I just got the Hofstadter volume from the Library of America and I’ve been enjoying/suffering through a reread of “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”.
“Enjoying” because Hofstadter is a knowledgeable and deeply insightful writer with a dryly witty style; “suffering through” because the fringe movements he was writing about in the early 60s are the right-wing mainstream of today and it’s sickening to think how widely this dementia has spread through the body politic.
But it does help to explain why some people internalize any mental poison that someone like Trump or Margery Taylor Green pours in their ears. They have a place already prepared for it there, a long habit of paranoid thinking that takes on different details, depending on what is politically fashionable, but is always the same in form and effect: the nation/way of life/race is under attack by shadowy and nefarious forces, which justifies any action to defend it. The menace may change (Communists, black people, Jews, drag queens, immigrants, etc.), but there is always a menace and you are always being urged to war against it.
And you can’t make peace with Nefarious Forces Unnamed. You cannot compromise with Nefarious Forces Unnamed. Which means you can’t coexist with Nefarious Forces Unnamed, and the very existence of a pluralistic government becomes intolerable.
And so here we are. It would be nice to know where we can go from here, but Hofstadter doesn’t provide any clue for that (at least not in this essay).
