Cycles of Mania and the Cancelling of the American Mind
America's manic episodes have paralyzed its critical thinking.
From late 2015 and partly as a reaction to what many in the establishment saw as the shock victory of Donald J. Trump in the 2016 presidential election, an idea spread within mainstream circles like wildfire: that the Russian government had conducted elaborate “disinformation” campaigns to manipulate Western social media and gain significant levels of influence over the U.S. political system and public discourse in order to interfere in U.S. elections and get Trump elected as the 45th American president. By 2023, this largely conspiratorial narrative—which came to be known as “Russiagate”—has collapsed.
The release of the Durham report this past spring formally cast the last shovel of dirt over Russiagate’s grave. What began as an attempt to excuse the loss of one of the best-funded and elite-endorsed presidential campaigns in history to a political outsider and celebrity host by pinning the blame on a foreign country quickly mutated into a political “witch hunt” targeting every critic of America’s domestic and foreign policy consensus from both the Left and the Right. A thoroughly bipartisan establishment saw the specter of foreign infiltration as an opportunity to discredit all anti-establishment views of American foreign policy, projecting them as secret plots by Moscow to undermine the United States.
Thanks to the release of the Twitter Files and dogged skepticism from some of the more non-mainstream media outlets, we now know that this establishment-led campaign was not simply a cynical attempt to score some partisan points, but rather a coordinated attack on critics of the status quo. Groups like Hamilton 68 constructed narratives about Russian “bots” and agents lurking behind every potential social media post. And they did it on the government’s dime. Such securitized rhetoric was encouraged and promoted by many in the federal government, including then-Senator Kamala Harris who stated in 2019 that most of the political furor around Colin Kaepernick’s taking a knee during the national anthem was caused by Russian actors.
The specter of foreign infiltration was an opportunity to discredit all anti-establishment views of American foreign policy, projecting them as secret plots by Moscow to undermine the United States.
Many observers, including myself, cried foul from the start. Rejecting Russiagate as an unsubstantiated conspiracy was an unpopular opinion to have in 2017 and 2018, especially for those with more left-leaning politics. Although foreign influence did impact the Trump administration's policies, other countries—such as Israel (via Jared Kushner) and Turkey (via Michael Flynn)—arguably held far more sway in the White House than did the Kremlin. Even in the run-up to the 2016 election itself, actors connected within the United Kingdom—perhaps reading the tea leaves with better foresight than the arrogant Clinton Campaign ever could—had arguably also tried to influence that election’s outcome with the mostly speculative “Steele Dossier”. One cannot help but wonder what actual evidence of foreign interference could have been uncovered if more effort had been put into scrutinizing the actions of those supposedly friendly countries.
While Russiagate itself remained primarily a media and elite fixation that would hardly match up with the everyday concerns of the average voter, it nonetheless represented a cycle of hawkish mania plaguing much of the political and commentariat classes. Its effects are with us still. The recent indictment of members of the African People’s Socialist Party for their anti-NATO activism under the pretext of them being Russian stooges is just one such example, which recalls both the FBI’s past attacks on black radical organizations as well as the fact that the federal government—which claims not to be directly involved in the Ukraine War—is seeking out “enemy agents” as if we lived during a conventional war.
Russiagate, then, continues to have a real-world impact on those targeted for their contrarian views today; and this, unfortunately, has a long precedence in modern American history. This history teaches us that when the elite educated classes come to fear the waning of their hold and influence on the “establishment”, they often become susceptible to moral panics and display hysteria around national security and perceived threats as a means to gatekeep and prevent any major shifts to the Overton window.
U.S. Intelligentsia and State Power
From the time of the Founding Fathers, some members of America’s high society opposed expansionism as a betrayal of the anti-imperial values of the new nation that had freed itself from the clasps of the British Empire.
