Greg Bales

The paranoid style in american politics

The paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content.

This is the essay in which Hofstadter sketched the rhetorical stance—what he called the “paranoid style”—of American political groups. Hofstadter was primarily describing McCarthyism and arguments emanating from the John Birch Society, but he builds his argument by looking first at anti-Masons and anti-Jesuits of the nineteenth century. Those who practice the paranoid style have an uncommon belief in the enemy’s ability to engineer history, to bend others to his will but for the intrepidness of the defenders and the unfortunate tendency of those who were formerly in the enemy’s camp to renege and spill secrets. We all suffer from our own shortcomings, Hofstadter concludes, most of us learn a measure of forgiveness because of it. Unfortunately, “the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.”

“The paranoid style in american politics” by Richard Hofstadter for Harper's Magazine