A Paranoid Style in American Politics for the Millennial Era

The historian Richard Hofstadter wrote "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" for Harper's back in 1964. In this now well-known piece he compared 19th century conspiracy theories with those of the "radical right" of his day, the John Birch Society and others whose political rhetoric featured "heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy."

He thought the comparison was a stretch--that the paranoid of his day were markedly different from the anti-Catholic Know-Nothings and other 19th century wingnuts:

If, after our historically discontinuous examples of the paranoid style, we now take the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country–that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.

Has anything changed in the last fifty years? Do we not hear in the anti-Obama/liberal/progressive tirades a lament for the disappearance of a "real America" and calls to take it back? Don't we hear wild accusations of socialism, communism, and treason? Consider other Hofstadter characterizations:

. . .The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms–he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. . .

. . .A special significance attaches to the figure of the renegade from the enemy cause. . .

. . .One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. . .

The current hysteria over Muslims gives us all these facets of paranoia. You'll run smack into the apocalyptic gloom at websites like Jihad Watch or in books like "Stealth Jihad." And think of those ex-Muslims "telling all" about the evils of their former faith. Or watch one of Glenn Beck's overwrought chalkboard exercises.

I'm thinking the only difference between Hofstadter's day and ours is the name of the threat.