Historian Richard Hofstadter called it “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” The famous essay was written in 1964 and became all the rage on the left because Hofstadter only studied “interest politics” and the “authoritarian personality” on the right. At the time, the John Birch Society, with its outrageous accusations about Communists among us, were easy pickings for a public intellectual like Hofstadter.
