The Paranoid Style in American Politics: An Essay: from The Paranoid Style in American Politics (Kindle Single)

by Richard Hofstadter

A Vintage Shorts Selection
 
A timely reissue of acclaimed historian Richard Hofstadter’s authoritative and unforgettable essay. First published in 1964 and no less relevant half a century later, The Paranoid Style in American Politics scrutinizes the conditions that gave rise to the extreme right of the 1950s and the 1960s, and presages the ascendancy of the Tea Party movement and, now, Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
 
Fringe groups can and do both influence and derail American politics, and Hofstadter remains indispensable reading for anyone who wants to understand why paranoia, a persistent psychic phenomenon with an outsize role in American public life, refuses to abate.
 
An ebook short.

Genres: Politics, History, Nonfiction, Essays, American History, Philosophy, Political Science

39 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 1, 1964

About the author

Richard Hofstadter was an American public intellectual, historian and DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. In the course of his career, Hofstadter became the “iconic historian of postwar liberal consensus” whom twenty-first century scholars continue consulting, because his intellectually engaging books and essays continue to illuminate contemporary history.

His most important works are Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 (1944); The American Political Tradition (1948); The Age of Reform (1955); Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963), and the essays collected in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964). He was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize: in 1956 for The Age of Reform, an unsentimental analysis of the populism movement in the 1890s and the progressive movement of the early 20th century; and in 1964 for the cultural history, Anti-intellectualism in American Life.

Richard Hofstadter was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1916 to a German American Lutheran mother and a Polish Jewish father, who died when he was ten. He attended the City Honors School, then studied philosophy and history at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1933, under the diplomatic historian Julius Pratt. As he matured, he culturally identified himself primarily as a Jew, rather than as a Protestant Christian, a stance that eventually may have cost him professorships at Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Berkeley, because of the institutional antisemitism of the 1940s.

As a man of his time, Richard Hofstadter was a Communist, and a member of the Young Communist League at university, and later progressed to Communist Party membership. In 1936, he entered the doctoral program in history at Columbia University, where Merle Curti was demonstrating how to synthesize intellectual, social, and political history based upon secondary sources rather than primary-source archival research. In 1938, he joined the Communist Party of the USA, yet realistically qualified his action: “I join without enthusiasm, but with a sense of obligation.... My fundamental reason for joining is that I don’t like capitalism and want to get rid of it. I am tired of talking.... The party is making a very profound contribution to the radicalization of the American people.... I prefer to go along with it now.” In late 1939, he ended the Communist stage of his life, because of the Soviet–Nazi alliance. He remained anti-capitalist: “I hate capitalism and everything that goes with it.”

In 1942, he earned his doctorate in history and in 1944 published his dissertation Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915, a pithy and commercially successful (200,000 copies) critique of late 19th century American capitalism and those who espoused its ruthless “dog-eat-dog” economic competition and justified themselves by invoking the doctrine of as Social Darwinism, identified with William Graham Sumner. Conservative critics, such as Irwin G. Wylie and Robert C. Bannister, however, disagree with this interpretation.

Reviews

[BlackOxford · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Deep State Is Always With Us

Christianity has traditionally defined itself principally by what it is not, namely Judaism. America as a self-described Christian nation defines itself historically with a similar ambiguity. Being unique, in the minds of its citizens, America is self-defined as ‘exceptional.’ But functionally this status can only be described negatively - not a European constitutional monarchy; not an Asian dictatorship; not a Middle Eastern theocracy are historically common designations.

When, as Hofstadter notes, these external reference points are insufficient to ensure national identity, the country habitually turns on itself for re-enforcement. America is Protestant not Catholic; Northern not Southern European; egalitarian not elitist; and, of course, Christian not Semitic (thus including both Muslims and Jews in a somewhat more cosmopolitan opposition). This combination of external and internal mistrust - lest one become confused with the Other - is how Hofstadter defines his paranoid style: “I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.”

Hofstadter tactfully points out that the paranoid style is not unique to American politics. It clearly has demonstrated itself elsewhere as the need has arisen to employ a sociological a force of national self-awareness - Republican Revolutionary France, Nazi Germany, the Great Britain of Charles II. But all of his examples for the objects of paranoid hatred - religions, immigrants, Masons, minority political groups - are all American. And I think he makes the implicit point that although the style he has in mind is potentially universal, it is particularly, even extremely, well developed in the United States, where it occurs not just periodically but as a persistent and continuous theme of American democracy (one cannot help but think of the X-Files as something peculiar to America).

This theme shows up most obviously as a feeling of national victimhood. “In the paranoid style, as I conceive it, the feeling of persecution is central, and it is indeed systematized in grandiose theories of conspiracy.” In the nineteenth century the conspirators were the Illuminati; in the 1940’s and 50’s it was Pinko Sympathisers; in the 1970’s, liberal defeatists. Today’s conspirators are Trump’s and Fox News’s Deep State. The real America is being taken advantage of by its allies, by its trading partners, and also by its own people - the Washington Swamp, the urban elite, Black people, the Federal Reserve, and both Houses of Congress, including both major parties.

Hofstadter sees this condition hard-wired, as it were, into the American political system and psyche:

“One of the most impressive facts about the paranoid style.. is that it represents an old and recurrent mode of expression in our public life which has frequently been linked with movements of suspicious discontent and whose content remains much the same even when it is adopted by men of distinctly different purposes. Our experience suggests too that, while it comes in waves of different intensity, it appears to be all but ineradicable.”

Since the condition is “a way of seeing the world and of expressing oneself,” it is largely invisible to the country itself. It is, therefore, a self-fulfilling construction of reality which appears natural. Paranoia creates ample reason to be paranoid.

Another unfortunate symptom of the paranoid style is that it tends to invert the principles it seeks to protect. As Hofstadter says, “A fundamental paradox of the paranoid style is the imitation of the enemy.” So, for example, the Ku Klux Klan adopts many of the rituals and even the vestments of the Catholic Church; the McCarthy Congressional Un-American hearings are identical to Soviet show trials; and of course Trump’s infamous Lock Her Up is merely a projection of his own criminality.

Written in the early 1960’s, The Paranoid Style may not ultimately prove timeless; but it is most certainly timely during the reign of Trump. Who knows, it could be the Republican Party’s playbook from the days of Nixon onward. In any case it remains an important document about the realities of American politics.

Postscript: the fictional expression of many of Hofstadter’s observations and conclusions can be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nine months into the Trump presidency I’m seldom shocked anymore, but when I heard that the Las Vegas Shooting victims were being abused online, accused of being Soros-paid actors in an anti-gun conspiracy, I was shocked. I mean, c’mon, this isn’t Sandy Hook! (as crazy as that theory was too.) I mean, this is a large, well-publicized event, involving hundreds of salt-of-the-earth country music fans, an event which happened during a pro-NRA Republican administration! And you guys can find a conspiracy, even here?

Then my next thought: I’ve been promising myself I was going to read “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” No time like the present, no time better than today.

