Although American political life has rarely touched on by the most acute varieties of class conflict, it has served again and again as an arena for uncommonly angry minds.

This is a collection of essays from 1963 by the historian Richard Hofstadter, probably most well know for either this book or for his other well-regarded book Anti-Intellectualism in American History which you can guess what it’s about.

This book begins with two essays that lay out a reading of a form of political discourse, especially related to the rise of far right extremism. This is a not a book on paranoia, as he lays out pretty directly, but of a kind of affected paranoiac speech (paranoia appropriation) that has taken over Right speech in politics. It’s a kind of speech and orientation that you absolutely know about because almost every Republican politician in the US is doing it right now in regards to the 2020 election. It’s a kind of status anxiety related to power. It’s absolutely tied to white supremacy, and couched in the language of fundamentalist dogma, and it’s literally the worst thing in the world right now because not only is it undemocratic, but it’s allowing for pretty much every bad thing in the world, while denying efforts to make them better.

Hofstadter carefully lays out how and where this happened, initially missing the connection to Protestant extremism, and then adding this back into his analysis in a follow up essay. He warned us.

The rest of the book is a solid analysis of various other historical topics, but the opening half of the book is too prescient to spend much time with those.

(Photo: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/241061.The_Paranoid_Style_in_American_Politics_and_Other_Essays?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=kL8JRvUIPw&rank=1)