The paranoid style 60 years on

This is a paragraph from Richard Hofstadter’s famous essay “The Paranoid Style and American Politics.”

If, after our historically discontinuous examples of the paranoid style, we now take the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country—that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.

Not a single word of this is any less accurate today than it was 60 years ago. The only thing that has changed is that what was then the openly and frankly paranoid wing of American conservatism when Barry Goldwater captured the party’s nomination — and was crushed in the general election by 23 percentage points — has become the entire movement, and has swallowed the Republican party whole.

And while Goldwater was a reactionary crank, to the point where he was considered unhinged by many a liberal observer — this is why the infamous daisy ad was so resonant — he was the soul of sanity compared to Donald Trump, in no small part because at least he understood that the fundamentalist Protestant wing of the GOP was fundamentally unappeasable:

Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.