I’m glad, after all these years, that I read it. This essay, first widely available in Harper’s November 1964 issue (I read the unabridged Oxford Lecture version, delivered a year before), may have been occasioned by the rise of Barry Goldwater, but it detects the “paranoid strain” as something that was present from the early days of the republic: from Federalist fear of the Illuminati (1796-1798) through the related Anti-Masonic Movement (1820s and ‘30s) and the anti-Catholic “Jesuit Threat” (1840s and 50s). The targets may be different, but the McCarthyites, the Birthers, TV Glen Beck (and his chalk board), and Alex Jones from InfoWars and the QAnon folks all follow a similar pattern.

I learned much from this essay, and I am sure I’ll read it again, for it deserves close study. From my first reading, I found the following passage to be the most illuminating:

The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular political interest–perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of their demands–cannot make themselves felt in the political process. Feeling that they have no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception of the world of power as omnipotent, sinister, and malicious fully confirmed. They see only the consequences of power–and this through distorting lenses–and have little chance to observe its actual machinery. L. B. Namier once said that “the crowning attainment of historical study” is to achieve “an intuitive sense of how things do not happen.” It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him. We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.

But I must admit that the following excerpt from a contemporary account of the “Jesuit Threat” is my favorite part of the essay. Probably because I’m a product of Jesuit education (Cincinnati Xavier), I found the following passage extremely amusing:

“It is an ascertained fact,” wrote one Protestant militant, “that Jesuits are prowling about all parts of the United States in every possible disguise, expressly to ascertain the advantageous situations and modes to disseminate Popery. A minister of the Gospel from Ohio has informed us that he discovered one carrying on his devices in his congregation; and he says that the western country swarms with them under the name of puppet show men, dancing masters, music teachers, peddlers of images and ornaments, barrel organ players, and similar practitioners.”

[Julio The Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Those who aren't paranoid haven't gotten the news yet."---William Burroughs
"Even paranoids have real enemies."---proverb

Suppose in 1804 I told you that the President of the United States had fathered a child with one of his black female slaves. You'd call me a conspiracy theorist. Well, it took almost 200 years but I was proven right. And, suppose in 1964, the year this book was written, I told you that the President of the United States had staged a false flag operation in the Gulf of Tonkin to have Congress grant him the authority to send troops to South Vietnam and bomb the North. Richard Hofstadter, along with everybody else, would have called me a conspiracy nut. Finally, after Hofstadter's death, suppose I told you the President, Vice-president and Secretary of State of the United States are conspiring to launch an invasion of Iraq using false evidence about Weapons of Mass Destruction? Off to the nut farm I go! Columbia University Historian Richard Hofstadter was well aware that there had been conspiracies in American history but the focus of this book is on the conspiratorial mindset, or as an old friend of mine on the left put it, "conspiracy buffs see political problems as police problems; if only those evil people got locked up America could go back to its great self". (See the Encyclopedia of Conspiracy entry under "Oliver Stone".) Hofstadter finds the roots of this type of thinking in America's religious origins. Every political problem must be a moral problem and evil is caused by wicked individuals and elites, not systems or systematic liars. The title essay, plus the marvelously funny "The Mind of 'Coin" Harvey", a turn of the twentieth-century self-taught economist who thought he had solved all the nation's financial woes in his head, both command attention to analyzing the conspiratorial mind. Of even greater importance today is the essay on "Pseudo-conservatism": "Today's conservatives are no such thing. They are radical rightists who, if they ever came to power, would transform this country beyond recognition." Richard, it's already happened. Just look at the composition of the Supreme Court and its decisions. (And, yes, there is a conspiracy theory on abortion, "white genocide" and The Great Replacement).

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most important books I've ever read, and my only regret is I waited this late in life. (I think in my earlier days Hofstadter was tarred with the "liberal consensus" brush of ideas like Daniel Bell's "End of Ideology." To an aging liberal, however, Hofstadter holds up remarkably well.) Hofstadter takes a step back from the growing "pseudo-conservative" movement of the 1950s and 1960s and shows it in a broader historic context. Whereas contemporary commentators and bloggers tend to get bogged down rebutting specific right-wing positions, which change from week to week and often contradict the previous position taken, Hofstadter sifts through the dishonest noise to extract the fundamental characteristics of pseudo-conservatism and hold them up to examination. The power of his insight is such that he is difficult to quote because nearly every paragraph is quotable.

Interestingly, I found his essay, "The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt -- 1954," to be possibly more profound even than the more celebrated "Paranoid Style." The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt" is so beautifully fitted together and elegantly argued as to resemble almost an old clockwork. Starting right with the title, Hofstadter zeroes in on the contradictions and pathologies of the pseudo-conservative revolt and its adherents.

Moreover, Hofstadter is so lucid he can even make interesting a discussion of the "free silver" movement.

I can't recommend this book too highly.

[Ivonne Rovira · Rating 5 out of 5]

O Paul Krugman! Not only do readers learn so much by reading his column and blog posts, but even the commenters on his blog “The Conscience of a Liberal” strew pearls of wisdom! This is the second time that a commenter on Krugman’s blog has recommended a book that turned out to be fantastic.

I had read the title article of The Paranoid Style in American Politics in 1978 or 1979 when I was still in college, and I had forgotten completely about it. But the commenter mentioned that the book of essays completely explained the Tea Party movement. I had thought that, due to John Bircher elements, a good deal of the Tea Party traced its roots to the Goldwater campaign of 1964 -- and one can trace a straight line between the two -- but it’s actually much older than that. Author Richard Hofstadter, in addition to explaining the psychological causes of these movements, reveals that the same ideas and attitudes emerge in the anti-Illuminati, anti-Freemason, anti-Catholic, and anti-communist movements. In each case, an insidious evil movement threatens “real Americans” (redefined in each incarnation), and only the True Believers understand the extent of the danger. The same bugaboos appear again and again: the demonization of a weak minority, the self-righteous attitude of the self-proclaimed “real Americans,” the apocalyptic vision of a clash between good and evil, one in which no compromise is possible. Even some of the policy details aren’t new: the hatred of the income tax, for example, or the depiction of the poor as feckless and wanton.

In each case, True Believers swallow patently ridiculous stories. Remember how fluoridated water would convert people into communists through their tap water? Hofstadter does, of course. But each age had its own fabricated “Kenyan” conspiracies: Anti-Catholics blamed the Depression of 1893 on treasonous Catholics, and John Birchers contended that President Dwight Eisenhower was a communist. Samuel Morse, now known exclusively as the inventor of the telegraph, was, in his own day, better known for his part in the anti-Illuminati and anti-Mason crusades. He railed against the Illuminati: “Shall our sons become the disciples of Voltaire, and the dragoons of Marat; or our daughters the concubines of the Illuminati?” Purple prose, much?

