> John Robison ... saw [the Masons] as a libertine, anti-Christian movement, given to the corruption of women, the cultivation of sensual pleasures, and the violation of property rights...
That is a pretty accurate description of where Europe ended up in the 1900s to today, so it seems a unreasonable to dismiss the man out of hand. 100 years for a big social project isn't that long a time given how slowly the world moved back then. It is reasonable to say that the Masons might have been a benign organisation - but they also might not have been. There is no contest that groups in Europe were trying and succeeding to push in that direction. The communists had their big breakout in the 1900s but the personality type always has and will exist and the intellectual groundwork was being laid at least as early as the 1850s.
There is this weird social dynamic where people dismiss the idea that radical change is possible in foresight then shrug it off and basically don't care in hindsight. It results in remarkably small groups being able to achieve some incredible things, but it is a bit frustrating an attitude to argue with.
"I'm not paranoid, but there's a bunch of paranoid people following me around."
"Have you heard about the new guy Joe?"
"Yeah, he's the guy who thinks people are always talking about him, right?"
"Boy, what a nutcase."
The other problem is special pleading - the author adds more and more conditions on what constitutes the "paranoid style", until he's able to isolate the phenomenon to mostly the right half of the political spectrum. Meanwhile one can make a career of blaming everything on capitalism, colonialism, racism, or whiteness [1], and remain safely in the clear.
[1] And many have, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noel_Ignatiev or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Sontag, employed by the very education system the author claims it is paranoid to believe contains traitors - sorry, not "contains traitors", the author deftly hedges it as requiring "the whole apparatus" to have fallen into enemy hands. An unusually strong condition, given it is applied to something so vague as a "style". I'd call it a strawman, if it wasn't written by such an eminent author.
The author already answered in the second paragraph:
"Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content."
Or here:
"In the history of the United States one find it, for example, in the anti-Masonic movement, the nativist and anti-Catholic movement, in certain spokesmen of abolitionism who regarded the United States as being in the grip of a slaveholders’ conspiracy, in many alarmists about the Mormons, in some Greenback and Populist writers who constructed a great conspiracy of international bankers, in the exposure of a munitions makers’ conspiracy of World War I, in the popular left-wing press, in the contemporary American right wing, and on both sides of the race controversy today, among White Citizens’ Councils and Black Muslims."
>Meanwhile one can make a career of blaming everything on capitalism, colonialism, racism, or whiteness [1], and remain safely in the clear.
Yeah, there is a difference between blaming things on a shadowy tiny hidden cabal of vaguely-defined conspirators whose existence you don't even attempt to prove, and blaming... you know... the people actually in charge.
I mean, the people in power during most of the last centuries and decades have been white, racist, colonialist and capitalists. That's a fact. That is how they defined themselves openly.
So, you are in effect saying that "reality has a well-known liberal bias".
That's exactly the special pleading/strawmanning I was referring to. There are entire academic departments dedicated to blaming e.g. "whiteness" [1], studies that go against this narrative are suppressed [2], academic jobs are conditioned on DEI loyalty oaths and activism [3] (before you try to sane-wash this, a commitment to treat everyone equally would net a candidate the lowest score [4]. This is being expanded to students [5].), and the immigration policy of the US is to make whites a minority [6] (it was changed explicitly for this reason - that the prior arrangement that maintained white-majority was racist [7]. This is being celebrated [8]). Things aren't much different in the UK, where schools get their ratings docked for being too white [9], and pupils get sent home for wearing the British flag [10].
None of these actions are the "paranoid style" the author is so worried about (and they don't look like the sort of things that white-supremacist or whatever countries would produce, but hey I'm sure the state-funded whiteness studies scholars know better than I, a layman). But those that are worried about them, the author picks the most fringe, conspiratorial among them, picks their most extreme theory (Every teacher is a secret communist agent! Every politician in thrall to Freemasons!), triumphantly debunks it (i.e. calls it paranoid), and then hopes that the factual complaints will be dismissed by association.
E.g. he'd pass over people complaining that the Hart-Celler act will change America's demographics, find the ones instead complaining that it was passed by a shadowy sinister cabal, debunk those, and hope everyone forgets the former group, who has by now been proven correct, despite politicians at the time claiming the act wouldn't change much (funny thing, trying to pass an act they claimed wouldn't do anything).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiteness_studies
[2] The authors also submitted different test studies to different peer-review boards. The methodology was identical, and the variable was that the purported findings either went for, or against, the liberal worldview (for example, one found evidence of discrimination against minority groups, and another found evidence of "reverse discrimination" against straight white males). Despite equal methodological strengths, the studies that went against the liberal worldview were criticized and rejected, and those that went with it were not. - https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bi..., describing this study: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1986-12806-001
[3] https://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/policy-report/the-new-loy...
[4] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/hypocrisy-...
[5] https://www.nationalreview.com/news/top-med-schools-weed-out...
[6] Already a minority among under-18s as of 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_demographic_decline#Unit...
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Ac...
[8] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/biden-white-americans-vide...
[9] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-30121108
[10] https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/girl-12-put-isolation-... (also reported by the BBC, which chose to omit that she was sent home: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cyvj289y788o)