Revolutionary War hero and then Secretary of War Henry Knox, for example, advocated against the seizure of Native American lands and the displacement of their peoples. As Manifest Destiny unfolded over the 19th Century, numerous newspapers questioned the land hunger of westward-bound settlers. Many politicians and members of the press also opposed the American annexation of Texas in 1845 and the naked territorial conquests that resulted from the U.S. invasion of Mexico in the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. Such objections even extended to former President John Quincy Adams, himself an early mastermind of the territorial expansion policy that later evolved into the Monroe Doctrine.
What remains striking in all the above examples, however, is a political culture that encourages open discourse, and even dispute, as a public good. Throughout the 19th century, even as the country continued to grow at a rapid and insatiable pace, healthy public debate and legislative sparring remained a constant feature of the young republic. And perhaps no subject animated this free-thinking spirit more than discussions around America’s foreign relations.
Even in the heady and war-feverish days of the 1898 conflict with Spain and the subsequent Philippines Insurrection, America’s luminaries would take to the press to furiously denounce the annexation of foreign lands and wars of conquest across the Pacific and the Caribbean. Indeed, no less a cultural heavyweight and literary giant than Mark Twain would eventually become the Vice President of the Anti-Imperialist League, a position which he held until his death in 1910.
Wilsonianism set the precedent for mixing politics of fear with morality through the targeted use of propaganda. And with it commenced an eerie—if manic—cycle in American politics.
Such elite sentiments became truly mainstream after the ridiculous farce that was Woodrow Wilson’s “crusade for democracy” in the First World War. This utopian and ideologically-driven view of America’s role on the world stage, combined with Wilson’s systematic use of public propaganda and the police force of the state to target leftists and pacifists as well as German-Americans and other immigrants deemed insufficiently supportive of the war effort, whipped the nation into a frenzy. But, with the Great War winding down, the first Red Scare also created a massive backlash from cultural and political forces alike once the impracticality, idealism, and bellicose nature of the Wilsonian project became apparent. Even before U.S. entry into WWI, one of the big musical hits of the nascent record industry of that time was Peerless Quartet’s I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier. America’s cultural elite and critical thinkers were, for the most part, doing their jobs even if they were often disregarded by a hardening political establishment.
Wilsonianism thus set the precedent for mixing the politics of fear with morality through the targeted use of propaganda. And with it commenced an eerie—if manic—cycle in American politics. In each instance, the state apparatus was deliberately used by the political establishment to manipulate public opinion in favor of interventionism; the overreach would inevitably generate a reaction with the contemporary intelligentsia opposing the resulting securitized and hawkish climate only to be ostracized and defamed by a government-led moral panic about national security.
In the Interwar Era, the popular mood turned against Wilson’s wartime authoritarianism and the notion of American soldiers fighting on behalf of European colonial powers. Yet, the very real threats of the Second World War and the nation rallying after Pearl Harbor were powerful enough to abolish this post-Wilsonian consensus and carry the nation through a major war and onto the first stages of the Cold War.
During the late 1940s through 1950s, the existing militarized climate coupled with the difficult stalemate in Korea and the “fall” of China to communism inspired opportunistic figures, such as Senator Joe McCarthy, to attempt to keep the wartime paranoia going during times of supposed peace. It took the rebellion of the legacy press of the time, spearheaded by figures such as Edward R. Murrow, to eventually break out of the Second Red Scare. This high standard of journalism enabled the U.S. press to retain its independence long enough to give rise to reporters who—despite their initial credulity over the Gulf of Tonkin Incident—would ultimately engage in an increasingly critical coverage of the later Vietnam War. This more critical attitude also made possible the pivot (under the Nixon Administration) of U.S. policy away from a globalist, anti-communist crusade and toward a realism that would allow for détente with the Soviets and an opening to China.