Worse, in each case, the movement’s followers become convinced that their leaders have been infected with whatever the terror du jour is. As Hofstadter writes, “He imagines that his own government and his own leaders are engaged in a more or less continuous conspiracy against him because he has come to think of authority only as something that aims to manipulate and deprive him.” And the True Believer simultaneously believes that his leaders are either brilliantly engaged in betraying the nation to the threat du jour or too incompetent to shield the nation from the wily opponent. As Hofstadter notes:

Many years ago, in an illuminating essay, D.W. Brogan pointed to a state of mind which he called “the illusion of American omnipotence”- - defined as “the illusion that any situation which distresses or endangers the United States can only exist because Americans have been fools or knaves.”

In other words, because of geography, Americans have never had to confront the fact that no country has unlimited power in the world. They can’t fathom that sometime things happen due to bad luck, miscommunication, or simply being outnumbered or outflanked. I was also struck with how, like the Tea Party, the Goldwaterites were completely unconcerned with winning elective office. “Their true victory lay not in winning the election but in capturing the party -- in itself no mean achievement -- which gave them an unprecedented platform from which to propagandize for a sound view of the world.”

Lastly, I have to note a fabulous quote from Hofstadter, who credited Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, with the successes of the Right in the 1950s and early 1960s rather than Senator Joseph McCarthy since “McCarthy could barely organize his own files, much less a national movement.” Priceless!

[Allen Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Deep State. Pizzagate. Stop the Steal. There have never been conspiracy theories as wacky as these in America, right? Wrong! It turns out that nutty conspiracy theories about various groups have been kicking around in America since its inception. The suspects have changed over the years, but the proclivity for paranoid conspiratorial obsessions has always been there. And much like in 2024 America, the politicians have always been most willing to use them and their deluded adherents to their own political advantage.

The late, great American historian and Pulitzer winner Richard Hofstadter penned this essay back in 1964, and I doubt he would have been surprised at all to see the state of American politics today, 60 years later, in all its dysfunctional glory. In the past, conspiracy theorists have feared and blamed such groups as the Masons, the Illuminati (which was nothing like what you’ve heard, lol), the Catholics, the Jews, the Mormons, and most of all—the Communists, always the goddamn Commies!

Hofstadter shows that conspiracy theories have always been part and parcel of American political culture. I’m not sure if knowing this fact makes me feel better or worse about today’s current incarnations. Regardless, I recommend this essay to American history and poli-sci readers. 5 stars.

[Sebastien · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read. Written close to over 60 years ago, many of the essays are still relevant to our current times. Hofstadter is a skilled writer, meticulous researcher, and surgically perceptive.

I enjoyed most of the essays, although my favorites were the title essay, the Anti-Trust essay, and the Barry Goldwater essay. The least interesting essay was the one on the Spanish-American War, but even that one had some interesting insights into the American psyche (and contradictions) regarding foreign policy and imperialism.

In the Goldwater essay, Goldwater certainly comes across as an intransigent ideologue (big surprise!). And I got an education on the whole silver movement which was a nice example of trying to solve a complex (and very real) problem with an overly simple solution. The irony is that the silver people weren’t wrong, but the means of successfully expanding the money supply was a route many from the gold camp and silver camp didn’t see coming: credit creation.

The Anti-Trust essay was interesting because many of the same challenges face us today regarding massive oligopolies that subvert democracy by controlling our politics and legislation. How these problems get solved is interesting.

Going to share a few quotes:

Here’s one from the Goldwater essay that speaks to our times, what I consider an extremely dangerous tool/tactic::

“When (Goldwater/the pseudo-conservative) argues that we are governed largely by means of near-hypnotic manipulation (brainwashing), wholesale corruption, and betrayal, it is indulging in something more significant than the fantasies of indignant patriots: it is questioning the legitimacy of the political order itself. The two-party system, as it has developed in the United States, hangs on the common recognition of loyal opposition: each side accepts the ultimate good intentions of the other…

But an essential point in the pseudo-conservative world view is that our recent Presidents, being men of wholly evil intent, have conspired against the public good. This does more than discredit them: it calls into question the validity of the political system that keeps putting such men into office.”

And this was a passage (from the Anti-Trust essay) that made me laugh:

“The left, if it can be called that, rebels in the name of nonconformity and opts out of the whole bourgeois world in the manner of the beatnik and the hipster. The right (in the manner of Barry Goldwater and his enthusiasts) rebels in the name of the older individualism, which believed that economic life should inculcate discipline and character. Though they would hate to admit it, they are both bedeviled in different ways by the same problem; each of them is trying to make its variety of nonconformism into a mass creed - which is a contradiction in terms. The beats opt out of corporate uniformity in their own uniforms and erect themselves into a stereotype. The right-wingers sing their praises of individualism in dreary, regimented choruses and applaud vigilantes who would kill every vestige of genuine dissent."

Here’s one final long quote that I really like, sums up a lot of things. I’m especially thinking of the 5G/Bill Gates hornet’s nest of conspiracies I’m seeing all over social media:

"The distinguishing thing about the paranoid style is not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they regard a 'vast' or 'gigantic' conspiracy as the motive force in historical events. History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power... The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of this conspiracy in apocalyptic terms... He constantly lives at a turning point: it is now or never in organizing resistance to conspiracy. Time is forever just running out...
Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated - if not from the world, at least from the theater of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention...

This enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman: sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He is a free, active, demonic agent. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history himself, or deflects the normal course of history in an evil way... The paranoid's interpretation of history is in this sense distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as consequences of someone's will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional); he is gaining a stranglehold on the educational system.”

Recommended for anyone interested in US history and examination of US national identity and psyche. I’m consistently surprised at how well Hofstadter’s writing and analyses hold-up (also highly recommend his book Anti-Intellectualism In American Life).

[Hadrian · Rating 3 out of 5]

An older essay in the study of political science in the United States, but still a useful one. Hofstadter begins with brief descriptions of 'the paranoid style' before moving to specific movements: anti-Masonry, anti-Catholicism, and finally the kind of John Bircher thinking that claimed President Eisenhower was part of a Soviet plot.

On the one hand, Hofstadter's description of the paranoid style is intriguing - the constant projection, the assumption that the enemies of the conspiracy are all-powerful and completely evil (and those who believe in the conspiracy completely good), the drawing up of elaborate theories with the basis of some real facts.

On the other hand, his description on the origins of the "paranoid style" is lacking. It is one thing to draw a line from the millennarian groups that Norman Cohn describes and tie them to anti-Masonic conspiracy theories to anti-Catholicism and then bimetallism and anti-Communism. The previous explanation of "economic anxiety" is lacking, given the comparative wealth and security of the people who befouled the capital on January 6th. Call it 'status' anxiety? Fear of losing privileges that had been exclusively theirs?

Still worth thinking about.

[Bryan--The Bee’s Knees · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before I get into any minor critiques, first let me say that I thoroughly enjoyed the first half of this book. Hofstadter put his finger on a trend in politics that has only gotten worse over time, and one that's difficult to see reversing. In fact, even though Hofstadter admits the 'paranoid' style infects both parties (but concentrates on the right-wing), it seems to me that in contemporary times, both sides have let paranoid politics consume them.

