The farce known as the GOP presidential campaign has officially become a freak show. Newt Gingrich, the creepiest huckster in American politics, whose unique combination of hypocrisy, opportunism and sanctimoniousness led to his being unceremoniously bounced from Congress back in 1998, is now the front-runner to become the Republican presidential nominee.

Having gone through Michele “the founding Fathers ended slavery” Bachmann, Rick “I’d close down the federal government if only I could remember what it is” Perry, and Herman “all this stuff twirling around in my head” Cain, Republican voters have now embraced their latest unelectable stooge, a narcissistic, ethically challenged trough-feeder and third-rate history professor whose brilliant ideas include a ludicrous two-track Social Security option and undermining the Supreme Court.

I pity the mainstream journalists who are required to pretend they take this grotesque process seriously. The GOP campaign has become indistinguishable from one of those episodes on “Montel” where a mouth-breathing woman in a hot pink warm-up suit accuses a big-haired sleazebag in a leopardskin muumuu of sleeping with her skanky boyfriend, who watches them pulling each other’s hair with a glazed, stoned smirk. How are you supposed to write about this rogue’s gallery with a straight face? Pretending that Herman Cain or Michele Bachmann are qualified to be president is like calling Meat Loaf “Mr. Loaf.”

Since the circus will be in town for another year, and prolonged exposure to it should carry a warning from the surgeon general, I offer the following imaginary and inaccurate summary as a public service. Newt will enjoy his moment in the sun, until it is disclosed that ACORN paid him $5 million to read its staff his Ph.D. thesis on the virtues of Belgian colonial education. He will be replaced by Ann Coulter, who will soar to the top of the GOP polls until she is caught trying to plant a suitcase bomb in Haji’s Palace, a local kabob restaurant.

The next GOP supernova will be Joe the Plumber, who will excite the faithful for five minutes, then withdraw to write a $10 million book about his experience. Just when all seems lost, the Great Goddess Sarah Palin herself will arrive in her helicopter, machine guns blazing away at wolves, caribou, whining liberals and other species over whom God has given man dominion. But tragically, Palin will be forced to withdraw with severe eyestrain after spending the entire campaign on her roof trying to see Putin rear his head.

That will leave Mitt Romney as the last GOP candidate standing. But the Republican base, the angry white Tea Partyers whose desperate search for candidates as reactionary as themselves is what started this whole process, will refuse to vote for the despised Mitt, who actually had to govern in the real world and thus left a track record that falls short of the absolute Maoist purity in right-wing word and deed demanded by the faithful. And so Barack Hussein Obama, foreign Commie, death-panel guru and Muslim terrorist, will run unopposed.

There is something disturbingly infantile about this process. It’s like watching a wailing baby rejecting one type of food after another, angrily hurling first the apricots, then the beans, then the broccoli off his plate while shrieking, “Don’t want it!” And the presidential campaign is not the only example of such regressive behavior and thought. The reaction of the Tea Party (which for all intents and purposes has become the Republican Party) to the mild and innocuous centrist Barack Obama — a president little different in his governing style, with due allowances being made for changed circumstances, from Dwight D. Eisenhower — is so irrational that it is difficult even to grasp what president it is talking about.

The Tea Party’s sense of limitless outrage, its bizarrely overwrought rhetoric of betrayal and dispossession, is closer to the rage of a toddler than the reasoning of an adult. The anger appears to predate its putative cause. The institutional party has behaved in exactly the same way: for three years, Republicans in Congress have essentially been having a temper tantrum. “Won’t raise taxes! Don’t care if we default! Waah!”

How did one of the two major American parties regress to a pre-potty-trained state?

Of all the analyses of the American right wing, perhaps the most penetrating, and by far the most prescient, was that offered by historian Richard Hofstadter in four brilliant essays. His 1964 piece “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” is by far the most famous of those pieces, but “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt — 1954,” and “Pseudo-Conservatism Revisited — 1965,” actually contain the heart of his analysis. A final essay, “Goldwater and Pseudo-Conservative Politics,” is a chilling reminder that right-wing thought so extreme that it once appeared marginal and almost bizarre has become mainstream. (The pieces, along with several other essays, are available in a 2008 Vintage edition with an informative foreword by Princeton historian Sean Wilentz.)

