the paranoid style in american politics and other essays

So, if'the paranoid style' is destined to stay with us as a concept, it's worth re-examining its meaning and the context in which Hofstadter developed it.įor Hofstadter, the essay (first given as a lecture at Oxford in 1963, published in short form in Harper's in 1964, expanded for the book in 1965) represented the final statement, if not exactly the culmination, of a decade of explorations into the American far right. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics'), but that his choice of words inevitably, and unfortunately, encouraged. All too often, pundits wheel out Hofstadter's intellectual authority as a substitute for fresh analysis sometimes they appear to be endorsing a psychological diagnosis of conservative activists-a reading of Hofstadter's work that he pointedly disavowed ('I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. Nonetheless, Hofstadter's thesis ought to be used carefully and sparingly. Today's ultraconservative activists exhibit many core elements of the style that Hofstadter identified: the penchant for' conspiratorial fantasy,' the apocalyptic stakes imagined to be involved in policy debates, the imperviousness to rational persuasion. It's hard to deny that the title recommends itself. Lately, from the rise of Sarah Palin to the spring's' tea parties' to the' birther' frenzies and health care town halls of this summer to the Joe Wilson contretemps, allusions to Hofstadter have never seemed more widespread.

Not surprisingly, my plea worked about as well as a stop sign before a runaway 18-wheeler. A few years ago, in this column, I proposed a moratorium on drive-by references to historian Richard Hofstadter's classic essay' The Paranoid Style in American Politics.' Too often, pundits invoked the title of that Goldwater-era exploration of right-wing fringe politics without giving much attention to the essay's actual content, let alone the context in which Hofstadter wrote it.

The paranoid style in american politics and other essays