The Paranoid Style in American Politics

An essay published in 1964 that explains nearly every decade since. Hofstadter named the recurring American temper of conspiracy and apocalypse, the conviction that hidden enemies are working the country's ruin, and showed it returning in generation after generation, on the left and the right. The diagnosis has not aged because the symptom has not passed. Read it to recognize the mood the moment it reappears, which it always does.

The Columbia historian who taught Americans to be skeptical of their own myths without ceasing to take the country seriously. The American Political Tradition reread the men on the money. The Paranoid Style in American Politics named a recurring temper in the national life, the conspiratorial, apocalyptic mood that returns in every generation. The essay was published in 1964 and explains a great deal that came after it.