For what it’s worth

Ryan Routh seems to be yet another unhinged man with a gun over there:

Mr. Routh, a former construction worker from Greensboro, N. C., said he never fought in Ukraine himself — he was too old and had no military experience.

But like many foreign volunteers who showed up at Ukraine’s border in the war’s early months, he was eager to cast aside his former life for something far more exciting and make a name for himself.

“In my opinion everyone should be there supporting the Ukrainians,” he told me, his voice urgent, exasperated and a little suspicious over the phone.

When I talked to Mr. Routh in March of last year, he had compiled a list of hundreds of Afghans spread between Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan whom he wanted to fly, somehow, to Ukraine. Mr. Routh told one Afghan he was helping: “I am just a civilian.”

My conversation with Mr. Routh was brief. He was in Washington, D.C., he said, and had planned for a two-hour meeting with some congressmen about Ukraine. (It’s unclear if that meeting ever happened.)

By the time I got off the phone with Mr. Routh some minutes later, it was clear he was in way over his head.

He talked of buying off corrupt officials, forging passports and doing whatever it took to get his Afghan cadre to Ukraine, but he had no real way to accomplish his goals. At one point he mentioned arranging a U.S. military transport flight from Iraq to Poland with Afghan refugees willing to fight.

I shook my head. It sounded ridiculous, but the tone in Mr. Routh’s voice said otherwise. He was going to back Ukraine’s war effort, no matter what.

Like many of the volunteers I interviewed, he fell off the map again. Until Sunday.

60 years ago this fall, Richard Hofstadter published his classic essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” I assume this essay was inspired, if that’s the right word, by the first Kennedy assassination, and it’s striking how its opening paragraph sounds like it could have been written this morning, with the alteration of just one proper noun:

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.

Or maybe it’s not even necessary to make that alteration: on some level — paging Rick Perlstein — Trumpism is the culmination of what Hofstadter called “the Goldwater movement,” although his characterization of that (this) movement as driven by the animosities and passions of “a small minority” has turned out to be overly optimistic.

The contemporary media environment has as it were normalized the paranoid style, to the point where something like a presidential assassination attempt is unsurprising to the point of banality. Donald Trump in particular is himself reaping what he has done so much to help sow, but he had and continues to have a whole lot of help in creating a paranoid, surreal, unreal nation, spiraling now toward who knows what, but probably nothing good.

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. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse. . .

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.

A more succinct description of the Trumpist mentality remains difficult to compose.