One of the most striking things about contemporary America is the popularity of conspiracy theories.
The list of absurd things that ¡°everybody knows¡± gets ever longer. If you¡¯re on the right, you ¡°know¡± that the Deep State is subverting the administration of President Donald Trump; that the global elite is set on undermining American sovereignty; and that lockdown during COVID-19 was a dry run for totalitarian rule. If you¡¯re on the left, you ¡°know¡± that Putin has ¡°kompromat¡± on Trump, probably involving urination; that the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt was a put-up job; and that the administration will find a way to cancel the midterm elections. I could go on ¡ª as America¡¯s distressingly articulate conspiracy theorists most certainly do.
These effusions are the latest examples of what the historian Richard Hofstadter dubbed ¡°the paranoid style of American politics.¡± Hofstadter¡¯s eponymous essay, which germinated in the Red Scare years of the 1950s before gaining public attention as a Harper¡¯s article in 1964, has just been republished by Penguin/Random House, along with other writings on the same theme. If anything, it seems even more relevant now than it did then. Indeed, anybody who wants to understand Trump¡¯s America could do no better than to read this book. ¡°American political life ... has served again and again as an arena for uncommonly angry minds,¡± Hofstadter wrote more than a half-century ago. Today, the angriest mind of them all sits in the Oval Office.
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