In “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Hofstadter traces the long tradition of irrational, conspiratorial and paranoid thinking in American history. While the left has not been free from this phenomenon — the absurd “9/11 truth movement” is perhaps the most salient example — the ideological eruptions of what Hofstadter drily calls “uncommonly angry minds” have overwhelmingly been found on the social, cultural and political right.

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Hofstadter offers a succinct summary of Adorno’s findings about the psychology of the authoritarian personality.



Beyond this summation, Hofstadter does not linger over the psychological origins of the pseudo-conservative. In fact, in the revisionist essay he wrote ten years later, he wrote that he had “overstressed clinical findings.” As a historian, he is more interested in the external, and specifically American, origins of right-wing hatred. Hofstadter argues that “pseudo-conservatism is in good part a product of the rootlessness and heterogeneity of American life and, above all, of its peculiar scramble for status and its peculiar search for secure identity.” Drawing a distinction between rational, ends-oriented “interest politics” and the murkier “status politics” which he asserts drives pseudo-conservatives, he argues that the right-wing revolt is an anguished reaction to the uncertainties of modernity itself.

In “Pseudo-Conservatism Revisited – 1965,” Hofstadter deepened his analysis of status politics, arguing that it reflects “the effort of Americans of diverse cultural and moral persuasions to win reassurance that their values are respected by the community at large…Such persons believe that their prestige in the community, even their self-esteem, depends on having these values honored in public. …Status politics seeks not to advance perceived material interests but to express grievances and resentments about such matters…As a rule, status politics does more to express emotions than to formulate policies.”

Hofstadter also notes the crucial importance of fundamentalist religious beliefs in pseudo-conservative thought.

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Seen in light of Hofstadter and Adorno’s work, the infantile behavior of the Republican Party makes perfect sense. Ironically, that behavior has everything to do with those “family values” the right purports to celebrate.

It’s all about impulse control. Like a wailing baby, the GOP base has none, and it has elevated its inability to deal with reality — with compromise and government and taxes and mediation and moral ambiguity and the need for reasonable authority — into a bizarre travesty it characterizes as “freedom.” As Hofstadter demonstrates, this “paranoid strain” runs throughout American history, but it was only with the rise of Ronald Reagan, who was in fact not the right-wing ideologue the GOP claims he was, that its disciples began taking over the party.

Far-right American politics has become a theater of projection. To win the nomination, the candidates must exactly mimic the impulses, idée fixes and biases of the faithful. Sarah Palin’s bizarre rise only makes sense in this light. The same logic drove Tea Party candidate Christine O’Donnell’s infamous “I’m you” ad. O’Donnell became a laughingstock, but if she hadn’t prefaced “I’m you” with possibly the worst opening line in political history, “I’m not a witch,” she might have had the last laugh.

The GOP has given its hardcore supporters exactly the presidential candidates they asked for: empty vessels into which the party faithful can pour their anger and resentment. And such candidates, by definition, will not possess any real knowledge of the world, of the political process, of the messy, fallen world we live in. If they do possess such knowledge, they must conceal that fact. Anyone who has actually had to work with opponents and make compromises to get things done — in short, a practical politician — will inevitably fail to live up to the rigid fundamentalism, religious, economic and moral, of the Tea Party. This is why Romney, who is a practical politician and is deeply mistrusted by the GOP faithful for that very reason, must pretend to be stupider and more intolerant than he is.

One can take a certain grim satisfaction in the fact that the infantile rage of the American right may lead it to devour itself. That rage has led Republican voters to support one unelectable loon after the next, simply because they satisfy their urges. But after the election/judicial appointment and reelection of George W. Bush, no one on the left or center of the American political spectrum should be under any illusions that a Democratic victory is assured. And even if Obama is reelected, he faces the prospect of four more years of dealing with a party of angry infants that would rather take the whole country down than have to abandon its righteous rage and cooperate with him for the public good.