With the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the unipolar moment, the old Wilsonian quest to achieve global social conformity based on American values would resurge, bolstered by the myth of American exceptionalism from the Reagan era. While there were objections from the Left and the Right to the idea of remaking the world in America’s neoliberal image, most in the mainstream media—in tandem with the political establishment—were enthralled by such rosy idealism. Journalists—many of whom former anti-Vietnam War activists and skeptics of Reaganite deindustrialization—came to praise President Bill Clinton for continuing and expanding Reagan’s policies and scorned the Seattle anti-globalization protests of 1999.
By 2001, many established commentators had become effective ideologues for the establishment instead of working to keep the apparatus of power in check. These pundits were of course devastated when they woke up on September 11, 2001 to find out that the myth of linear global progress and the “end of history” that they had championed since 1989 as the credo of their professional class and a mark of their social status had proven hollow and out of touch with the real world.
These media elites were thus primed for moral outrage and developed a thirst for vengeance. And they were soon to be offered just that by the neoconservatives in the Bush administration.
The Last Stand of Independent Media?
The years following the September 11 attacks were among the darkest periods in recent memory with the U.S. political culture effectively genuflecting at the sight of a growing U.S. security state that was further empowered by the Patriot Act. The initial dearth of any pushback against the War on Terror agenda and its endless wars and mass surveillance programs, combined with the bipartisan support for a new and delusional global crusade, arguably took the country much closer to a blind acquiescence to an “authoritarian” model of governance than any time before.
The Dixie Chicks were blacklisted from entertainment for criticizing the President in public. Bill Maher was quite literally “canceled” for pointing out that as insane as the ideology behind Al Qaeda was, the extremists were nonetheless demonstrating a certain bravery when they flew planes into buildings. Initially happy to go along with the new jingoism, both Hollywood and mainstream journalism eventually discovered that the public was crying out for opposing views, and this proved especially salient in the entertainment sector. With the reaction to 9/11 becoming every bit as terrifying to some as the attacks themselves, it was time for establishment intelligentsia to distinguish itself from the state and stage its first proper comeback since the earlier backlashes to Vietnam and the Church Committee.
Within this context proliferated a stream of content that can be most politely described as awareness movies. Most were superficial rubbish, the kind of Robert Redford-produced and Meryl Streep-starring “topical” entertainment that appears to flatter the self-conception of the average NPR listener without making much of a dent in the consciousness of the general public. Movies like Stop Loss, Rendition, Syriana, The Kingdom, and Lions for Lambs triggered brief media conversations before quietly fading out and being rightly forgotten about after making little impact on audiences or policy discussions. There was little if any critical interrogation of the prevailing forces shaping America’s eerie and securitized post-9/11 zeitgeist.
One major exception to this trend, however, was George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck. Shot entirely in black and white both as a stylistic choice and to more easily integrate its heavy use of era-specific footage, the movie explores the public rivalry between legendary journalist Edward R. Murrow and Senator Joseph McCarthy in the years of 1953-4.
Good Night portrays life within Murrow’s See It Now newsroom during the Second Red Scare. Using the program's stories about the real human toll of Senator McCarthy’s witch hunt on targeted individuals and its increasingly critical commentary on McCarthy himself, the movie explores the immense societal pressure that could be brought to bear both on normal citizens as well as journalists questioning a dominant and increasingly state-sanctioned narrative. Good Night begins with covering the firing of Milo Radulovich from the Air Force for the “crime” of his immigrant father reading a newspaper from Yugoslavia. As events snowball, the film pushes the audience to confront important issues such as state overreach, Pentagon subterfuge, and resisting powerful figures in the government.
McCarthy’s primary role in weaponizing baseless accusations of loyalty to foreign governments and radical ideologies oozes out of every scene as his accusatory gaze moves ever closer to the staff of See It Now. In a clever move by the filmmaker, McCarthy is played by himself. His every appearance in the film is genuine archival footage. No exaggeration or creative license is taken here about this particular historical figure’s slovenly and unhinged aspect. But as the news program remains unwavering in the face of pressure, both McCarthy and his narrative look less intimidating and more ridiculous. The point, it seems, is that a false but popular narrative can be punctured if enough people stand against it, unperturbed by the social pressure that is its only real force. Murrow himself concludes the narrative by stating that television is nothing but “a box with lights in it” if it cannot be used to stand against such corrupt narratives.