The Paranoid Style: That the world is sharply divided between good and evil, and that there is a dark conspiracy (almost satanic) that is steadily eroding the good things that we have been able to achieve in this country. That conspiracy is represented by the other party, but not only is the good man or woman being attacked by them, but many members of their own party have essentially betrayed the good cause by either being hoodwinked or bribed by the evil forces, thus adding to the number of enemies to be fought.

Hofstadter traces this trend from its early beginnings, through panics over Illuminati or Masonic conspiracies up to his contemporary time--the Barry Goldwater campaign. Then, as now, the present gives the best examples of paranoid behavior, though Hofstadter makes clear that he is not using the word in a clinical way:

...there is a vital difference between the paranoid spokesman in politics and the clinical paranoiac: although they both tend to be overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic in expression, the clinical paranoid sees the hostile and conspiratorial world in which feels himself to be living as directed specifically against him; whereas the spokesman of the paranoid style finds it directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate affects not himself alone but millions of others. Insofar as he does not usually see himself singled out as the individual victim of a personal conspiracy, he is somewhat more rational and much more disinterested. His sense that his political passions are unselfish and patriotic, in fact goes far to intensify his feeling of righteousness and his moral indignation.

Who does that remind you of!

The first half of the book contains three essays--the aforementioned Paranoid Style, and two other essays that deal with the Pseudo-Conservative Revolt; one in 1954, and one in 1965. Both of these I thought were extremely interesting from not only an analytical view but from the historical as well. Your mileage may vary, but no matter if you are left or right or middle, Hofstadter's points are worth reading, though if you are or were an ardent supporter of Barry Goldwater, you may not care for the author's portrayal of the Arizonan.

The second half of the book is a different kettle of fish entirely--titled Some Problems of the Modern Era, Hofstadter looks at the political battle over the annexation of the Philippines in the 1890s, the progression of the Antitrust movement, and the battle over free silver, also in the late 1800s. I believe that these essays are going to appeal to those who already have an interest in their subjects, but are not likely to draw converts: My own interest started high and ended low, which reflects my own partiality to the subjects. The last one especially, was difficult for me, as a layman and not an economist, to truly get the specifics down, and I'm not confident that I ever did. Economic history can be dull, even though it plays as big a part in any analysis of historical events as other, more exciting happenings. A hundred years later, it's difficult to understand the passion engendered by the idea of 'free silver', but I wonder if, a hundred years from now, people will even be capable of understanding the incredible amount of argument over the Affordable Care Act.

So; highly recommended to political junkies and history buffs. I think almost anyone with any concern over political ideas at all will find the first essay eye-opening, and I'd recommend the entire book for just that piece alone. Hofstadter does, unfortunately (to this reader at least) have a mannerism about his writing that subtly shores up his position as a rational observer while picking apart the fringe elements of American politics, and which highlights their irrationality by comparison. Once I noticed it, it was hard to unsee it. It indicates a partiality in his position that takes something away from his cogent arguments. Still, his basic outline seems to hold true to me today, except that his description of fringe elements are no longer contained at the fringes.

[Alexander Peterhans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Frightening in how relevant this essay still is to modern politics.

[sologdin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty slick, even 50 years down the road. Various essays on various topics, all insightful. The eponymous essay is a true classic, detailing the variants of political paranoia, with attention to historical detail and to subgenres, such as the apocalyptic, the conspiratorial, and so on. The best bit is that the author smuggles in some Frankfurt Marxism in the footnotes, which makes it fairly amazing that it was published during the Cold War in the US. E.g., one great little essay on 'pseudo-conservativism' adopts Adorno's work in The Authoritarian Personality, and we see Franz Neumann and others showing up also.

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everybody else has noted the prescience and relevance of Hofstadter's title essay (a study of the psychology underlying the extremist rhetoric of the John Birch Society and related libertarian ideologues in the 50s and 60s). I agree there. What is seldom pointed out is where Hofstadter went wrong.

First, Hofstadter is unfair to some of the historical movements he cites as presaging the "Paranoid Style". The preachers who fanned the Illuminati scare in 1790s New England were wrong, it's true, but they were responding to a very real revolution in public mores and religious views. Their interpretation was reasonable given the poor information available to them. The anti-Masonic party may have overestimated Masons' evil influence, but they were responding to a system of governance that served the elite, at a time when democratic institutions and the need of working people to be represented were coming into conflict with this system. It was, again, wrong, but not unreasonable. In the case of the Populists, Hofstadter is completely wrong. Their demands for a more elastic currency to erode their debts, and their identification of eastern bankers as their enemy, were sound and astute (indeed, I've always wondered where the Grange organizations that fed this movement got their analysis). Their movement stands as one of the few instances when rural whites tried to ally with the sharecropper blacks in the south (prompting the Jim Crow system to reinforce race divisions over class divisions). Their vaguely left-wing program for monetary reform received the posthumous blessing of Milton Friedman, the conservative economist. Hofstadter is grasping at straws by painting them as villains.

Why is he grasping at straws? Because he has to harmonize his analysis of the Paranoid Style with his Consensus View of American history. The Consensus View is wrong. It is an overgeneralization from the situation that prevailed in post-war America, when Hofstadter happened to form his opinions -- this was a period when the party in power represented northern liberals, big-city machines, organized labor, the mafia, and the white supremacists in the south, and the other party broadly agreed with its program but promised to administer it better. That was never going to hold for very long. It was an aberration. American history, like history everywhere, has been characterized by conflict over who gets the surplus society produces above its need to reproduce itself. This will always be so, there is no end to history. However, once you acknowledge this, it becomes more difficult to argue (as Hofstadter wanted to) that movements like the Birchers are really beyond the pale. No group can really be branded "un-American", because what "American" means is contested, and will change with each new generation. Any group that seems out of step today might just be ahead of their time.

What is distinctive about the Paranoid Style, then? That it focuses on fictitious problems, rather than real ones, and thus introduces a lot of worthless nonsense into the national dialog. "Eisenhower's a Communist selling us out!" "Kennedy is trying to deliver us to control by the UN!" "Obama's a Muslim atheist Marxist Kenyan terrorist who hates white people and loves Lenin and Stalin!" &c. No dialog is possible with people making such accusations. First, they're unmoored from any commitment to the epistemology most of us have committed to (the scientific method). Second, they're not worthy even of recognition.

Sadly, the lack of engagement makes these people even worse, since they're in an echo chamber. But what can you do?

