The Republican Party Swipes Right For The Paranoid Style Of Politics

Applying Richard Hofstadter’s majestic 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” to our current political situation.

The Republican party of 2024, which is currently well situated to retain/take control of all three branches of our government, is dominated and animated by a set of extreme beliefs consistent with the paranoid style of politics.

This is a unique moment in American history and it is frightening.

I’m sure many of my readers are Republicans. My own father is Republican and will vote the Republican ticket in New York. With a little irony but an ironclad belief, I state that there are mostly “good people on either side.” Because I don’t and won’t define a person solely by their political party affiliation. Nor should any of us.

But all Americans need to think about what it might mean for this Republican party to control our government.

The Paranoid Style of Politics

Sixty years ago, soon after the assassination of JFK, historian Richard Hofstadter wrote an essay that traced the paranoid style of politics throughout American history.

Hofstadter was not referring to paranoid in the clinical, individual sense, but rather, he used it to mean “paranoid modes of expression by…normal people” in furtherance of political goals and beliefs.

Paranoid individuals and paranoid political leaders both express themselves in a style that is “overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic.”

While an individual suffering from paranoia may see the world arrayed against them personally, the paranoid politician sees and presents the world as hostile and threatening to an entire culture that to them embodies the soul of their country. ¹

I note that the assertion of conspiracies is often indistinguishable from the paranoid style.

Leaping from facts to fantasy

An important characteristic of the typical paranoid political movement is that it is based on some set of facts that are then distorted in an ugly and fantastical way.

In his 1964 essay, Hofstadter uses the example of the post-war fluoridation of water to prevent tooth decay. Widespread and prolonged use of fluoridation was new so it was true that there was some risk of harmful effects showing up later. But the leap made by some rightwing ideologues was that fluoridation was a conspiracy to turn Americans into socialists through some sort of magical chemical reaction that would rot our brains.

A current example. On immigration it is reasonable and factual to believe that America has failed to control its borders. But the Republican Party has distorted this fact. The leader of that party, Donald Trump, tells us that, after having been released from “prisons, jails and mental institutions” millions of people are pouring over the border––note the language of invasion––… “to destroy our country.” To be more specific, this army of criminals and terrorists is coming to rape and kill American women. This is after they take millions of jobs from Black and Hispanic Americans.  ²

There is a similar paranoid strain in American history regarding an invasion of Catholics. It starts with the fact that in the early part of the 19^th century, America was dominated by Protestants. Throughout the 19^th century, Catholic immigrants were changing America’s once homogenous religious culture. Influential people like the minister Lyman Beecher leapt to the conclusion that the “potentates of Europe” were sending Catholics to America as part of a plot to extirpate Protestantism and make Catholicism America’s national religion. ³

Enemies Evil And Pervasive

The necessity to act immediately against a uniquely evil opponent is another characteristic of the paranoid style.

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s detailed blueprint of Republican plans for post-election governance, alleges in its introduction that the “long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass” and “freedom and liberty are under siege as never before.” ⁴

Now compare that credo of Project 2025 with Senator Joseph McCarthy’s urgent insistence, circa 1950, that the government had been taken over by Communists. McCarthy claimed that American foreign policy and military failures ⁵ could only be explained by

“a great conspiracy [of Communists] on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.” ⁶

There were Communist sympathizers in 1950’s America (there still are; we’re a vast country) and some of them were employed by the government and a few of them were spies. But from those facts grew the insistence that everyone who mattered, from the president on down, was in on the conspiracy and had to be stopped immediately.

Winner-take-all

Another characteristic of the paranoid style is the belief that there is no room for compromise. Either we win or they win. From the American 19th century, either all Protestant or all Catholic. ⁷

This week, Steve Bannon was interviewed by NYT columnist David Brooks about Bannon’s political program and whether Bannon saw any hope for healing the division between the Democratic and Republican parties. Bannon told Brooks:

“You are reasonable. We’re not reasonable. We’re unreasonable because we’re fighting for a republic. And we’re never going to be reasonable until we get what we achieve. We’re not looking to compromise. We’re looking to win.

We are two different worldviews. And those worldviews can’t be bridged.” ⁸

Here’s Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation (author of Project 2025):

“[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” ⁹

If you think Bannon or Kevin Roberts are unfair representations of the Republican party (I don’t), here are the only slightly milder words of Justice Samuel Alito:

“One side or the other is going to win. There can be a way of living together peacefully, but it’s difficult because there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised.” ¹⁰

Perhaps Alito is talking about “godliness,” Roberts about the Marxist takeover of our institutions, and Bannon about the “Deep State,” but the winner-take-all point of view animates the words and actions of all three men.

As does the underlying threat of violence in Bannon’s unreasonableness and Alito’s “difficulty” in peaceful co-existence. As for Roberts, his talk of revolution and of bloodlessness, conditioned upon surrender, speaks for itself.

The Paranoid Style on the Left

Of course I can name-check some current day paranoid political beliefs of the far Left. The belief that every single issue in America is about nothing other than race or gender. Or the belief that everything America does is evil. Or the belief that countries and people are either oppressor or oppressed with nothing in-between.

But these conspiratorial, paranoid beliefs have remained on the fringes of the Democratic party.

American history also provides many examples of the paranoid style on the Left. Hofstadter in his essay cites conspiracy theories such as the belief that World War One was orchestrated by profit-seeking military arms dealers. Or the late 19^th century belief that East Coast bankers conspired to impoverish the rest of the country through the nefarious mechanism of the gold standard.

