In July, 1953, a former Communist named Manning Johnson testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee about the menacing implications of Bolshevism in American life. He warned that Communists had infiltrated civil-rights organizations, making it difficult to distinguish the movement for racial equality from the movement for centralization and wealth redistribution. The civil-rights movement was often accused of Communist subversion, so little about the appearance warranted particular notice, save for one fact: Johnson was African-American. Black critics howled accusations of racial betrayal, but Johnson was engaged in something subtly different and vastly more interesting: desegregating the American tradition of paranoia.

It’s tempting to see Ben Carson—neurosurgeon, notable black success, conservative pundit, and coquettish potential Presidential candidate—as this election’s Herman Cain: the black conservative whose mere presence inoculates other Republicans from charges of racism as they attack Obama. The ability to provide that kind of racial cover may be part of the reason for Carson’s prominence in the party, but it’s not its overriding rationale. Instead, Carson is heir to the tradition of people like Manning Johnson and George Schuyler, the black conservative who defended Joseph McCarthy even after McCarthy’s fellow Senate Republicans rejected his conspiratorial canards. To the broad public, Carson’s crackpottery—his argument that the sexual behavior of prisoners proves that homosexuality is a choice, his contention that Obamacare is the biggest travesty to befall the nation since slavery, his theory that Obama may declare martial law and cancel the 2016 elections—disqualifies him from being taken seriously. But, for the small segment of the population that he is concerned with, those statements are assurances that they are not monochromatically white. Carson is a black representative and standard-bearer, not for conservatives but for paranoid Americans.

Carson first attracted mainstream attention when, in February, 2013, he delivered the keynote speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, which he prefaced several times with warnings about his disdain for political correctness. Carson, as is his habit, opened with the impressive details of his personal biography: the impoverished childhood in a single-parent household, in Detroit; the moral values inculcated in him by his illiterate but fiercely protective mother; the against-the-odds success that validates his creed of hard work, godliness, and education. With President Obama seated just feet from him, he went on to warn of the dangers of the federal deficit, advocate a flat tax based upon Biblical tithing, and endorse private health-care accounts that would replace the Affordable Care Act.

While Internet commentators hailed Carson’s speech for “wiping the smile off Obama’s face,” the President’s countenance would have been more aptly described as expressing a default neutrality. None of Carson’s comments marked him as exceedingly conservative; it wouldn’t be difficult to find Democrats who share those sentiments. In fact, Carson’s Booker T. Washington-esque prescriptions of personal virtue as a cure for poverty are almost identical to the arguments that Obama himself deploys when talking to black audiences. Nor do these admonishments encompass the entirety of Carson’s thinking on matters of race. The National Prayer Breakfast speech became the basis for his book “One Nation,” in which he criticizes racial profiling:

Though the days of legalized segregation are over, racist bigotry and prejudice still exist today, both in overt and covert ways. I can remember times when I would be walking in a white neighborhood and in short order a police car would show up, undoubtedly summoned by a concerned onlooker. Unfortunately, this and worse still happens today, as evidenced by the Trayvon Martin case. A neighborhood watchman, George Zimmerman, suspicious of the young black man who was walking through the neighborhood late at night, shot and killed Martin after an altercation. The real tragedy is that a young life was lost and another ruined because both individuals made assumptions about the other that were probably untrue.

Even with the false note of evenhandedness, in which Martin’s death is the product of shared racism, this marks a departure from the reactionary arguments made by other black conservatives, like Carol Swain, in which Martin was seen as essentially responsible for his own death. And, at the Conservative Political Action Conference last month, Carson urged congressional Republicans to create an alternate plan to insure health benefits for poor people before dismantling Obamacare. He is not among those who feel that the government has no role in insuring that the poor have access to health care.

Yet if Carson is only moderately conservative, he’s radically paranoid. His rhetoric betrays a sweaty-palmed fixation on government power, and a fear that President Obama has made himself into an American Caesar. Those fears are most clearly manifested in his tendency toward hyperbolic comparison. From his somewhat nuanced take, in “One Nation,” on Trayvon Martin’s death, Carson goes on to argue that the liberal disdain for black conservatives is as pernicious as Jim Crow. At the Values Voter Summit in 2013, he compared the Affordable Care Act to slavery, and argued that both are mechanisms of government control. This is part of a world view in which homosexuality is a matter of volition and possibly a product of a willful, covert effort to subvert traditional values. This is why Carson is able to reconcile support of civil rights for African-Americans with their denial to gays and lesbians, as he stated on CNN last week. African-Americans are not, after all, black on purpose.

The most relevant comparison for Carson isn’t to Cain but to Michele Bachmann, the last Presidential aspirant who, despite membership in a group with a history as targets of discrimination, came to represent the twitchy ideals of American panic. Carson has written of his youth, “Many of the whites in those days found ways to rationalize their unjust treatment of fellow human beings, arguing that they were not racists but rather protectors of traditional values.” Carson’s presence as a potential Presidential candidate represents a triumph, albeit a cynical one, over those rationalizations. He’s moved the country one step closer to that moment when we will be measured not by the color of our skin but by the content of our conspiracy theories.