“In the history of the United States one. Of course, there were numerous movements that had employed the paranoid style long before the Cold War. Hofstadter continues: Barry Goldwater was warning of the communist’s indoctrinating American schoolchildren while the John Birch Society’s founder Robert Welch was claiming that President Eisenhower was a “conscious agent of the communist conspiracy.” The previous decade had also seen the rise and fall of McCarthyism, which was likely fresh in the mind of Hofstadter, who had been a member of the Young Communist League in his youth. When Hofstadter wrote his essay, it was a particularly paranoid time for America in the midst of the Cold War and the Civil Rights movement and just one year removed from the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Since Hofstadter wrote this seminal essay, it has been frequently revisited by political commentators and historians to compare and contrast contemporary and historical political movements that are prone to what he calls the “paranoid style” - but it seems especially pertinent in 2016, the year of Donald Trump. Although the paranoid style is always with us, it tends to wax and wane in relevance, lapsing into long periods of obscurity on the fringes of the political spectrum (left and right) and coming back when least expected. “ The Paranoid Style in American Politics” was written by the renowned historian Richard Hofstadter in 1964 - shortly after Donald Trump had graduated High School - and the Columbia professor was in fact describing the Barry Goldwater movement in the passage above (indeed, the essay was published in November, the month of the 1964 presidential election). Some readers may have already worked out that this essay was not published recently, nor was the author describing the Trump movement. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.” But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. “American politics has often been an arena for angry minds,” writes the professor. “In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Trump movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. In a recently published essay, a noted professor of American History at Columbia University investigates the rise of Donald Trump and his highly paranoid approach to politics, along with the long history of similarly paranoid political and social movements in the United States:
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