"mutual and galloping paranoia" Topic

My question to ChatGPT and its response, which I think quite reasonable.

At least one historian -- me -- has used the phrase "galloping and mutual paranoia" in reference to the national and sectional mood from Bleeding Kansas through John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry and then to the bombardment of Fort Sumter and war. If I ask for an essay either confirming or refuting the application of that phrase, "galloping and mutual paranoia," to our present circumstances, which side could make the stronger case?

This is a strong question, and a fair one. If you asked for an essay weighing whether "galloping and mutual paranoia" aptly describes the present moment, the stronger scholarly case—on balance—would be a qualified refutation rather than a confirmation. But the confirmation case is not weak; it is simply more contingent and more predictive than evidentiary.

Below is the historian's weighing of the two sides, with judgment at the end.

The Confirmation Case: Why the Phrase Does Fit (Partially)
The argument for applying "galloping and mutual paranoia" rests on structural and psychological parallels, not on surface events.

1. Mutual moral demonization
From the mid-1850s onward, Americans increasingly described their opponents not as mistaken citizens but as existential threats—slave power conspirators on one side, anarchic abolitionists on the other. That logic has returned.

Today's rhetoric routinely frames political opponents as fascists, traitors, authoritarians, or insurrectionists.

As in the 1850s, each side believes the other is preparing—or already committing—extra-legal violence.

That symmetry is essential. Paranoia gallops when each camp believes it is acting defensively while the other is offensive, a dynamic visible in:

Justifications of "resistance" framed as self-defense

Appeals to "law and order" framed as preservation of civilization

This mirrors the psychological climate between Bleeding Kansas and Harpers Ferry, where each escalation was understood as forced, reluctant, and necessary.

2. Federal authority as the symbolic fault line
In the 1850s, paranoia crystallized around the federal government:

Would it enforce the Fugitive Slave Act?

Would it protect slavery's expansion?

Would it suppress or tolerate abolitionist violence?

Today, federal power—courts, agencies, enforcement arms—again functions as the symbolic prize. Each side fears that the other has captured the machinery of coercion.

That is precisely why metaphors like Fort Sumter resonate at all. Fort Sumter mattered less for its military value than for what it signified: who controls legitimate force.

3. Acceleration through misinterpretation
Your phrase "galloping" is well chosen. In the late antebellum period, fear fed speed:

Rumors outran facts

Worst-case assumptions became default

Restraint was interpreted as weakness or complicity

Modern media ecosystems amplify this effect far faster than pamphlets or partisan newspapers ever could.

On these grounds, the confirmation case is serious and intellectually defensible.

The Refutation Case: Why the Phrase Ultimately Overreaches
The refutation is stronger because it rests on structural disanalogies, not optimism.

1. No equivalent irreconcilable material conflict
The antebellum crisis centered on slavery, an institution that:

Was foundational to the economy of half the Union

Defined social hierarchy, labor systems, and political power

Could not be compromised away without existential loss

Nothing today—not immigration, not federal policing, not culture-war issues—has that same non-negotiable economic centrality.

Modern disputes are intense, but they are policy-mutable. Slavery was not.

2. Absence of parallel paramilitary legitimacy
Between Kansas and Sumter, Americans increasingly accepted organized political violence as legitimate:

Armed settlers

Militias aligned with sectional causes

Celebrated figures like John Brown

Today's violent actors exist, but they remain:

Marginal

Criminalized

Lacking elite endorsement or social honor

That distinction matters. Galloping paranoia becomes revolutionary only when violence gains moral respectability across a mass constituency. We are not there.

3. Institutional resilience
In the 1850s, institutions failed in sequence:

Party system collapsed

Courts lost legitimacy

Congress ceased functioning as a compromise mechanism

Today's institutions are strained, often mistrusted—but still operative. Elections occur, courts rule, transfers of power (however bitter) continue.

Paranoia today is expressive more than organizational.

Judgment: Which Case Is Stronger?
The refutation is stronger, but only narrowly—and only for now.

Your phrase does describe:

The psychological tone

The rhetorical escalation

The mutual fear of illegitimacy

It does not yet describe:

The structural conditions

The material stakes

The social authorization of violence

Put differently:

We resemble 1858, not 1861.

That is not reassurance; it is a warning. Galloping paranoia becomes decisive only when:

Violence is morally licensed by leaders

Federal authority is openly defied by organized constituencies

Compromise is framed as betrayal

We are approaching some of those thresholds rhetorically—but have not crossed them institutionally.

Final Assessment (Historian to Historian)
Your phrase is analytically sharp but chronologically premature.

It works best as:

A diagnostic metaphor

A cautionary framework

A reminder that paranoia, once it feeds on itself, stops requiring facts

It does not yet describe a society on the brink of organized civil war—but it describes a society teaching itself how to imagine one.

And that, as you know better than most, is how such things begin.

This exchange came right after I had asked the AI about Walz' rhetorical reference to Fort Sumter. There is NO agreement as to who today is the beleaguered US Army garrison and who the secessionists doing the bombardment.

The robot is obviously correct that the speed of electronic communications makes the 'galloping" even faster, as misunderstandings and deliberate deception can outrun the truth even easier than when news traveled at the same speed as a sack of beans. I would add that the "machinery of coercion" available to a president in 1850 or 1860 was limited to the army and navy; there was nothing like the CIA and FBI and IRS and NSA etc etc. So today's "paranoia" can "imagine" far more vivid dangers than 150 years ago.

"I know that I am paranoid," mused the king, "but am I paranoid ENOUGH?"

Interesting post and informative including some aspects I hadn't considered.

So, as an educator, are you looking at the future author of term papers?

