Inside the Mind of the Conspiracy Theorist
It is hard to write stuff that stays fresh, and that’s what makes Richard Hofstalder’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics, written in 1964, so impressive. We live, as everyone knows, in what feels like a high point of mainstream conspiracy theory in the United States. There’s nothing you can read today that better will describes the aesthetic or the distinct mindset of those who believe our country is about to be taken away from us, by them. The essay is, in its way, a tour of the mind of the conspiracy theorist.
Hofstadler, a professor of history at Columbia University, used the word “paranoid” because he felt “no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.” But the essay was ultimately about the lasting power of the belief that some sinister cabal is in the process of taking over America, and the political purposes to which idea has been put. “The central image” wrote Hofstandler “is that of a vast and sinister conspiracy, a gigantic and yet subtle machinery set in motion to undermine and destroy a way of life.” Its adherents are taught to feel dispossessed. Their country “has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try and repossess it and…