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

The titular essay feels so contemporary that I had to recheck its date of original publication. It was written almost fifty years ago, but if you replaced 'Goldwater Republicans' with 'Tea Party', it could easily have been written anytime in the last year or two. The main difference is a sad one, that in the 1960s the U.S. and world economies were still growing, whereas now it looks as if we're headed into permanent decline driven mainly by fossil fuel depletion.
The focus of the book, as the title indicates, is on the Manichean mindset that tends to see issues in stark terms of good vs. evil and problems as the result of sinister plots rather than bad luck or honest mistakes. It addresses the symbiosis among this conspiracy-theorist worldview, religious fundamentalism, and bigotry, and the way it makes its adherents vulnerable to cynical exploitation by politicians and other power-seekers pushing their buttons.
I felt the last essay was unnecessary and seemed added as padding of a sort; while it did tangentially relate to the book's theme, it spent more time on a scenic tour of now-obscure 19th- and early-20th-century fiscal policy than on the paranoia that sometimes entered arguments on that subject, and when it did address the paranoia it didn't add anything to the examination in the earlier parts of the book.
Still, all in all it's a worthwhile read.

[Czarny Pies · Rating 2 out of 5]

Having recently noticed a review of this nasty little book posted by a GR friend, I remembered having read it in the previous century and am now adding it to my GR database.
It is with some embarrassment that I confess to agreeing with Hofstadter on his main thesis: i.e. that there is a paranoid style that frequently re-appears in American politics. Published in 1963, Hofstadter offers a compelling explanation for the American Red Scare that had produced the McCarthy witch hunt of communists and America's disastrous intervention in Viet Nam.
I was particularly struck by this thesis that the paranoid style was the result of the fact that America had been settled by members of paranoid religions (Congregationalists, Quakers, Puritans, Baptists, etc.) who had made themselves unwelcome in England. These religions are all opposed to established churches and many of their members are distrustful of authority. Hofstadter may have a point but I find his tone unpleasant.
I am however very uneasy with those who would accept Hofstadter's thesis as an explanation for the success of Donald Trump and the alt-right. In my view, Trump's supporters were not simply paranoid. There are legitimate reasons to challenge the status quo in American politics which I believe that the left could accommodate without abandoning its progressive agenda.

[Mehrsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

The earlier essays are still hugely relevant for our time. We are still a people who love to stir up conspiracy theories and blame the illuminati for stuff we can't understand. Reading this book is like watching the take off of the train knowing it ends in a big wreck. I guess it's also comforting to note that none of this is new and this sort of fantastic thinking and paranoia has been a solid thread running through America's past.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Richard Hofstadter è stato uno dei più grandi storici americani del Novecento, vincitore per ben due volte del premio Pulitzer, ed è desolante il fatto che le sue opere siano praticamente irreperibili in Italia, come anche che questo autore sia per molti (me compreso) un perfetto sconosciuto. Incuriosito dalla recente pubblicazione di questo saggio breve, ho rimediato, almeno in parte, a tale ignoranza: “Lo stile paranoide nella politica americana” ha l'efficacia del rigoroso studio accademico, essendo illuminante anche per gli esperti del settore, ma possiede al contempo la chiarezza e la comprensibilità di un'opera divulgativa, adatta al grande pubblico dei non addetti ai lavori. Una caratteristica simile rende ancora più assurdo il fatto che l'editoria, anche quella di nicchia, abbia finora snobbato tale autore.

In questo breve trattatello, Hofstadter esamina rapidamente le origini, gli sviluppi e le caratteristiche salienti di quello che egli stesso definisce stile paranoide nella politica americana, un modo di fare politica che ha radici profonde e che viene ampiamente utilizzato ancora oggi, non solo in America, sia dagli schieramenti di destra che da quelli di sinistra. Tale approccio politico è definito da Hofstadter paranoide non tanto per l'accezione clinica, quanto perché questo termine evoca adeguatamente le qualità di estrema esagerazione, sospettosità e fantasia cospiratoria che lo caratterizza. Scrive Hofstadter: “Il dizionario Webster definisce la paranoia, in termini clinici, come un disordine mentale cronico caratterizzato da sistematiche manie di persecuzione e di grandezza. Nello stile paranoide, il sentimento di persecuzione è centrale, ed è strutturato in elaborate teorie della cospirazione. Ma esiste una differenza fondamentale tra il rappresentante dello stile paranoide in politica e il paranoico clinico: sebbene tendano entrambi a essere estremamente sovreccitati, sospettosi, aggressivi, megalomani e apocalittici nelle loro espressioni, il paranoico clinico vede il mondo ostile e cospiratore in cui sente di vivere come diretto specificamente contro di lui; laddove invece il rappresentante dello stile paranoide trova che sia diretto contro una nazione, una cultura, uno stile di vita il cui destino non tocca solo lui ma milioni di persone” (pagine 12-13).

Concentrandosi sulla storia americana, Hofstadter presenta una breve carrellata dei protagonisti dello stile paranoide a stelle e strisce, presente sin dalla nascita della nazione: col passare dei periodi storici e con l'evolversi dei movimenti paranoidi, ciò che è cambiato è stato il bersaglio contro cui dirigere odio e paura, ma non la modalità con cui questi sentimenti del tutto irrazionali sono stati coltivati: dall'odio per i massoni di fine Settecento e inizio Ottocento, a quello per i cattolici tra fine Ottocento e inizio Novecento, per arrivare a quello per i comunisti nella seconda metà del Novecento. Tipico esempio di politico paranoide citato da Hofstadter è il senatore McCarthy, uno dei principali artefici di quel clima di caccia alle streghe creatosi durante il periodo della Guerra Fredda: convinto difensore del capitalismo e dell'american way of life, nemico del comunismo sovietico e della collaborazione internazionale, egli considerava la politica di Marshall e il suo piano di aiuti all'Europa le principali cause che avrebbero portato alla rovina gli Stati Uniti, con la conseguente sconfitta nella Guerra Fredda che avrebbe garantito all'Unione Sovietica il dominio mondiale.

Nello stile paranoide la fantasia cospiratrice è, dunque, centrale: l'idea che dietro lo svolgersi della storia ci sia una macchinazione perpetrata da un nemico potente e malvagio è fondante del paranoide. Continua Hofstadter: “A distinguere lo stile paranoide non è il fatto che i suoi esponenti vedano cospirazioni o complotti qua e là nel corso della storia, ma che ritengano che una vasta e gigantesca cospirazione sia la forza motrice degli eventi storici. La storia è una cospirazione, messa in moto da forze demoniache dal potere quasi trascendente, e si sente che per batterla c'è bisogno non dei soliti metodi dei botta e risposta politico, ma di una crociata senza quartiere. Il rappresentante dello stile paranoide vede il destino di questa cospirazione in termini apocalittici: traffica con la nascita e la morte di interi mondi, di interi ordini politici, di interi sistemi di valori. In ogni istante presidia le barricate della civiltà. Vive costantemente a un punto di svolta: il momento per organizzare la resistenza alla cospirazione è ora o mai più” (pagina 56).

