What is striking about these quotes is that, far from capturing the mental state of small-town America even at the height of McCarthyism—a toxic disruption that never came close to becoming a political movement—Hofstadter’s words perfectly describe the liberal response to Trump and Trumpism. It could be that the wildest paranoiac fantasies on the far right conceive of one Democratic figure or another in the way Hofstadter describes, though I have yet to see it. But Hofstadter’s description of “the enemy” applies, with almost eerie precision, to the caricature of a diabolical Trump that has run through the mainstream media for four years and counting. And is there a better description of the Democratic “resistance” movement than not only the abandonment of “the usual methods of political give-and-take, but an all-out crusade”? There is a reason that Hofstadter’s concepts of status anxiety and paranoia as the driving forces behind American conservatism have survived their scholarly debunking and become part of the liberal worldview. They amount to the biggest psychological projection in American intellectual life, starting with Hofstadter himself, who as a Jewish scholar at then anti-Semitic Columbia must have been constantly plagued by both mental conditions. Today status anxiety and paranoia are entrenched on the liberal side. It is the status anxiety of young editors, reporters, and producers, working in a collapsing profession, that is behind the generational combat that has driven the media to the far Left.