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TURN ON ANY NEWS PROGRAM OR PICK UP ANY NEWSPAPER IN 2022, AND YOU'RE LIKELY TO ENCOUNTER A DEPICTION OF EVERYDAY AMERICANS ACTING IN ENRAGED, UNCONTROLLED WAYS. From physical altercations on airplanes to unruly school board meetings about critical race theory and mask mandates, Americans have seemingly lost our ability to be civil in the public sphere. Perhaps nowhere has this trend been more evident than in the nation's capital on Jan. 6, 2021, when hordes stormed barricades to enter the U.S. Capitol building hoping to subvert the democratic process. The insurrection was a physical manifestation - broadcast in real time across social media and news channels - of the fears, feelings of dispossession and unbridled anger that have come to characterize American politics. We might be tempted to perceive this rage as something new and aberrant, a product of internet-fueled conspiracies run amok, the result of Donald Trump's presidency. But it is neither new nor anomalous. Rather, this rage is a product of the inherent contradictions between the American political system and American political values.
For roughly 60 years, historians and political scientists have been concerned about the growing threat of conspiratorial thinking and the associated rage. No article has been more influential in this arena than Richard Hofstadter's seminal 1964 essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," which ran in Harper's Magazine. Defined by hostility, suspicion and the perception of threat, the paranoid style has been embedded in American political culture since at least the 18th century, according to Hofstadter. It stems from the nebulous - or pluralistic - nature of the American state and has been historically directed at anyone not perceived to be American or anyone believed to pose a threat to America. The paranoid style is therefore a mode of political thought that helps to define outsiders and insiders.
Underpinning the paranoid style is the belief that those who exhibit this hostility are the true Americans and the rightful owners of the nation. Although political paranoia has been with us from the beginning, the mid-20th century saw a significant transformation in the paranoid style on the political Right. Adherents of the Right began to see themselves as dispossessed. Its proponents were no longer defending what was actively theirs, because they...