Fear has, in this moment, a respectability I’ve never seen in my life.
It should be no surprise that the Richard J. Hofstadter article about US Right Wing Politics was called
The Paranoid Style in American Politics:
American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent
years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme
right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how
much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions
of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind
that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it
the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the
sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy
that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not
speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other
purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any
figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the
idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little
contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to
men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of
expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon
significant.
