The Conception of the Birther
The “birther” controversy is newly in the headlines, but its umbilical cord stretches deep into our history.
By Todd S. Purdum
It has been more than a year since President Obama produced a copy of his long-form birth certificate from Hawaii—and nearly 50 years since the historian Richard Hofstadter first coined the phrase “the paranoid style in American politics.” But the continuing “birther” circus in Arizona demonstrates that this is one non-issue—and one national character flaw—that is never going to go away ...
This would all be funny, if it weren’t so sad—and more than a little bit scary. Fittingly enough, Hofstadter’s analysis had its origins in another Arizonan, Barry Goldwater, whose campaign for the G.O.P. nomination is what inspired Hofstadter’s lecture at Oxford University in 1963 and his essay in Harper’s magazine the following year. Hofstadter acknowledged that he was borrowing the term “paranoid” from psychiatry and that it was pejorative. But the phenomenon he described was anything but new, and not necessarily limited to right-wingers. Irrational venom had variously been turned against Freemasons, Jesuits, Progressives, and—perhaps most famously, with McCarthyism—against Communists.
“The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms,” Hofstadter wrote. “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” and “does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician.” ...
By the end of his life, of course, Barry Goldwater’s instinctual Western libertarianism had mellowed into a live-and-let-live attitude on many questions, including allowing homosexuals to serve openly in the military. He didn’t care, he once famously declared, if a soldier was straight, so long as he could shoot straight. He developed a mutually respectful acquaintance with as prominent a sinner as Bill Clinton, who took pains to call on him when visiting the state. It’s too bad that there’s no one on the ground in Arizona like Goldwater right now to stand up for Obama on this issue, and to remind us that “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/purdum/2012/05/birthers-barry-goldwater-richard-hofstadter-arizona-arpaio
