A Brief History of Wingnuts in America; From George Washington to Woodstock
In this exclusive excerpt from the new edition of Wingnuts, author John Avlon reminds us that paranoid extremism is nothing new in American politics.
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If you’re disgusted by the unhinged hyper-partisanship that distorts our political debates beyond reason, here’s some good news – we’ve overcome these forces before.
American political history has been marked by periodic eruptions of the “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” that Richard Hofstadter famously characterized as “the paranoid style in American politics.” Wingnuts have masqueraded under different names and causes at different times, but they have always been committed to an “us against them” framing of domestic debates while inflaming group hatred in the name of politics and alleged principle. They prey on fear and ignorance.
Survey Wingnut rhetoric through the ages and the usual suspects keep surfacing: appeals to religious suspicion; ethnic and racial divisions; foreign subversion of sovereignty; and perhaps the oldest conspiracy theory of them all – accusing the president of the United States of being a tyrant and a dictator bent on destroying the Constitution.
Even our most beloved and broadly unifying figures were not immune from Wingnuts’ attacks in their time.
When George Washington served as the shaky young republic’s first president, newspapers such as the Aurora (edited by Benjamin Franklin’s grandson) obsessively attacked him, calling on Washington to resign the office while declaring that, “the mask of political hypocrisy has been alike worn by Caesar, a Cromwell and a Washington.” Washington’s onetime ally Thomas Paine turned on him in vicious fashion after the Jay Treaty of neutrality with Great Britain, writing, “The world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an imposter; whether you have abandoned good principles or whether you ever had any.” more . . .
In this exclusive excerpt from the new edition of Wingnuts, author John Avlon reminds us that paranoid extremism is nothing new in American politics.
-------------------
If you’re disgusted by the unhinged hyper-partisanship that distorts our political debates beyond reason, here’s some good news – we’ve overcome these forces before.
American political history has been marked by periodic eruptions of the “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” that Richard Hofstadter famously characterized as “the paranoid style in American politics.” Wingnuts have masqueraded under different names and causes at different times, but they have always been committed to an “us against them” framing of domestic debates while inflaming group hatred in the name of politics and alleged principle. They prey on fear and ignorance.
Survey Wingnut rhetoric through the ages and the usual suspects keep surfacing: appeals to religious suspicion; ethnic and racial divisions; foreign subversion of sovereignty; and perhaps the oldest conspiracy theory of them all – accusing the president of the United States of being a tyrant and a dictator bent on destroying the Constitution.
Even our most beloved and broadly unifying figures were not immune from Wingnuts’ attacks in their time.
When George Washington served as the shaky young republic’s first president, newspapers such as the Aurora (edited by Benjamin Franklin’s grandson) obsessively attacked him, calling on Washington to resign the office while declaring that, “the mask of political hypocrisy has been alike worn by Caesar, a Cromwell and a Washington.” Washington’s onetime ally Thomas Paine turned on him in vicious fashion after the Jay Treaty of neutrality with Great Britain, writing, “The world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an imposter; whether you have abandoned good principles or whether you ever had any.” more . . .
