The paranoid mind, wrote Richard Hofstadter — one of America’s great 20th-century thinkers — sees the world as a battle between good and evil. Anything less than total victory will only deepen the paranoia. “Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began,” Hofstadter wrote. “This is in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.”
In today’s US case, the enemy is the deep state allied with globalist forces, whom conspiracy theorists believe (without evidence) rigged the presidential election for Joe Biden. The question is whether that kind of paranoiac, which, polls suggest, describes the overwhelming majority of Republican voters, will drift into atomised resentment or be a political wrecking force.
The answer will shape the direction of American politics in the years ahead. Hofstadter’s observations point us in both reassuring and worrying directions. He developed his theory of “the paranoid style in American politics” having watched Joe McCarthy’s red scare, which convulsed US politics, media, academia and the entertainment industry for several years in the 1950s.