Thread by @beyerstein

It's fashionable to say Hofstadter was wrong and the paranoid style has always been central to American politics. But you can't read this and deny that there has been a sea change. Trump is promising to lead the Battle of Armageddon.

When Hofstadter wrote the paranoid style, huge swathes of American public, including much of the GOP was scandalized and shaken when Goldwater said extremism in defense of liberty was no vice.

People incorrectly conflate the paranoid style with conspiracy theories. The paranoid style is often associated with conspiracy theories, but there's more to it than that. It's a behavior pattern marked by overheated suspicion and hostility.

Ronald Reagan often trafficked in conspiracy theories but he did not embody the paranoid style. He claimed Gerald Ford faked his own assassination attempt for sympathy but his political brand was sunny and optimistic.

Abraham Lincoln invoked what was arguably a conspiracy theory in his House Divided speech. And some authors cite it to prove the paranoid style is ubiquitous--but Lincoln's political brand was the opposite of the paranoid style.

Lincoln probably didn't say "I destroy my enemies by making them my friends" but it's a pervasive legend because it fits his brand. He certainly did say "with malice toward none, with charity for all."

Frankly, given how things turned out, Lincoln might have benefited from a little more suspicion and hostility.

You can point to episodes in American history where the paranoid style crept towards the mainstream, like the McCarthy Era. But the fact remains Joe McCarthy embodied the paranoid style and Harry Truman largely didn't. Though both worried about subversion.

McCarthy died in disgrace after he went after the US military. Right wing propagandists from William F. Buckley to Anne Coulter tried to rehabilitate his image and it never worked because the American public didn't like that sort of thing.

But now you've got Trump, the protege of Roy Cohn, who was the protegé of Joe McCarthy himself, screaming about Marxists on main and millions of Americans think it's normal and good.

You've got Trump swearing to use the Department of Justice to investigate "every Marxist prosecutor" and assailing General Milley as some kind of radical leftist and on and on and on. And it barely even makes the news.

Many of Hofstadter's academic critics incorrectly assail him for "psychologizing" his subjects based on little more than the use of the word "paranoid," and despite RH's explicit stipulation that he was talking about more or less normal people and not those w/mental illness.

Hofstadter was interested in the applications of psychology to history. But in the Paranoid Style he was on the cusp of a much larger linguistic trend in using the word "paranoid" to refer to excessive preoccupation outside the clinical context.

Today, it's typical to say things like "I'm paranoid about additives in sunscreen" with no implication mental illness.

The paranoid style, as defined by Hofstadter is an observable behavior pattern. You can ignore every psychological connotation and focus on the behavior.

One criticism of Hofstadter that I'm still trying to evaluate is whether he erred by contrasting the paranoid style to the pragmatic center.

Many thinkers I admire, notably Chip Berlet and Kathy Olmsted, insist that Hofstadter was wrong to contrast the paranoid style and the pragmatic center.

But if, like Hofstadter, you define the paranoid style as an absolutist way of thinking that shuns political compromise, I don't know how you can help but contrast it to a more pragmatic approach to political dealmaking.

It's clearly a fallacy to valorize the center of every spectrum of opinion just because it's the center. But I don't think Hofstadter ever makes that mistake. He said there was a consensus, not that everything about the consensus was good. He thought a lot was wrong with it.

You can have radical political beliefs and still be willing to the hard work of political dealmaking. But if you endorse the paranoid style, where you assume that everything's a battle between Good and Evil, you won't be effective.

Some authors point to popular conspiracy theories in American history and assert that we've always had this problem and we're just being ahistorical to think there's a unique problem today.

But the recurrent popularity of various event conspiracy theories is not the same thing as the triumph of the paranoid style. In Trump and the MAGA movement we've got an unprecedented embrace of the hostile overheated mode RH called the paranoid style.