The paranoid style in liberal criticism
Peter Tonguette
Depending on who you listen to, hang out with, or read, a hit summer movie about saving kidnapped children is laced with QAnon references, the video for an anti-violence country music hit traffics in racism, and a Hillary Clinton-voting comedian, arguably the most successful of his age, is a dangerous right-wing transphobe.
None of these things are true, but to the paranoid mindset that rules civic life in America, and that now fully encompasses art and culture, that hardly matters.
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In 1964, Stanley Kubrick offered a pungent parody of that last, seemingly beyond-the-pale notion in his satirical masterpiece Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb — proof that paranoid thinking is not a recent development in our nation’s character. At one point in Kubrick’s Cold War-era picture, divorced-from-reality Gen. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) reveals that he has resolved to drink only distilled water or rainwater because, by his reckoning, the fluoridation campaign is “the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face.” Because Ripper has single-handedly initiated a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union, we can say that the world ended neither with a bang nor a whimper but with a deterrent to tooth decay.
For the Left during the time of the Cold War, paranoia was often assumed to be a bug, if not a feature, of the conservative anti-communist movement. Consider the much-admired historian Richard Hofstadter’s classic book, 1965’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics. “Although American political life has rarely been touched by the most acute varieties of class conflict, it has served again and again as an arena for uncommonly angry minds,” Hofstadter wrote, making clear he had in mind a particular species of angry minds. “Today this fact is most evident on the extreme right wing, which has shown, particularly in the Goldwater movement, how much political leverage can be got out of animosities and passions of a small minority.” As examples of such right-wing conspiratorial thinking, Hofstadter cited the conflation of firearm controls with the development of a “one world socialistic government,” the excesses of anti-communist Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and even the fluoridation controversy so memorably explicated in Dr. Strangelove.
This conviction that paranoia is the exclusive provenance of the Right remained such an article of faith among the Left that the evils of old-school McCarthyism were routinely trotted out well into the 21st century, as in George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck, a superbly realized movie from 2005 that made a hero out of broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, played by the excellent David Strathairn, for counseling his viewers to reject the overreach of “the junior senator from Wisconsin” and not to “walk in fear one of another.” Hear, hear.
Yet, in one of those strange ironies of history, it is the Left that today walks in fear of at least half of the population. Like their anti-communist forebears, the current paranoids are wild-eyed, certain of their own rightness, and far too voracious in their pursuit of alleged evidence of extremism.
Among the most telling recent examples of the present-day paranoid mindset is found in the preposterous overreaction to the (to them) inexplicable success of the movie Sound of Freedom, which, amid a summer movie season defined by atom bombs and Barbie dolls, is likely to earn north of $200 million at the domestic box office. The true-life tale stars Jim Caviezel as Tim Ballard, a Department of Homeland Security agent whose mandate includes pursuing sex traffickers who target children. Frustrated by the red tape of his job, Ballard goes solo, sets up operations in South America, and undertakes a nearly solitary mission not only to bring traffickers to justice but to liberate those who have been trafficked: the children who have been kidnapped, conned, or otherwise coerced into sex trafficking rings.
Released by Angel Studios, Sound of Freedom is a little wearying in its obsessiveness: It is truly a single-issue movie with nary a scene, character, or moment that strays from the central plot of Ballard liberating exploited children. There are no moral gray areas or ambiguities. Ballard’s wife (played, in a bizarrely fleeting cameo, by Oscar-winner Mira Sorvino) does not doubt, question, or even offer an opinion about her husband’s quest. This is exceedingly simple filmmaking: We cheer when bad guys are beaten up by Caviezel, a gentle giant who usually speaks in sotto voce but is capable of Chuck Norris-like hand-to-hand lethality. We tear up when the children are brought back together with their parents. On this basic, rather primitive level, the movie is successful — and certainly has resonated with the millions who have bought tickets.
