The Paranoia Strategy: Lessons from American Alternative Health Promotions

• In Event: 2254 - Culture and Narrative

Abstract

Hofstadter's essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" opened a floodgate of analyses of the American obsession with fear, paranoia and conspiracy theories. However, to date few scholars turned to uncover how the American political tradition feeds the popular obsession with fear, paranoia, and conspiracy theories. The present paper goes beyond prior contributions to the study of the paranoid style in America by uncovering the deep cultural trauma that feeds the American tradition. It emphasizes how American Foundation Documents constitute and solidify the American national habitus around paranoid suspicions of loss of liberty. The paper analyzes how entrepreneurs use the American political tradition in authoring commercials for alternative cures. The paper concludes that mistrust, suspicion, and paranoia are habitually ingrained and constitutionally directed traits that testify to the power of political socialization in America. Paradoxically, the American paranoid habitus is part of a particularly democratic one.

Author

• Gad Yair, Hebrew University of Jerusalem