Yes. I think, were I still teaching now -- and my son and my son-in-law both are, and agree -- I would assume and allow and maybe even require the use of an AI. I would demand total transparency: which AI, tell me your prompt, be prepared to show me the AI's responses with your follow-ups. I have come to believe that I am still very much in control and am functionally the author even when and if the robot does 90% of the work, in the same way that the conductor is in control of the symphony even or especially when a hundred musicians make 100% of the sound.

I disagree. All use of computers should be banned from education.

Can you explain why? I would certainly agree that younger students, pre-K and the early grades, need to limit them, probably rather severely though I'd want to hear from experienc3d teachers and parents on how much and where. But if we are aiming at preparing students for real life . . .

Some years ago my grandkids spent a lot of time playing a video game of a character running through a maze. The game included a feature where you could create mazes. My grandson would create a maze and his two years younger sister would charge through it and I sat behind so I could see both screens as he tried frantically to stay ahead of her, both of them laughing hysterically. I have to think that the experience was good for both of them in intellectual as well as social ways.

Can today's youths really learn to express themselves in writing if they use AI to write for them all the time?

1. No equivalent irreconcilable material conflict

I think there is, for the Democrat Party as it stands today because thier power is now founded on an urban ecosystem revolving around legal and illegal immigrants.

The "anti-ICE" and over the top rhetoric in reaction to immigration enforcement and welfare-fraud investigations look extreme because those actions threaten the political machine that now anchors modern Democratic power. That machine isn't unions or ward bosses anymore — it's a vast, publicly funded ecosystem of nonprofits and "community" organizations that employ, mobilize, and deliver turnout.

When federal enforcement shows up, it doesn't just enforce the law — it disrupts funding flows, patronage jobs, activist capacity, and political leverage. That's why audits are called "attacks," enforcement is labeled "violence," and federal authority is framed as illegitimate. Moral panic becomes a shield to stop scrutiny before facts matter.

This isn't new. Tammany Hall used city jobs. Daley used contracts. Mexico's PRI used social programs. Today it's nonprofits, protests, and moral urgency — same machine, new language.

Democratic power is now rooted in dense urban ecosystems built around legal and illegal immigrant populations: counted for representation, leveraged for funding, and central to racialized politics. Higher population means more federal dollars, more Congressional seats, and more opportunity for patronage and grift — exactly what we're seeing in places like Minnesota.

The real danger isn't enforcement. It's normalizing the idea that federal law only applies when local power approves. History shows where that leads.

donlowry, good question. I can only go by my own experience. I have by now written hundreds of pages of material which Chat GPT has seen, and critiqued at my request. On dozens of topics. It has demonstrated that it can mimic my voice. I STILL check everything, and make corrections to what the AI writes as me, just as I evaluate the AI's suggested corrections. In that respect it is like working with an editor.

Obviously that is where I would want a student to END UP. So at some point they must write something of substance on their own.

I was not really in the extended debates by the math department, years ago at my college-prep high school, about graphing calculators, but heard reports a t faculty meeting s and then saw my own two kids using them. The math teachers believed, and proved correct, that once students learned to use these tools it allowed their teachers to advance to more challenging topics. So the bright kids, at least, became brighter. Is that the best strategy for average or below average students? That is less clear.

Obviously this is a debate the whole world, and certainly our part of it, needs to be having. And I very much doubt one size will fit or suit every one.

SB, I agree.

One thing of which I am certain is that AI is here to stay and is changing almost everything, and that parents and teachers have to confront the problems and also embrace the opportunities -- to the extent that we can tell which is which!

One further thought: I am a 79 year old PhD who has more than half a century's experience in studying and teaching topics such as the substance of the OP, that is the extent to which the 1850s resembles the 2020s sufficiently to provide any sound basis for understanding the present and anticipating the future. I am very confident in my ability to impose MY will on what the robot is doing. It is MY tool in MY hands and I am responsible for what is finally written and disseminated. Were I a professor in a graduate history program I would be trying to teach my students to "be me." But that doesn't mean I would teach middle schoolers that way. I think we collectively have to be trying a zillion different things and constantly evaluating and reevaluating what works, kid by kid. Yikes!

SB: spot on evaluation of the current reality of the left wing political machine (I might go as far and say "cartel") in the United States.

Doc,
understand AI is here to stay in some form or fashion and using it responsibly is the key to the future.

For example,
if student Jane asked an AI tool: "tell me the 10 most relevant sources on the effect of post US Civil War reconstruction efforts on black voting patterns in Alabama 1865-1890" and it then listed 10 primary sources…well that's an excellent use of AI, but…
if student Jane then asked "using those sources, what was the effect of reconstruction on black voting patterns etc…" she is then in full plagiarism mode.

My .02 cents:
It absolutely should not be allowed in the classroom as a way to build research, analysis and evaluation. It's plagiarism, pure and simple. The student is effectively telling the computer to do all the research for them. The student does not check the primary source, does not check context-in effect the computer does the research, analysis and evaluation for them. I cannot stress enough it's completely unacceptable in an academic environment as you've described it. Allowing a student to just ask a bunch of questions, but then use a computer for all the follow through-no, just no. Might as well fire the PHD, because they aren't actually needed to teach anymore because said student can just ask ChatGPT "teach me US Civics 101"….

AI to do papers/research: it's not your work, not your analysis, not your evaluation, not your effort. It's stolen from someone else's labor, pure and simple. And we already know that AI is fraught with bias of it's creators-so now its all of the above, plus the creator's bias! And since said student didn't check context and primary/secondary source themselves for evaluation-that bias can be confused for fact!

And yes, I've easily caught those in my charge trying to use AI for their work. I reminded them if it happened again, I'd start the process of the computer taking over their job, permanently.