What counts is not the things that happen, but what we do with them.
| Annie Ernaux
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Back from a brief beach vacation, where I mostly read, and wrote only a little. Here’s some bits that resurfaced from 1964 and 2025.
Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics1, is a timeless classic. He was strongly influenced by Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunt, and Barry Goldwater’s efforts to paint the United Nations as a tool of ‘international communism’: [emphasis mine]:
American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.
Personally, my view is that 'paranoid style' may not go far enough. Hofstadter is detailing instances of mass psychopathology when large groups are infected by conspiracy theories about 'others' -- Catholics, Jews, anarchists, Communists, and immigrants who are purportedly attempting to secretly subvert politics and society, up to and including overthrowing the government. These are largely movements of White supremacist nativists calling out these 'enemies' as dangerous and 'un-American'.
Instead of his title, he might have used ‘The Paranoia of American Politics’.
The essay is quite long, so here is a summary:
I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.
The idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.
A point of departure for me: I don’t believe that people who fall under the sway of paranoid mass movements are ‘more or less normal’. I think they are nuts, no matter how many of theme there are.
I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric. The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent.
He tracks various historic conspiracy theories, from the 1800s to his present, the 1960s: the Bavarian Illuminati, the anti-Masonic movement, Goldwater and the anti-UN movement, McCarthy’s anti-Communist frenzy, and the anti-Catholic movement.
If, after our historically discontinuous examples of the paranoid style, we now take the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country—that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.
This sounds like Trump’s coterie, up to including claim the Dems are communists, attempting to destroy America. The ‘dispossessed’ argument hits home in 2026, as more Americans think everything is broken, and become increasingly antipolitical.
The basic elements of contemporary right-wing thought can be reduced to three: First, there has been the now-familiar sustained conspiracy, running over more than a generation, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt’s New Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism.
By ‘free capitalism’ I interpret him to mean ‘free trade’ which is shorthand for ‘unfettered, pro-growth-at-all-costs globalist capitalism’.
The second contention is that top government officialdom has been so infiltrated by Communists that American policy, at least since the days leading up to Pearl Harbor, has been dominated by men who were shrewdly and consistently selling out American national interests.
Finally, the country is infused with a network of Communist agents, just as in the old days it was infiltrated by Jesuit agents, so that the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media is engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans.
‘The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—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. He constantly lives at a turning point.’
In sections entitled Emulating the Enemy, Renegades and Pedants, and The Double Sufferer, Hofstadter details the psychology of the ‘paranoid spokesman’, in a psychiatric style.
Perhaps the central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise.
Everything is reduced to good versus evil, us against them, zero-sum absolutes.
A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen. It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop.
An inability to learn how things do and don’t work.
He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him—and in any case he resists enlightenment.
This reminds me of Anne Lowenhaupt Tsing’s concept of the ‘self-contained’, who cannot be changed by experience, articulated in The Mushroom at the End of the World.
Hofstadter wraps up with his epigraph on the double suffering of the paranoid:
We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.
Anne Helen Petersen on Death of the Corporate Job
In September of 2025, Anne Helen Petersen responded to Alex McCann’s blockbuster essay, Death of the Corporate Job. By blockbuster I mean it created a lot of chatter, but at its core, it seemed to me to be a rehash of David Graeber’s bullshit jobs script (repudiated by Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs | Magdalena Soffia, Alex J Wood, Brendan Burchell, which I explored in Nice Doggy).
Petersen starts by pulling a few quotes from McCann:
The corporate role isn’t dying in some dramatic collapse. It’s dying like religion died for many people—slowly, through diminishing belief rather than disappearing churches.
The structures remain. The offices still gleam. The meetings still happen. The emails still flow. But the faith that this activity means something, that it’s building towards something worthwhile, that it justifies the life hours it consumes—that faith is evaporating.
And finally:
I know developers who do their “official” job in the morning and build their own products in the afternoon. Marketers who run their agencies from their corporate desks. Consultants who’ve automated their actual deliverables and spend most of their time on side projects.
They’re not quitting. They’re using the corporate infrastructure—the steady salary, the laptop, the stability—as a platform for building something real. The corporate role hasn’t died; it’s become a funding mechanism for actual work.
One person I spoke to called it “corporate entrepreneurship”—not in the LinkedIn way where you’re an “intrapreneur” innovating within your company, but in the sense that you’re using your corporate presence to subsidise your real work.
This is particularly acute for people in their twenties. We entered the workforce just as the illusion was becoming impossible to maintain. We never had that period where we could believe our corporate roles were meaningful.
Then Petersen lets loose [emphasis mine]:
It’s all very Fight Club and Office Space meets Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, isn’t it? Maybe a little Graduate, a dash of Say Anything Lloyd Dobbler-ism, and certainly some David Graeber, who first published his essay on “Bullshit Jobs” in 2013 (and who Alex, to his credit, references directly).
I don’t mean to be paternalistic so much as highlight how every generation arrives at a similar point of disillusionment: most jobs involve bullshit. What you do with that information, once gleaned, is usually a pretty good barometer of character. But the realization that the corporate career can feel meaningless — that’s nothing new.
The highlighted sentences above motivated me to use the Annie Ernaux quote for this issue. We all run headfirst into the bullshitty, corporate, cringey parts of work, usually pretty soon after starting to work in the first place.
You can mistakenly take that collision as a personal shortcoming; that somehow you are failing at the corporate game. Or, perhaps with more time toiling in the mines, you might reach a realization: corporatism is not about helping workers to find purpose and meaning in their work. It is simply a machine designed to derive profits that can be — to the greatest extent possible — directed to the owners, and as little as possible to the workers. The solution to this is a different economy, where the returns on all the participants’ contributions — capital and labor — are shared more equally.
Petersen does not lean as far to the left as I do in her discussion, but she spends the rest of her analysis making the case for self-employment as a means to get out of the machine [emphasis mine]:
Self-employment has remained somewhat steady for the last decade at just over 10% of the working population. There was an uptick after Covid, and current numbers suggest that the demographics with the greatest job loss — see: Black women — are also the demographics with the biggest increases in self-employment. We have woven a rhetoric around the current job market to convince us that the problem isn’t the way we’ve organized the economy, or the ongoing erosion of the safety net, or the erosion of worker’s rights, but the jobs themselves. In that paradigm, the solution isn’t to vote to create a different economy, with different incentives and different allocation of profits, but to create your own job.
It’s rich, I know, that I’m writing all of this from the perch of a seemingly secure freelance job. But it’s also telling that even though this enterprise has been successful beyond my wildest dreams, I worry constantly: about my partner losing his full-time employment and, by extension, our access to good healthcare; about developing brain fog or a disability; about Substack’s viability as a platform; about my relevance as I age; about how much I need to set aside each month to ensure that when I can no longer write the way I do, I will be able to survive.
So here’s my contribution to this genre of job market writing. After years of navigating failing industries and labor exploitation, I finally have total control. I know exactly what I do, and who I do it for, and why I do it. I have almost entirely rid my workday of bullshit. But because nothing about the larger system itself has changed, I can have all that control — a seemingly perfect job! — and operate, every day, in total fear.
We need to change that ‘larger system’ to counter that fear. Now.
If you can’t afford yet-one-more-subscription, please help me by restacking this post to spread the word.