Upon release, Good Night, and Good Luck was well received by the legacy media in the War on Terror era, and justly so. Its example of journalists standing up to dogmatic and stifling narratives that allow politicians to cover up their own inadequacies of character and prudence by falsely accusing their critics of being foreign agents seemed a breath of fresh air: It resonated with many who had endured the cloying years of media acquiescence to the Bush administration during W's first term. At long last, it was finally time to push back against the endless chorus of “they hate us for our freedoms” and “you’re either with us or with the terrorists”.
With each recurrence of mania and securitization, the cycles of moral panic and media consolidation seem to harden and accelerate.
Much like the 1920s or the 1970s, the later 2000s saw mainstream intelligentsia trying to stage a comeback and cleanse a much-stained reputation, the unipolar moment notwithstanding. As we now know, this effort didn’t quite succeed in the long run but it was a valiant attempt given the circumstances.
Ditching Murrow to Marry McCarthy
That was the Bush Era. Today, much of mainstream media commentary operates in a very different fashion. With each recurrence of mania and securitization, the cycles of moral panic and media consolidation seem to harden and accelerate. Accusations of disloyalty and being in league with foreign actors are now so commonplace that they have become the background noise of public discourse, and pro-establishment forces most regularly deploy these incendiary tactics against their critics.
Due for the most part to the two unexpected election results of Brexit and Trump in 2016, a paranoid and accusatory tone has taken over liberal-aligned media commentary. As the ichthyoid eyes of Adam Schiff descend on critics of established policy, this time around it's the Republicans and independents—rather than Democrats—who are more likely to claim that they are subject to a new McCarthyism. Opposition and backlash to the present foreign policy consensus are viewed not as a legitimate response against the overreach of a self-righteous political establishment at home, but rather as an insidious alien plot to install Kremlin-friendly puppets and promote a set of policies to undermine “the West”.
Considering the sorry state of the main claims of “Russiagate” (to say nothing about the panic around Munchausen’s Syndrome type of mass delusion that overtook U.S. diplomats circa 2016 known as the “Havana Syndrome”), this line of attack on critics of state policy is every bit as ridiculous as the anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s. And it has only been exacerbated into an even more severe case of paranoid fever owing to the Russian war in Ukraine.
Perhaps the best example of this turn away from Murrow and towards McCarthy on the part of media figures can be found in Keith Olbermann. Among the first voices in the mainstream media to decry the excesses of the Bush years, Olbermann became famous for his fiery denunciations of George W. Bush’s wars, rebuking his messianic worldview and the Bush administration’s general incompetence. His former show “Countdown” probably saved an irrelevant MSNBC from inevitable decline.
Olbermann clearly idolized Murrow, even signing off at the end of his show with the famous quote, “good night and good luck”. Fast forward to the Trump era though, and Olbermann has reinvented himself as one of the more hyperbolic anti-Trump commentators who disparages anyone he dislikes as “Russian scum”. Perhaps it should not surprise that this heel-face turn has coincided with a newly-found reconciliatory attitude toward his former nemesis, George W. Bush!
This is a rather common attitude shift among much of the media elite in recent years. Bush is being rehabilitated as the anti-Trump while the Democratic party has long since adopted most of Bush’s foreign and security policies anyway. The mainstream effort to rehabilitate Bush also perfectly corresponds to the shift away from Murrow’s critical stance to McCarthy’s accusatory one among many established journalists and media commentators. It also explains why Hollywood probably wouldn’t make something like Good Night, and Good Luck today to scrutinize the hysteria around the Ukraine war.
The pleasant fiction that the United States and its political system are some bellwether or ultimate destiny for the entire planet has been exposed as a fraud. As a result, our existing class of elites has never felt so thoroughly insecure.