Paranoia in Control

I have not been immune from getting caught up in the hype that any given presidential election is “the most important election of our lifetime.” And in writing this essay I’ve interrogated myself as to whether I’m catastrophizing.

But I can’t think of another modern example of one of our two major political parties led by such extremist and violent people. The refusal by the Republican party to accept the 2020 election as legitimate followed by the assault on the Capitol on January 6^th, 2021 are unprecedented embraces by a major political party of the paranoid style.

In 1964 when he wrote his essay, Hofstadter emphasized that the paranoid style in American politics had been the province of “minority movements.” He made that crucial distinction as part of a passage pointing out that America was not exceptional among countries in eruptions of the paranoid style. He cited examples of the paranoid style in Europe, noting that:

“the single case in modern history where one might say that the paranoid style has had a consummatory triumph was…in Germany.”

He is referring of course to the Nazi Party.

Just Words

In this essay I’ve quoted recent words from various Republican leaders to make my case. I can anticipate objections that these are “just words.” That everyone knows that Trump and Bannon exaggerate for effect, that the Heritage Project is just whipping up recruiting enthusiasm for their Project 2025 blueprint, that Samuel Alito’s words were said offhand in an unguarded moment.

It’s true that the constraints of governing can make it impossible to put into action the words spoken and written during a campaign. And many politicians say things they do not really believe.

But then I think about what the Supreme Court has already done with the words of its recent decisions. I think of the words used to try to discredit the 2020 election and the words used to plan and incite the Capitol riot.

I think also of the long train of misery and suffering and death caused by words spoken and written throughout history. I think about how in the 16^th century, if you were caught reading the wrong version of the Christian bible, you could be burned alive. Or in modern times, if you were “named” as a Communist during the McCarthy “Red Scare” of the 1950s, your career and life could be ruined.

And I conclude it would be the height of folly and recklessness to dismiss the extreme rhetoric of today’s Republican party as “just words.”

Question for the comments: Let’s make this comments section a useful and respectful space to express views from across the political spectrum.

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Comment by Jay Adler of

Homo Vitruvius by A. Jay Adler

(highly recommended). As I wrote to Jay, I thought his comment completed my essay.

David, I cautiously wade in (and immediately out) with these observations. The comments include, in the end, the usual muddle of widely divergent views, well and not so well considered, that lead us nowhere. Largely on the right, even a moderate right, they offer false equivalencies that evade qualitative difference. As you point out, the paranoid style has long existed in politics, generally on the extremes. And just as there has always been that style, there have always been extreme mutual misrepresentations back and forth between conservative and liberal in the country, including the most extreme elements of either tendency misrepresented as the tendency itself. About the left, before the fall of the Eastern Bloc, this would mean, as with McCarthy, you note, stoking panic that the government and the Democratic party itself were filled with communists. One might say that nothing has changed since, even now, Trump casts the Democratic Party of Joe Biden - all his career the epitome of a moderate liberal -- as the "radical, socialist, Marxist left." It would be comical if not so tragic in its potential consequences. But viewing our current situation as one in which nothing has changed, so easy to do, with all the charges and counter charges between right and left of calumny and threat and all the rest, ad infinitum, misses the qualitative difference. That difference is Trump, and those who, in his having taken over the Republican Party, have already molded themselves in his image.

I agree with many of the criticisms of the far left offered in these comments. Nonetheless, none of tendencies of the far left, in their expressed intent, are equivalent to what Trump represents, advocates, or articulates every day. No one on the left representing those tendencies is at the center of power (or has ever, whatever one may think of them, behaved in the vile manner that Trump daily does). The Democratic Party has not been taken over by those tendencies. The Republican Party has been taken over by Trump. It is Trump.

Trump is a bad man, a very bad man, personally and publicly. He has treated people badly all his life, very badly, hurt people without care, and expressed his indifference to hurting people on a mass scale if he has the power to do so. He is a mean and vicious person without human sympathy. The evidence of his badness is voluminous. If elected again -- he has told us clearly -- he will do very bad things.

Neither Trump nor many of his most prominent backers, from Bannon, to Michael Flynn to what became of the Heritage Foundation, believes in democracy or the rule of law. Trump, of course, believes in nothing at all but the aggrandizement of his own monstrous ego. "Policy" pronouncements for him are like the scorpion talking into the frog's ear.

No aversion to the worst of the far left or even distaste for mere liberalism will justify a vote for him.

1. An excerpt from Hofstadter’s essay was published in Harper’s. You can also find a PDF of the entire essay by searching for “The Paranoid Style In American Politics” and “PDF.”

His book of essays titled “The Paranoid Style In American Politics” can be ordered here.

Hofstadter was a great American historian and a superb writer. Many of his books take the long view of American history, identifying patterns and their early roots. “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” is particularly illuminating.

2. Source: Transcript from the Trump-Biden debate on June 27^th.

3. Source: Hofstadter. Beecher was a leading Presbyterian minister and the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  

4. From the introduction of Project 2025, a book edited and organized by The Heritage Foundation, a far right wing think tank.

5. Hofstadter:

“Any historian of warfare knows it is in good part a comedy of errors and a museum of incompetence; but if for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination.” 

6. Quoted by Hofstadter

7. Anti-Catholic venom continued well into the 20th century. Catholics and Catholicism were major targets of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1920s.

8. New York Times interview of Steve Bannon by David Brooks; July 1^st, 2024.

9. Quoted from a recent interview with Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation in the July 4^th post of

Letters from an American

10. NYT article, June 10th, 2024