Hofstadter documents his point with some interesting historical examples, although in trying to apply it to his contemporary (1963-64) world, the biases of the mid-century faculty lounge confound him. The style preys upon the followers’ feeling of dispossession. The central thesis is undisputable enough: “The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent.” The paranoid style itself he defines as “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy” that is, something so terrible is happening that political enemies must have conspired to cause it. The title certainly was evocative of the current season of American presidential politics, so I took a fresh look at the essay recently to see how well it holds up and applies to the present campaign. (Hofstadter got his money’s worth out of his labors.) Everyone of a certain age who took history or political science classes in the mid-1960’s had an assigned reading list which included “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” a book by Professor Richard Hofstadter, named after its title essay which was originally an article in the November, 1964 issue of Harper’s Magazine, which in turn was based on a lecture Hofstadter gave at Oxford in November 1963.
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