Back in the post-9/11 era, establishment liberals had severe (and correct) reservations about the government’s response to terrorism and the pervading securitized climate. What they were not doubtful about was the United States’ position in the world as the unquestioned hegemonic and moral power: This confidence about America's role in the world and their own position at the helm made them speak out from a position of strength. Today, in contrast, they find themselves in an entirely new world whose only certainty it seems lies in its determination to reject and dethrone them.
Internationally, with the ascent of China and the greater level of strategic and political autonomy displayed by middle powers, American liberals can no longer rest comfortably in the supposed universalism of their ideological and moral model as a salve in troubled times. Different countries—having alternate historical and geographic circumstances, cultural pedigree, and political paths—are now confident enough to go their own way. This flies in the face of the narcissism underlying media conceptions of internationalism.
Domestically, meanwhile, the Trump election and rise of populism was a testament to just how much resentment ordinary Americans harbored against their leaders and their hubristic image of America as a “project”. In effect, the pleasant fiction that the United States and its political system are some bellwether or ultimate destiny for the fate of the entire planet has been exposed as a fraud. As a result, our existing class of elites has never felt so thoroughly insecure.
A new McCarthyism is becoming institutionalized according to which any deviation from the establishment creed at any juncture constitutes a betrayal of the nation itself.
The establishment-aligned corporate media apparatus is particularly sensitive to these changes. In their worldview, they are on “the right side of history”. This teleological interpretation of the human experience does not make room for the reality of societal divergence, imperial decline, and the natural unfolding of cyclic processes that are intrinsic to history. If internationalist neoliberalism is triumphant, then any skepticism about the universal aspirations of its global policy masquerading as “diplomacy” is viewed as a form of betrayal to the United States itself. With the United States and its establishment both now highly insecure about their global position, the ruling class has come to believe that it is the one true embodiment of America: Its will must be her command and those of the American people. Thus, a new McCarthyism is fast becoming institutionalized according to which any deviation from the establishment creed at any juncture constitutes a betrayal of the nation itself.
Of course, from the vantage point of international relations, states are territorial entities seeking self-preservation first and foremost. Yet the new Western intelligentsia rejects this premise as it looks to nation-states as tea leaves to be read for the future state of the world, or as harbingers of global policy. Rather than being the strongest state among many, the United States is rhetorically set up to be an ideological edifice, standing for all that is good and holy (just like the self-conception of its ruling class). To criticize U.S. policy, therefore, is tantamount to going against a powerful church and its doctrine. It is to be “authoritarian” or “an appeaser” in the all-or-nothing existential war of “democracy” versus “autocracy”.
Such a worldview is not only childish but a grotesque oversimplification of geopolitics. It was neither true in the Cold War, nor in World War II. But to justify a sprawling global empire and the massive security budget that is needed to sustain it, this fiction must be sold as truth. And many in the mainstream media have taken on the task of selling this product. Just as See It Now relied on cigarette commercials and the cast had to be seen smoking on air, so too does today’s mainstream media rely on defense contracting.
Given this context, it should not surprise then that much of the pundit class has been happy to retire its critical thinking to accommodate the establishment and its narratives. Most of the profession no longer sees their vocation as keeping watch over the actions of the political elite, as they ultimately did in the aftermath of the Iraq war, but rather to insulate and gatekeep for the establishment, even cheerlead its specious public accounts and misguided policies.
The relentless expansion and petrification of the professional-managerial class's monoculture seems to become more comprehensive and totalistic with each swing of the ever more rapidly oscillating pendulum in our cycles of mania. Left unchecked, we may soon reach that moment of singularity when our paranoid periods will no longer be scattered points in our history that could be reprieved by a Murrow but a permanent state characterized by neverending oppression and abuse by the likes of McCarthy.
