Not just national or international history. Even my own history. As a twenty-year old rumors of conspiracy terrified me. No longer. History provides me with a healthy antidote: Richard Hofstadter.
I graduated from college in 1959, a few years before Richard Hofstadter's essay on The Paranoid Style in American Politics came out in Harper's. As an associate in a Pasadena (California) church, the conspiracy theories of the John Birch Society were driving me nuts. One of the promulgators of conspiracy, a retired naval officer and member of the "society" was teaching in adult classes. The senior minister, a swell guy, but utterly gutless, let it go on and on. I was a history major, so I was familiar with American conspiracy theories. I was amazed how many in that well-educated, upper-middle-class church were believers in the process. . .
Shortly after I left that position, Hofstadter's essay on the paranoid style came out in Harper's magazine. I’ve updated the first paragraph of the article: American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work (among extremists of the left and right). . . who have now demonstrated . . . 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 (or left-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.
I have viewed it as a touchstone ever since. Still I never thought the essay would be as valuable today as it was then. Yet here's the conservative writer, Bret Stephens, a "never Trump Republican" using the valued essay again. What's especially helpful is his reinterpretation of Hofstadter and the insight that Hofstadter might have been surprised to find out that the "party of conspiracy is also the party of government."
Stephen's application of Hofstadter is especially insightful.
The principal lesson of paranoia is the ease with which politically aroused people can mistake errors for deceptions, coincidences for patterns, bumbling for dereliction and secrecy for treachery. True conspiracies are rare but stupidity is nearly universal. The failure to know the difference, combined with the desire for a particular result, is what accounts for the paranoid style.
America already has one party that's lost its mind. We don't need another.
**Bret Stephens: The GOP's Bonfire of the Sanities, NYT Opinion, “The G.O.P.'s Bonfire of the Sanities.” Jan. 26, 2018..
**Richard Hofstadter: “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Harper’s Magazine, November 1964.