Generally speaking, when a movie becomes a sleeper hit, Hollywood reacts by trying to ape its success, but in this case, the industry has tried to explain away its popularity. Naysayers have implied that the box-office numbers were somehow goosed by the studio’s strategy to prompt audience members to purchase tickets for those who might wish to see the picture later — as though word of mouth somehow delegitimizes its success. More perniciously, many commentators have claimed that the movie is a kind of vessel for some vaguely defined QAnon ideology. The warning has been sounded by all the usual suspects. NPR’s headline read: “QAnon supporters are promoting ‘Sound of Freedom.’ Here’s why.” And The Nation’s: “‘Sound of Freedom’ Is a QAnon Fever Dream.” Rolling Stone’s: “‘Sound of Freedom’: Box Office Triumph for QAnon Believers.” To be sure, this perception has been burnished by some public remarks made by Caviezel, whose references to “the storm,” as in “the storm is upon us,” are apparently rich with symbolic meaning to those familiar with the QAnon lexicon (a group that does not include your faithful writer).
As far as I can see, though, the movie itself has nothing to do with QAnon, Al-Anon, the Anonymous author of the Clinton-era satirical novel Primary Colors, or the Artist Formerly Known as Prince. Ironically, Sound of Freedom obviously belongs to the honorable, if rather tedious, tradition of the do-gooder message movie, traditionally a liberal genre exemplified by such pictures as The Defiant Ones, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Day After, and Philadelphia. Like those sanctimonious films, Sound of Freedom is more a work of propaganda than art, but its makers erred in choosing a cause that has lost favor with the Left. Child trafficking is no joke, but to our cultural commissars, to care about the subject makes one a stooge of the MAGA movement. If the same sort of movie had been made about an approved subject — say, a drama about Caviezel going undercover to bring to justice Jan. 6 rioters — it would be a shoo-in for Oscar nominations.
The paranoid-possessed liberals simply cannot credit its adversaries with good faith. Like McCarthy before them, they see plots, not people. Take, for instance, the hue and cry that followed the release of the music video for Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town,” a song that inveighs against such widely frowned-upon acts as carjacking old ladies, robbing liquor stores, and yelling profanities at law enforcement officers. Most of us would undoubtedly agree with the song’s point that such things are bad, and the country music fan base will surely agree with the song’s insistence that the small-town ethos is a bulwark against such bad behavior.
Yet because Aldean’s music video illustrated the lyrics by incorporating footage of real crimes, including flag-burning, civilian harassment of police, and general rioting, it was said to have been irredeemably racist. CMT said so long to the video. Even its filming location was deemed problematic: Nearly a century ago, a lynching had taken place at the same courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, where Aldean’s video was filmed. But it does not occur to the paranoid mindset that Aldean was not responsible for securing the location. By their reckoning, the only explanation can be that he has hate in his heart. The notion that Aldean merely objects to civil disorder, and that the courthouse was chosen for its aesthetic value, is dismissed, ignored, skipped past as an inconvenient truth, or at least a plausible one.
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There is no question that Sound of Freedom and “Try That in a Small Town” belong to an emergent alternate conservative culture distinct from and in opposition to the mainstream, but the paranoids have gone beyond trying to cancel or vilify such niche products. In many ways, Hollywood has started to eat its own. When Dave Chappelle dares to send up cancel culture, expresses some degree of understanding for voters in his home state of Ohio who support former President Donald Trump, or includes transgender-related material in his routines, a thousand think pieces are born. Chappelle was called “Trumpian” by CNN and “transphobic” by the Daily Beast, but he is neither — he is merely funny, edgy, provocative, outrageous, as were Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce before him.
According to the paranoid style in liberal criticism, however, nothing is ever what it seems. A movie about child trafficking can’t be just that. A song rallying behind small-town values has to have some covert meaning. A comedian who speaks the unspeakable must be working for the other side. This is a new breed of McCarthyism arguably worse than the original because McCarthy was discredited in his own time, but the current wave of paranoid delusion is being practiced right out in the open. The idea that movies, songs, and comedians who appeal to millions harbor secret agendas is preposterous — as preposterous as starting World War III on the basis of fluoride in the water supply.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.