It alerted Hofstadter’s readers to the way in which the paranoid style, although subsisting mostly at the fringes of American politics, could at times come frighteningly close to its command posts. This reference to the presidential campaign fronted by the Republican senator from Arizona also served another purpose. He does this by pointing to the “Goldwater movement” and the attendant “animosities and passions” (3) that made this movement, the most striking, contemporary manifestation of the eccentricity he was striving to comprehend. In an introductory paragraph that uses broad brushstrokes to sketch the profile of a distinctive form of political irrationality, Hofstadter also reveals a willingness not only to get specific but to do so in ways that were highly topical. In fact, this unsettling situation mirrors the circumstances under which Hofstadter in 1964 originally presented his essay to the American reading public. After all, the United States is currently in the throes of an unusually consequential electoral campaign and, with the mantras of the “deep state” and “fake news” still ringing in voters’ ears, it is not a stretch to claim that, in some sense, the paranoid style is itself one of the issues on the ballot. An astute sense of timing has undoubtedly guided the Library of America (LOA) publishing house in recently deciding to reissue Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style of American Politics” as part of a volume that collects his mid-career writings and that has been edited by Princeton historian Sean Wilentz.

The paranoid style in american politics