Risulta lampante, pertanto, come lo stile paranoide veda il conflitto politico come una lotta manichea tra bene e male assoluti, con il nemico che assume il ruolo di incarnazione del male e il proprio movimento quello del bene, unica alternativa alla catastrofe, unica speranza per l'umanità di salvarsi dai piani diabolici: “L'approccio apocalittico dello stile paranoide arriva pericolosamente vicino al pessimismo più disperato, ma di solito si ferma un attimo prima di finirci dentro. Gli avvertimenti apocalittici scatenano passione e militanza, ed eccitano gli animi suscettibili in modo non dissimile da alcuni temi tipici del cristianesimo. Se espressi adeguatamente, questi avvertimenti assolvono alla stessa funzione della descrizione delle orribili conseguenze del peccato nella predica di un pastore revivalista: descrivono ciò che incombe ma può ancora essere evitato. È una versione secolare e diabolica dell'approccio degli avventisti” (pagina 57).

Quella del paranoico politico, quindi, non è soltanto una professione, ma una missione salvifica, una lotta coraggiosa intrapresa da pochi eletti votati al bene che può portare soltanto alla vittoria schiacciante sul nemico, sulle forze del male: “Il paranoico è un leader militante. Non vede il conflitto sociale come una cosa che richiede mediazione e compromesso, come fa invece il politico di professione. Dal momento che la posta in gioco è sempre un conflitto tra un bene e un male assoluti, la qualità richiesta non è una disponibilità al compromesso, ma la volontà di combattere fino in fondo. Non ci si accontenterà di altro che di una vittoria assoluta. Siccome il nemico è considerato totalmente malvagio e implacabile, va eliminato del tutto” (pagina 58).

Ovviamente, come ampiamente utilizzato anche dai totalitarismi del Novecento, nello stile paranoide l'odio per il nemico è il sentimento trainante delle masse, l'unico collante, l'unico motivo unificatore. Il nemico assume una precisa definizione, identificandosi in un gruppo facilmente riconoscibile e dotato di caratteristiche aberranti: “Questo nemico è delineato con nettezza: è un perfetto modello di cattiveria, una sorta di superuomo amorale, sinistro, ubiquo, potente, crudele, sensuale, amante del lusso [...]. È un attore libero, intraprendente, demoniaco. Pone in essere da sé, anzi addirittura costruisce, il meccanismo della storia, oppure devia in maniera malvagia il normale corso della storia. Provoca le crisi, dà l'assalto alle banche, causa le depressioni, orchestra disastri e infine si gode i profitti della miseria che ha prodotto [...]. Molto spesso si ritiene che il nemico possegga qualche fonte di potere particolarmente efficace: controlla la stampa; dirige l'opinione pubblica attraverso la manipolazione delle notizie; dispone di fondi illimitati; ha trovato un nuovo segreto per influenzare la mente; ha una tecnica speciale di seduzione; tiene quasi per il collo l'intero sistema dell'istruzione” (pagine 59-60). Tutti mezzi, quelli con cui agisce questo fantomatico nemico, assolutamente deprecabili, ma che guarda caso sono proprio gli stessi di cui lo stile paranoide si serve per diffondersi tra le masse ed aumentare il proprio consenso politico.

Ricapitolando, Hofstadter traccia le caratteristiche comuni ai diversi movimenti politici che nelle diverse epoche hanno adottato uno stile paranoide: la costruzione, lo svelamento e lo screditamento di un definito nemico; le fantasie di piani segreti, di macchinazioni diaboliche, di complotti e di cospirazioni globali che dirigono il corso della storia e hanno l'obiettivo di conquistare il mondo; la visione manichea di lotta tra bene e male assoluti; la missione salvifica posta a fondamento del programma politico e la presenza di molti altri elementi religiosi nel linguaggio politico, come la visione escatologica e apocalittica che accomuna i paranoidi moderni ai movimenti avventisti e millenaristi già presenti nel Medioevo; le manifestazioni di follia anche violenta. Conclude Hofstadter: “Tutti soffriamo la storia, ma il paranoico la soffre doppiamente, perché è afflitto non solo dal mondo reale, come tutti noi, ma anche dalle sue fantasie” (pagina 74).

Questo saggio è apparso per la prima volta nel 1964, in un'America pervasa da un clima politico, quello della Guerra Fredda, dominato da segreti spionistici e minacce di apocalissi, e fortemente improntato al sospetto e alla paranoia: l'omicidio del presidente Kennedy era stato appena commesso, e le fantasie di complotto erano già ampiamente affiorate nell'immaginario collettivo. Dunque, pur essendo ancora immerso in quell'epoca, Hofstadter ha saputo analizzare con una incredibile lucidità il proprio presente, scrivendo un'opera fondamentale, seppur breve, che affronta temi ancora attualissimi, ancora imprescindibili per capire la contemporaneità. L'unica pecca è forse data dall'eccessiva brevità, dall'impossibilità di poter approfondire adeguatamente temi così interessanti e cruciali per comprendere le estreme derive della politica che sono giunte fino ai nostri giorni, in America come in Europa, dai suprematisti ai sovranisti, dai nativisti ai nuovi teorici del complotto (come i sostenitori di QAnon).

[Peter Jana · Rating 5 out of 5]

The more things change, the more they stay the same ... This collection of essays is especially insightful in today's political environment where the Tea Baggers' boiling kettle is making such a ruckus.

The parallels between what Hofstadter called "pseudo-conservatism" in 1954 and today are amply discerned when he claims, "It is at least conceivable that a highly organized and effective minority [has developed:] whose main threat is its power to create a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well being and safety would become impossible." Glenn Beck anyone?

Hofstadtler uses the term "paranoid style" in referring to the "heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy" characteristic of certain minority political movements since the 18th century. While it has characterized the political left at times, Hofstadler, writing in the 50s and Goldwater 60s, is most concerned with it's modern "pseudo-conservative" bent.

Hofstadter borrows from Theodore Adorno in claiming that pseudo-conservatives are "pseudo" because they overturn traditional values instead of preserving them. Instead of being temperate and compromising they are prone to frenzy and ideological incoherence, such as accusing Eisenhower of being a socialist (43-44). Traditional conservatives embrace the past, pseudo conservatives repudiate it (48).

To my mind this seems to demonstrate that the meaning of "conservative" changes with the election cycle. When conservatives are "in" they want to "conserve" when they are out they want to "over turn." Do conservatives exist anymore, or are they all hard boiled reactionaries?

The Tea Baggers claim that the Bush II regime exemplified a false conservativism, because of its big government, big spending, centralized ways. They are right in this assessment, but I see them as reactionary in thinking that we can go back to a type of decentralized political structure. It seems they want more to do with the Articles of Confederation than with the Constitution.

Why doesn't Hofstadter use the word reactionary instead of psedudo-conservative? Wasn't Goldwater, the focus of the last essay, a reactionary?

According to Hofstadter, "Status Politics," not rational economic interest, is the motivating factor for pseudo-conservativism. Compare with "What's the Matter with Kansas."

Americans are more prone to status anxiety because of their geographic mobility and relatively democratic, multi-cultural, and egalitarian social structure. "We boast of a melting pot, but we are not quite sure what it is that will remain when we have been melted down (51)."

