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According to a Scripps public opinion poll, “one-third of Americans think that the government either carried out the 9/11 attacks or intentionally allowed them to happen,” but Hayes notes that life pretty much “continues as before, even though tens of millions of people apparently believe they are being governed by mass murderers.”
The more I think about Hayes’s theory — which he juxtaposes with historian Richard Hofstadter’s famous essay on the paranoid style in American politics — the more I realize how well it works for Chicago. I can’t tell you how many critics of the Daley administration have begged me not to print their names for fear they will lose their jobs or basic services or become the target of city inspectors. Yet many of these same people seem surprisingly content to live in a city about which they fear the very worst. Most of them tell me they plan to vote for Mayor Daley.
