Notable Quotable- Richard Hofstadter on Paranoia

In America, there can only be two explanations for the collapse of democracy and its migration toward a “democratic” dictatorship.

Last week, the United States Census Bureau released its latest data on its population’s educational attainment. For 2024, the report finds that only 39.5% of Americans between the ages of 25 and 55 hold a bachelor’s degree or higher. And, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, 54% of U.S. adults read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.

Throughout America’s history, the deeply entrenched Puritan mindset has shunned intellectualism, making it enemy number one. To this day, ultra-conservatives are averse to funding anything but religious schools. And, now, we’ve locked our nation into the hands of a Supreme Court majority whose members are adherents to this Puritan ideology and who also believe the second coming is at hand. With such a big event looming, democracy must give way to theocracy so that no good Christian on the high court gets left behind.

In his 1964 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Anti-intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstadter, former De Witt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University, wrote: “The Puritan ideal of the minister as an intellectual and educational leader was steadily weakened in the face of the evangelical ideal of the minister as a popular crusader and exhorter.” If a minister was intellectual, it meant he could not possibly be pious.

Over the last century, intellectualism has been further shunned in favor of entertainment with news media outlets, left and right, leading the way. If it doesn’t bleed, it won’t lead and, well, audiences won’t stick around. No heroes, no villains, no fun. Not so good for corporate profits.

But the news media fixed that problem and figured out how to manipulate us at the same time.

Today, we Americans cling to the edges of our seats during evening news broadcasts where the political discourse is spiced with fake news and malicious accusations that rile us up and whip us into a state of paranoia against the targeted enemy. This is the second explanation for the undoing of our nation’s pillars of democracy.

In his essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter provided examples of such a style from history:

“Lyman Beecher, the elder of a famous family and the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote in the same year his Plea for the West, in which he considered the possibility that the Christian millennium might come in the American states. Everything depended, in his judgment, upon what influences dominated the great West, where the future of the country lay. There, Protestantism was engaged in a life-or-death struggle with Catholicism. ‘Whatever we do, it must be done quickly’…A great tide of immigration, hostile to free institutions, was sweeping in upon the country, subsidized and sent by ‘the potentates of Europe,’ multiplying tumult and violence, filling jails, crowding poorhouses, quadrupling taxation, and sending increasing thousands of voters to ‘lay their inexperienced hand upon the helm of our power.’” Sound familiar?

Another example illustrates how, back in this 1964 San Francisco Chronicle news brief, the right-wing John Birch Society attacked its enemy by labeling it part of the communist conspiracy, which Fox News still does to this day when labeling any perceived enemy or person who is not loyal to Donald Trump.

“The John Birch Society is attempting to suppress a television series about the United Nations by means of a mass letter-writing campaign to the sponsor, The Xerox Corporation. The corporation, however, intends to go ahead with the programs. Birch official John Rousselot said, ‘We hate to see a corporation of this country promote the U.N. when we know that it is an instrument of the Soviet Communist conspiracy.’” -San Francisco Chronicle, July 31, 1964

In his essay, Hofstadter explains how the modern right-wing of the 1960s 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 socialist and communist 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.” Again, sound familiar?

Hofstadter then reduces the basic elements of contemporary right-wing thought down to three:

“First, there has been the now-familiar sustained conspiracy, running over more than a generation, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt's New Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism.

“The second contention is that top government officialdom has been so infiltrated by Communists that American policy, at least since the days leading up to Pearl Harbor, has been dominated by men who were shrewdly and consistently selling out American national interests.

“Finally, the country is infused with a network of Communist agents, just as in the old days it was infiltrated by Jesuit agents, so that the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media is engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans.”

Today we hear the same paranoid and often Puritan accusations against current targets of the far right, recycled through conservative news outlets, blogs, and podcasts. There is no attempt at original thought. It’s off-the-rack fearmongering because it if ain’t broke, why fix it? Sadly, today’s youngest conservatives eat it up as quickly as their forbears did so long ago.

Wrapping up his essay, Hofstadter offers this thought:

“This glimpse across a long span of time emboldens me to make the conjecture—it is no more than that—that a mentality disposed to see the world in this way may be a persistent psychic phenomenon, more or less constantly affecting a modest minority of the population. But certain religious traditions, certain social structures and national inheritances, certain historical catastrophes or frustrations may be conducive to the release of such psychic energies, and to situations in which they can more readily be built into mass movements or political parties."

History repeats itself once more.

Richard Hofstadter's essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, quoted here, was adapted from the Herbert Spencer Lecture delivered at Oxford University in November 1963. You can read the full, original essay here.