Breaking the Manic Recurrence
In the 1950s, America chose to reject McCarthyism, and its national media (eventually) led the charge in doing so. Its intelligentsia had made similar pushbacks against draconian state-backed censorship schemes before and so the cultural elites of the McCarthy era could hearken back to tradition as they stood tall against government overreach. In the “War on Terror” era, most of the media establishment first fell in line but then came to question the narrative based on some of its excesses, albeit to varying degrees.
Nowadays, however, one would be hard-pressed to find any mainstream journalist or media personality who would dare question an official national security narrative. Having given up the example of Murrow for that of McCarthy, they seem to have little appetite or stomach for investigation but rather serve as a kind of clergy to the doctrine of American Exceptionalism. As the Twitter Files revelations about Russiagate make abundantly clear, when a war is perceived as existential, any disagreement invites a witch hunt.
What's more, whereas it was once simply the expectation for the mainstream press to push back against the contrived status quo, now anyone courageous enough to raise an objection is generally expected to be purged from his or her position of power and influence in legacy institutions. Forcing critics outside the establishment is a clear strategy to discredit and silence those members of the intellectual and cultural elite who refuse to fall in line—by denying them institutional prestige and recognition as well as making it harder for them to make an honest living.
But there is hope still. Perhaps, just as Goodnight and Good Luck once enabled some daylight of sanity to break into the popular culture during a past cycle of mania, so too can Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, released this summer, do the same. A film about the complex genius who led and coordinated the development of the Manhattan Project, the biopic already has gathered massive critical and audience acclaim. A major theme in the movie is J. Robert Oppenheimer's own fear of what he had unleashed as well as his own background in anti-establishment and personally unorthodox left-wing politics.
As the movie unfolds it becomes clear that McCarthyism is a major theme in the narrative. Despite the critical role Oppenheimer played in the development of nuclear weapons and the initial advantage he gave the United States in what became the arms race with the Soviet Union, he was disparaged by the political and media elites for advocating transparency with competitors like the USSR in hopes of avoiding the nuclear arms race that ironically became the defining legacy of his achievements.
Director Christopher Nolan uses the film as an
opportunity to expose some of the internal machinations utilized by
domestic rivals opposed to Oppenheimer's less-hawkish approach after
WWII. These tactics included using his personal life and beliefs to
discredit him, which culminated in him losing the very security
clearance that he had used to develop the atomic bomb, at the behest of
those who wanted to use it toward endless escalation. Nolan depicts how
for the character attacks against Oppenheimer to succeed, it was also
imperative for the hawks to seize control of the narrative: to promote
military expansionism and shut down public debate over their policies
which they rightly suspected would disrupt their plans.
At a time when national security journalism has abrogated its critical distance from the subject it intends to cover, one can only hope that, once again, a period piece meant as ostensible entertainment can provide the breathing space and the needed inspiration to reanimate our society’s spirit to collectively question official narratives about enemies foreign and domestic. For the one thing all these past examples of mania share is that they were, at least for a short while, defeated by a resurgence of critical thought that publicly exposed and humiliated the overbearing monoculture of security, paranoia, and jingoism.
One of the remarkable attributes of the United States is its ability to automatically course-correct when a path taken by its establishment slides too far in one direction. One can almost feel the tides shift as the “very serious” talking points and accusations of yesteryear cease being regarded as sacrosanct or even worth engaging with today—slipping permanently into the territory of farce, self-parody, and poorly-aged spectacle.
In order to expedite this process and prevent our current McCartyian moment from becoming a permanent state, we need to cultivate a rooted sense of integrity, skepticism, and civic responsibility. As engaged citizens, we must acquire the courage to stand our ground, develop a keen sense of what is in the public interest in foreign policy, and shine our critical eye upon unproven and false narratives advanced by self-serious, regime-sanctioned, and sanctimonious claimants of authority.
Only then it might become possible to put paid to these miniature dark ages of discourse and perhaps even develop the vigilance to delay their eventual return for as long as possible.
For now, though, all our task requires is the courage of a calm and collected person to ask, “Have you no decency, sir?”