The Reactionary Mind and Mimetic Inversion: Making Sense of the Monstrous Double

In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, the American historian Richard Hofstadter writes, “A fundamental paradox of the paranoid style is the imitation of the enemy.” Hofstadter’s classic example is the Ku Klux Klan, a violent reactionary movement that at once vilified and fought the Catholic Church, yet imitated the sartorial style — the robes, staffs, and conical hats — of the Catholic penitential orders of Spain and Italy. Contemporary examples of the paranoid style imitating the enemy include Blue Lives Matter, the men’s rights movement, “straight pride,” and Great Replacement Theory. Historical examples of the powerful and privileged imitating the political style of egalitarian social movements can be traced back to Edmund Burke, the founder of conservatism proper. This pattern has been remarkably consistent: an inversion of self and other. How are we to make sense of this pattern? Why does it happen? What are the principal elements of the phenomenon of mimetic inversion? This paper considers René Girard’s concept of the monstrous double, a feature of his theory of mimesis. Although Girard, by no means original, points to a very real phenomenon, he nonetheless fails to provide an adequate account of mimetic inversion. Using historical examples from Edmund Burke, Thomas Carlyle, and John Calhoun, I argue that the monstrous double is not a mutual phenomenon between symmetrical rivals, but rather a symptom of the powerful and the privileged threatened by the historical march toward equality.