'Crazy' in politics subject of museum lecture Friday

MOSES LAKE — Political sound and fury, and even where politics gets a little crazy, is the subject of a lecture at 7 p.m. Friday at the Moses Lake Museum & Art Center, 401 S. Balsam St.

Washington State University professor Cornell Clayton will talk about “Crazy Politics: Populism, Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in America.” Admission is free.

The lecture is sponsored by the museum and Humanities Washington.

Clayton said populism and political paranoia are two separate strands of thought, but “they are related in some ways.” Both have deep historical roots in U.S. politics.

People involved in politics in America frequently have presented it as a struggle between good guys and bad guys. Frequently it’s depicted as the struggle of the American people (the good guys) against an elite, local or global (the bad guys). “Who we define as the elite varies,” he said, based each individual’s partisan and ideological identification.

He cited the 2016 presidential election as an example. Both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump tapped into that populist strain, he said – just different kinds of populism. For Sanders supporters, the good guys were workers and small producers, and the bad guys were big corporations, big banks and big financiers along Wall Street. Trump supporters looked at small business owners and workers as the good guys, and a corrupt political – rather than economic – elite as the bad guys, Clayton said.

The paranoid style goes back a long way in American history, but Clayton said he uses the definition from a 1964 book from historian Richard Hofstader. Paranoiacs – at least the political ones – agree that there are good guys and bad guys, with the added belief that the bad guys are actively up to something.

Again, the “something” depends on other factors, the individual’s previous ideological and partisan identification. Left-leaning political paranoiacs will believe different conspiracy theories than right-leaning political paranoiacs, Clayton said.

Those ideological predispositions are critical in determining what people believe and why, and what impact they think it has on politics, he said.

Clayton is the director of WSU’s Thomas S. Foley Institute for Public Policy and Public Service, and the Thomas S. Foley Distinguished Professor of Government. He has a PhD from Oxford University.

People who want more information on the lecture can contact the museum 509-764-3830.

Cheryl Schweizer can be reached via email at education@columbiabasinherald.com.