American egalitarianism promises high social status, or at least an upwardly mobile status. When that mobility is blocked it becomes refracted in politics. In this way, politics is more a matter of social psychology than of economics.

This is especially due to the relative prosperity of the times (1950s). Times of economic prosperity are more prone to status politics than times of economic downturn people when people are more concerned with money than status.

What does this mean in today's climate? This last framework does not seem to fit in today's deep recession.

Since Americans have an anomic rootlessness in terms of status they are more prone to the paranoid style in politics. For Hofstadler, this is exemplified with the reaction of old-family WASPs concerned, at various points in American history, that their status is threatened by immigration. Conversely, immigrants, such as Irish and Italian Catholics, have an unstable national identity that needs to be created - it's not "given" - thus making them prone to a hyper-conformism that expresses itself in jingoism and nationalism. Both the old WASPs and the new Catholics, for different reasons, are more likely to fall for the paranoid style.

[Anthony Buckley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eric kindly sent me a copy of the title essay, but I must certainly have a look at the entire book.

The phrase “paranoid style” has been bandied about in discussions of American politics ever since Hofstadter wrote his article, back in the 1960s. It points to an irrational fearfulness directed by the American right towards such people as communists, socialists, liberals and ethnic minorities. The article specifically pinpoints hostility to Catholics and Freemasons, which I never really thought to be particularly prevalent in the USA. If it had been written today, he would have written about Muslims who conveniently stepped into a disagreeably empty communist-shaped hole.

I quite like his notion of a paranoid “style”, for it helps delineate an important distinction between the sensible and the daft. The fact is we are all sensibly scared of criminals, terrorists, aggressive nations, and those people generally who would do us harm. We all feel at least some minor apprehension when we come across those who are radically different from us. It's why we lock our back doors and put our money in banks. The paranoia comes in when we have elaborate and loopy fantasies about people and when our fears are disproportionate and extreme.

Hofstadter wisely says that paranoia is not confined to America. He's right. Where I live is a positive paranoiac’s paradise. Members of my government think the Pope is an Antichrist, and that Rome is “Mystery, Babylon the Great”. And there are many who share the kind of views about Masonry described in Hofstadter’s piece.

So one should never forget that nice biblical quote about “motes” and “beams” (or is it “splinters” and “planks”?) There is always a risk that, in getting paranoid about paranoiacs, one may just be getting paranoid oneself.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're scratching your head about Glenn Beck or Lou Dobbs or Sarah Palin or any of our current crop of defenders of the American way, spend a few hours with Hofstadter, a legendary twentieth century political historian, cut off in his prime but not before he got a real bead on the phenomenon of right wing radicalism. Its a pretty honest attempt to rake through McCarthyism and Goldwater's rise to discern the common themes, the rhetoric and perhaps the underlying emotional, psychological and social phenomena that keep this unique American brand of anti-intellectual aggression disguised as the defense of liberty a vital force, a bad dream we can't wake up from. He connects it but contrasts it with earlier versions of conspiracy mongering and nativism which have periodically swept through the country - populism, antiCatholicism, anti-Masonic, KuKluxKlan. I won't try to summarize, his ideas are already fairly densely packed in a series of long essays that trace the evolution of his views on the topic. Definitely helps a person get a perspective on the crazy things they say on cable news, and why it keeps working, at least for a slice of us.

[Vagabond of Letters, DLitt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Part 1: 4 stars, incisive and thought-provoking. Related to the title of the book.

Part 2: 2 stars. The essays of part 2 might be good (so I'm not marking a 1), but they're unrelated to the description or purpose of the book, including such things as a biographical sketch of 'Coin' Harvey and the free silver movement, a strictly historical precis of the political environment leading to the American occupation of the Philippines, and an article on the Sherman Act. With zero connection to the first part or the title and description of the book, these 150pp of unrelated essays were added just because they were written by Hofstadter and because the publisher didn't want to send a 144pp volume to press.

[Carol · Rating 3 out of 5]

A disjointed set of essays - so only the first half of the book has anything to do with the title. The first half to had some interesting history on politics and fear. But, overall, I had trouble sticking with his writing style in these essays - especially the last one. His writings ramble and are overly wordy.

[Marco Innamorati · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un libro sul complottismo scritto nel 1952 mostra come la tendenza a individuare piani di nemici occulti non è una tendenza recente. È invece un fenomeno che si ripresenta a ondate da tempo probabilmente immemorabile, seguendo schemi simili.

[Bhaskar Sunkara · Rating 2 out of 5]

Overrated, filled with psychological bullshit.

[David Monroe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I re-read it last year. It could have been written today.

[alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hofstadter in these essays takes the themes from his excellent “Age of Reform” and expands them nearly to their breaking point. From the Goldwater campaign to the imperial conquest of the Philippines, to an affecting portrait of bilmetalist William “Coin” Harvey, we get a panoramic view of the American crank. In only 300 pages, this book has a sweeping sense of history that focuses on a misunderstood and underestimated force in American political life.

The pure acid of his contempt for Goldwater is a glory to read. Especially considering the recent attempts to laud Goldwater as a "principled conservative". If Hofstadter were still around today he would correctly say it is the principals that are the problem.

When it comes to dismantling Goldwater, Hofstadter never settles into Manichean dualism or moral simplicity but leaves nothing left of Goldwater or his intellect. He doesn’t see the conservative movement as an aberration but as the newest emanation of a parallel track in American life that goes back to the founding. Instead of of cheering along with everyone else in LBJ’s crushing 1964 victory, and the “death of the Republican Party” Hofstadter sees a death, but of a party that has been decapitated by the paranoiac conservative movement

“But, above all, the far right has become a permanent force in the political order because the things upon which it feeds are also permanent: the chronic and ineluctable frustrations of our foreign policy, the opposition to the movement for racial equality, the discontents that come with affluence, the fevers of the culturally alienated who practice what Fritz Stern has called in another connection “the politics of cultural despair.”

The incredible foresight in which he was able to call the right-wing trajectory is astounding. As he says 70 years ago:

Writing in 1954, at the peak of the McCarthyist period, I suggested that the American right-wing could best be understood not as a neo-fascist movement girding itself for the conquest of power but as a persistent and effective minority whose main threat was in its power to create “a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our wellbeing and safety would become impossible.”

The final essay, on the otherwise unknown bimetallist William “Coin” Harvey, is fascinating. a Man who knew almost nothing about Silver was able to write a tract that was a massive bestseller that had admirers as high up as William Jennings Bryant. The essay swerves between correction, doing a commentary on Coin's tract, to outright condemnation as Coin fantasizes about total war with England, and ends on a sense of tepid respect. The life of Coin is met with one defeat after another. He watched as his ideas captured the minds of America to becoming a joke, and then completely forgotten. It ends with an image of an unfinished pyramid Coin built in the Ozarks meant for future generations to dig up after the American society collapses so they too can learn the necessity of Bimetallism and avoid our fate.

