manchurian candidate for the Kremlin and/or that the Russian government quite literally hacked the polls for secure a win for Trump.
Official conspiracies are for those who cannot come to grips with the depressing facts of reality: America’s institutions do not have the public’s interest in mind. They’re failing all around us: from jurisprudence to the press corps to our infrastructure. So, incredible narrative resources must be mustered to disavow that reality.
And of course, none of the Russiagate stuff ended up being true. But it was good business for every outlet that peddled it (as it was for the news organizations that aided and abetted the bipartisan conspiracy theory about Saddam Hussein’s alliance with Al Qaeda). Official conspiracies make big money and thrive in the current media economy. Unfortunately, because in major cases like Russiagate, they also hazard the public trust to an extreme degree and give license and potential creedence to unofficial conspiracy theories.
Unofficial conspiracies theories, like QAnon or pizzagate (interestingly both pedophile themed), live largely online. If the communities around these conspiracy theories have anything to recommend themselves it’s their distrust of establishment media organizations. Unfortunately, these only evince disenfranchisement and (often) a semi-millenarian delusion. Matt Taibbi lays it out syllogistically:
The country’s leaders are corrupt and have become unresponsive to the needs of the population.
People all over are beginning to notice.
This being America, as ordinary people tune out their corrupt leaders, they will replace official propaganda with conspiratorial explanations even more ridiculous than the original lies.
Official or unofficial, these conspiracy theories betray an inability to reckon with reality. They also suggest a general narrative breakdown in America and a widening social chasm between their communicants. It’s no longer clear to large portions of the public what’s happening in their own country for reasons that have almost nothing to do with issues of government transparency.
II. Amnesia
Amnesia exacerbates the paranoia. Of course, America has always been allergic to history beyond the conveniences of propaganda, but that’s not really what’s at issue. The problem is less a problem of historical information and more a problem of public memory.
Both official and unofficial paranoia exist within the framework of the attention economy. They play out online and in the news, which means all the incentives around ad buys and clicks and viewer numbers, etc. condition it.
But the online world functions like an etch-a-sketch. Wait long enough and it’ll shake itself clean and something else pops up seemingly ex nihilo and a new picture appears before you.
Matti Taibbi captured this in a recent piece:
The media in the last four years has devolved into a succession of moral manias. We are told the Most Important Thing Ever is happening for days or weeks at a time, until subjects are abruptly dropped and forgotten, but the tone of warlike emergency remains…
Whether on social media or on television or in print, this creates an urgency that obliterates the past. Anyone paying attention during the onset of coronavirus will remember that certain outlets opted to cover Ukrainegate instead. So, properly informing the public of vital information falls to the wayside. And like the “to wear a mask or not to wear a mask” waffling, it has demonstrated little more than the government and the press share alike in their flexibility and lack of accountability.
Of course, things like this will only erode public trust and inspire suspicious attitudes that push beyond healthy skepticism. Because in watching all this, you get the sense that someone’s lying to you, important people are lying to you, that they don’t care about you, that you’re just a pawn, that something else is playing out just behind what’s right before your eyes.
Even worse, these media cycles rely on whipping up public anger to secure click counts and views. Suddenly, every news organization in America will start peddling something they want you to panic about, to get angry about, and then, all of a sudden, it’s gone. It’s as if it never happened. And all that anger and rage reveal their impotence. As Byung-Chul Han observes in In the Swarm: Digital Prospects, we move from outrage to outrage.
The outraged do not form a stable we who are displaying concern for society as a whole. Enraged citizens, even though they are citizens, do not demonstrate concern for the whole of the social body so much as for themselves.
All of this panic and outrage — they lead nowhere, mean nothing, somehow, and leave a bad taste in your mouth. The social consequences manifest themselves in a cynical, embittered, confused populace. And it makes us long for simpler times.
III. Nostalgia
In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym points out that nostalgia came to us from the medical field at the dawn of the modern era — a Swiss doctor coined the phrase in 1688. “Nostalgia,” she writes,
(from nostos — return home, and algia — longing) is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy.
Boym discusses two types of nostalgia: restorative nostalgia, which “puts the emphasis on nostos and proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps; and reflective nostalgia, which dwells in algia, in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance.”
America is a mire of restorative nostalgia. And this goes beyond “Make America Great Again,” or liberal pining for the Obama years (even, somehow, the Bush years). There’s a general misapprehension of historical time and a longing to return to innocence in the face of chaos, suspicion, acrimony, and death. My generation has spent most of its adulthood longing for its 90’s childhood, a tick amplified by the disappearance of the “American Dream” which has left us in suspended adolescence as we’ve been unable to secure the hallmarks of adulthood that belonged to our parents and grandparents.
But even the generation below mine waxes nostalgic for times it never experienced. I was recently alerted to popular TikTok videos made out of footage of teens from the 00’s to the 10’s as a nostalgia supercut of kids who grew up in “better times.”
It seems everything misses something just behind us now, something better. Where did it go? When exactly was it? And who took it?
It’s not even a feeling of being robbed of a future, of some kind of potential, but of a past that was never available in the first place. This trend is a culmination of something Christopher Lasch noticed in the seventies: “People today hunger not for personal salvation let alone for the restoration of an earlier golden age, but for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic security.” The restorative nostalgia that abounds today seeks not to recover a lost era but to recuperate an imagined sense of stability absent from our contemporary chaos. As a result, as Lasch pointed out so many decades ago, we experience an indifference to the idea of our future and our posterity. We concern ourselves, instead, with ourselves.
The result of the trinity of American politics is a polity whose ability to make sense of the world, to act coherently, and to understand the consequences of its actions appears in great atrophy. This leaves it vulnerable to scapegoating, demagoguery, unforced errors, and a lack of facility with foresight, planning, and prioritization. And greater social division seems in the cards as we become more fearful as a result. As Frank Furedi points out, “Confusions concerning what threat to worry about also amplify the problem and bestow on fear an arbitrary and increasingly divisive dynamic.” Paranoia, amnesia, and nostalgia work like acid on social bonds. They frustrate fellow feeling and tolerance. And they undermine broad collaboration in the project of society.
