RICHARD HOFSTADTER’S famous 1964 essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics is a diatribe against the hard right, appearing on the eve of Barry Goldwater’s Republican nomination for president.

The style though, of constantly pointing the finger outward and never inward to one’s own faults, is a constant tendency in American political thought from McCarthyism’s branding of the communist threat at a time when the Soviet Union was weakened from WWII to Reagan’s Nicaraguans who were about to attack the mainland to Trump’s border refugees fleeing the ravages of the Global South who are hell-bent on destroying the US.

What is new in this campaign is the embracing of that style by the liberal center or really center right, as the Democratic party candidate Kamala Harris welcomes the architect of the criminal war on Iraq Dick Chaney and his daughter Liz into the party’s “big tent.”

The Democrats, of course, have a problem and that problem is their support of genocide in the Middle East, now spread from Gaza to the West Bank to the suburbs of Beirut in Lebanon to say nothing of the persistent bombing of Yemen and Syria, all supported by the now over $22.7 billion worth of weapons and aid supplied by the Biden-Harris administration to Israel.

That figure from a Brown University study also includes as estimate that because of the collateral damage caused by malnutrition and disease the death toll in Gaza, now estimated at 42,500, must be multiplied by 25, putting the figure killed in Gaza alone at over one million, the majority women and children.

So there is an actual holocaust, as it is referred to in the region, that the Democrats are enabling and which they could stop at any point by simply cutting the funds used to supply the weapons for this carnage.

One popular saying that has emerged from this year of slaughter is: “If you wonder what you would have done in the last holocaust, ask yourself what you are doing in this one.”

But instead of addressing this issue, they are employing the paranoid style to accuse Trump of being Hitler, trumpeting his quote that “I need the kind of generals Hitler had” and comparing Trump’s rally in Madison Square Garden to that of both Hitler’s famous 1934 rally in Nuremberg and a 1939 Nazi rally in the Garden.

What the supposedly caring “liberal” Democrats are doing by this is attempting to exonerate themselves and their own guilt by instead pointing outside themselves to someone who really represents the threat of fascism and of a new holocaust.

No doubt the real estate tycoon Trump is horrible and will be a terror in the Middle East, with his son in law, Jared Kushner, having already visited Gaza and proclaiming it a wonderful land on which to build beach front condos and with the old man himself looking forward to relaunching his hotel franchise in a Palestinian-less Israel.

The problem is the Democrats are no better. Biden’s hand-wringing over the fact that “too many” Palestinians have been killed demonstrates that his opposition to wanton destruction of civilians is about quantity not quality.

Harris is, if anything, worse. When asked about the genocide question, her answer was essentially, “you need to accept genocide if you want affordable groceries.” Her famous answer to speakers in her audience trying to raise the question was to silence them by putting up her hand and saying “I’m speaking.”

The party hierarchy itself, aware that the only option left to them to maintain continual support for an insupportable policy was denial refused to have even a pro-Harris Palestinian speak at its convention.

Biden-Harris are also responsible for sabotaging peace talks that may have quickly ended the war in Ukraine where 1,200 Ukrainians are dying each day as the US unsuccessfully uses them to weaken Russia.

It’s so bad that one Ukrainian officer recently killed himself rather than order his untrained, ill-equipped men into battle again an enemy where they would be slaughtered.

This recalls Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory and the needless slaughter in WWI of the French, German and Russian working class, only brought to a halt by the Russian Revolution.

Press gangs are everywhere grabbing Ukrainian men (and soon maybe Ukrainian women) off the streets and, with the age of conscription about to be lowered, the borders are being sealed so that young men do not attempt to escape these killing fields.

In their futile quest to destroy Russia, once again the great barbarian from the East that threatens the European “garden,” Biden and his cronies are more than willing to sacrifice the European economy as well.

No plausible explanation for who blew up the Nord Stream Pipeline, the greatest ecological disaster in history and one that has devastated Europe’s economy, has been so-far supplied to counter Seymour Hersh’s exposure of the disaster being engineered by
those who would benefit from it the most, the oil suppliers the US and Norway.

This week Volkswagen, a crucial part of the automobile industry, center of the German and European economy, announced it was closing several of its plants because it cannot manage the high cost of skyrocketing European energy, now that cheap Russian oil is no longer available.

Biden-Harris, as is Trump, are also responsible for ever-increasing tensions against China in their attempt to destroy the Belt and Road Project aimed at doing for much of the rest of the developing world what has been done in China, namely raising 800 million people out of extreme poverty.

The goal of both administrations is to end this project by Biden-Harris involving China in a costly arms race and Trump-Biden equally forcing a tariff war that will simply end up as a tax on US consumers.

The Democrat’s rationale in the last few campaigns, as the party abandons its working class and labor constituencies, is that they are the lesser of two evils.

Unfortunately in this election, there is no lesser of two evils, they are both evil and pointing fingers at each other and reactivating the “paranoid style” only sinks the country deeper into a morass for which these spineless politicians since they have no solution but endless war and conflict far from a debate will not even allow the crucial questions facing both the US and the world to be discussed.

Dennis Broe is a journalist, novelist and critic whose work can be found on Substack at Cultural Politics For Those Who Care dennisbroe.substack.com.