Perhaps the point of this series of essays is to show that the Paranoid Style is something America will always have in spades. This style creates villains but also a sort of Quixotic hero that isn’t exactly worth lauding, but as long as they'll always be there, it's at the very least stirring to see that kind of devotion to a single idea.

[Brett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hofstadter's "Paranoid Style" essay is his best known work and often quoted to this day. His quotability is in fact his best attribute. He is a commanding writer, sweeping the reader along with generalizations go down very easily and pithily.

Paranoid style feels like a prophecy. At the time of its writing, Hofstadter was making a distinction between a fringe phenomenon personified by the John Birch Society, Joseph McCarthy, and the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater. He characterized these types of 'paranoid' political actors as outside the mainstream, an arguable proposition even when the essay was newly published. Today the paranoid style seems to permeate every aspect of political life.

Hofstadter differentiates between the personal paranoid conspiracy theorist, someone seeing conspiracy behind all the significant happenings in their own life, and the political paranoid who sees the conspiracy as driving the fates of the nation or culture. The paranoid style is self-aggrandizing and often marshals mountains of supporting documentation that has no bearing on the actual issue; it sees the world as on the brink of apocalypse with Manichean good and evil forces in a state of constant struggle. Hofstadter writes about the targets of this conspiracism as Catholics, the Illuminati, and the supposed army of communist sympathizers in the government. The targets of this kind of thinking have changed today but are easy enough to pick out.

One frequent criticism of Hofstadter is that his ideas are essentially psychological and divorced from the material basis of politics. This is a critique that I at one time would have been inclined to agree with, but over the years I have become more convinced that our politics is no longer much aligned with any distribution of benefits and that in fact psychological needs are playing a great role in voter behavior. Almost the entirety of the republican party is engaged in a fever dream psychodrama, except perhaps for tax policy on the wealthiest individuals, the one area where policy outcomes are still important for this group of voters (or more accurately, donors).

To my mind, Hofstadter's books remain profitable reads even many decades later. I must hasten to add in the case of this book that the second half is a much different animal, as Hofstadter writes about some specific historical political events that are less for the general public, namely the antitrust movement and the free silver movement. These essays are not exactly uninteresting but they do not share the same broad appeal that his more general political essays do. I wouldn't blame you for skipping them.

[Lucas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eu descobri o ensaio que da título a esse livro lendo How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future do Levitsky. A breve descrição que Levitsky faz da caracterização de uma parcela da direita americana feita por Hofstadter em "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" me lembrou muito a direita brasileira o que me animou a ler o ensaio na íntegra.
Acabei lendo toda a primeira parte do livro que é constituída por ensaios sobre a direita americana. É realmente impressionante como o que parece ser uma degeneração da direita democrática americana no pós-guerra guarda enorme similaridade com parte da direita brasileira atual. Chamou-me atenção em particular nos ensaios de Hofstadter a caracterização do estilo dessa nova direita, de seu recorte ideológico e de sua base social. Vou usar alguns excertos para ilustrar cada uma dessas dimensões. Sobre o estilo paranoico:

"As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, the quality needed is not a willingness to compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Nothing but complete victory will do. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated-if not from the world, at least from the theater of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for unqualified victories leads to the fonnulation of hopelessly demanding and unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid's frustration.."

Um grande insight para mim foi entender que esse movimento não é conservador. Acho isso importante porque sempre achei parte da direita brasileira não conservadora (pelo menos não tem nada a ver com que aprendi sobre conservadorismo nos livro de Roger Scruton e Jerry Z. Muller). Mas Hofstadter mata a charada:

"It can most accurately be called pseudo-conservative-I borrow the term from The
Authoritarian personality, published in 1950 by Theodore w. Adorno and his associates-because its exponents, although they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of
conservatism, show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions, and institutions. They have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true
conservatism in the classical sense of the word, and they are far from pleased with the dominant
practical conservatism of the moment as it is represented by the Eisenhower administration. Their political reactions express rather a profound if largely unconscious haued of our society and its ways-a hatred which one would hesitate to impute to them if one did not have suggestive evidence both from clinical techniques and from their own modes of expression."

Por fim, Hofstadter acaba dando razão ao velho e ainda pouco elaborado argumento petista que a reação raivosa de parte da classe média contra os governos de centro-esquerda (PSDB aí incluído?) e o establishment de modo geral se deve a uma ansiedade relacionada à perda de status. Nessa discussão ele faz uma distinção interessante entre política de interesses (que seria uma política normal) e uma política de status (uma degeneração da política tradicional).

Realmente muito interessante os ensaios. Vale a leitura!

[Diocletian · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a collection of essays examining radical political groups that influence American politics. The essays were well written and comprehensible, particularly in the first half of the book; the second half still is too, but they do get more scholarly and are meant for a more specific audience.

Although these essays explore multiple different aspects of fringe politics, it has a specific focus on the politics of the extreme right- a group that claims to be conservative, but is more willing to destroy political and social institutions rather than protect them like traditional conservatives do. Although these are focused on the extreme right movements of the day, much of what it explores can also be applied to the modern neoconservative movement and its hijacking of the moderate Republican party, with its increasing militarism, extreme dislike of social welfare efforts, and its rise in paranoia and embrace of conspiracy theories. Overall, a very good and still important read. If Hofstadter were alive nowadays, he would probably be shocked at the way this "paranoid style" of thought has progressed- and he would probably would also have written some more excellent essays exploring the the subject, which is something we could use right about now.

[Lee Candilin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A timely reminder that history always repeat itself, no matter how much the human race has evolved, or perhaps in spite of it. The writer explained about the mechanics and the mentality behind the lure of the paranoid style, and why this paranoia recurred over a long span of time and in different places. A very insightful essay into why fundamental fears and hatreds, rather than negotiable interests, ruled the political arena both in the past and today. What is scary to me is the rampant spread of paranoia (exacerbated by our social medias and fake news) in these modern times. Where in the past, the paranoid's influence was limited by word-of-mouth contacts and newsprint circulations, today, the paranoid militant can easily move the world by a stroke of keys, working out from a secluded corner somewhere in the world, and we are all his comrades when we share and spread that piece of news which may arouse fear and hatred.
I quote the writer, "...the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician."

[Douglass Gaking · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hofstadter's characterizations of the radical right from more than 50 years ago are today more relevant than ever. The election of Donald Trump is probably the apex of the movement's accomplishments, and it bears stunning resemblance to the Goldwater campaign and other movements that Hofstadter writes about. My only frustration is that Hofstadter thinks almost exclusively in the right-left paradigm and fails to acknowledge the role of paranoia in the American left and elsewhere.

The essays in this book are not entirely focused on the topic of the paranoid style. I am really not sure what a history of the Spanish-American War and failed occupation of the Philippines is doing in this book. I feel like the first 3 essays are on point, while the 3 that follow were added as an afterthought for filler. The first half of this book is essential reading for anyone interested in American politics. The rest is okay if you want to brush up on your 19th century American history.