Militants in the paranoid style see their enemy as “a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral Superman, sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury loving,” Hofstadter writes. His list of evils here, though nearly 60 years old, sounds remarkably modern. It could have been drawn up by one of the House impeachment managers to denounce then-President Trump.

One might challenge Hofstadter, not by questioning whether there is a paranoid style in America, but by asking whether there is anything unique about the tinfoil hats worn in the United States. “There is a paranoid style in America — and everywhere else!” Jonah Goldberg tells RealClearInvestigations. “Virtually every society in the world has conspiracy theories and America is pretty average on that score.”…

For those perplexed by the end-times obsessions the contemporary left brings to issue after issue – that we’re on the verge of “mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves”(Robert Kagan) or that there is a climate “emergency” and “Our House Is on Fire” (Greta Thunberg) – there is an explanation, the one that Hofstadter originally applied to the right. “The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of this conspiracy in apocalyptic terms,” Hofstadter writes, “he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds.” It is now or never with the paranoiacs. “Time is forever just running out.”

Paranoid militants are like “religious millenarians,” Hofstadter writes. They are “sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse” but usually stop short.