I'm reading The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, and it's too good and too relevant not to post about. But so far there's nothing I could say about it that he doesn't say better himself. So I'll just post daily quotes (mostly) without comment. Beginning with:
Unlike most of the liberal dissent of the past, the new dissent not only has no respect for nonconformism, but is based upon a relentless demand for conformity. It can most accurately be called pseudo-conservative...because its exponents, although they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions, and institutions. They have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word...Their political reactions express rather a profound if largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways--a hatred which one would hesitate to impute to them if one did not have suggestive evidence both from clinical techniques and from their own forms of expression.[That's all, folks]
--Richard Hofstadter, The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt - 1954
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