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Shoq (shoq@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 09-Apr-2026 09:07:33 JST Shoq
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If you never read this, it was written in 1964, and explained pretty much what got us to this MAGA hellscape.
The Paranoid Style in American Politics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paranoid_Style_in_American_Politics
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  The Paranoid Style in American Politics
  
  "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" is an essay by American historian Richard Hofstadter, first published in Harper's Magazine in November 1964. It was the title essay in a book by the author the following year. Published soon after Arizona senator Barry Goldwater won the Republican Party presidential nomination over the more moderate Nelson Rockefeller, Hofstadter's article explores the influence of a particular style of conspiracy theory and "movements of suspicious discontent" throughout American history. Background Hofstadter's 1959 BBC radio lecture on "The American Right Wing and the Paranoid Style" was later revised and published as "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" in the November 1964 Harper's Magazine. Hofstadter's initial focus on status anxiety tied to interest politics came from Franz Neumann's "Anxiety and Politics" (1954). Frankfurt School adherent Herbert Marcuse similarly connected status anxiety to interest politics in a eulogy for the deceased Neumann during a memorial service at Columbia University in 1955. Hofstadter shifted to studying the concepts...
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  The Right Irreverend (dadakopf@dobbs.town)'s status on Thursday, 09-Apr-2026 09:07:34 JST The Right Irreverend
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  @shoq I saw somewhere that Jefferson said a democracy only works with a well educated voting populace. But see Richard Hofstadter on how that whole thing worked out.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hofstadter
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    Richard Hofstadter
    
    Richard Hofstadter (August 6, 1916 – October 24, 1970) was an American historian and public intellectual. Hofstadter was the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. Rejecting his earlier historical materialist approach to history, in the 1950s he came closer to the concept of "consensus history", and was epitomized by some of his admirers as the "iconic historian of postwar liberal consensus." Others see in his work an early critique of the one-dimensional society, since he was equally critical of socialist and capitalist models of society, and bemoaned the "consensus" within the society as "bounded by the horizons of property and entrepreneurship", criticizing the "hegemonic liberal capitalist culture running throughout the course of American history". Hofstadter's books include Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 (1944); The American Political Tradition (1948); The Age of Reform (1955); Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963); and the essays collected in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964). He was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize: in 1956 for...
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  Shoq (shoq@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 09-Apr-2026 09:07:35 JST Shoq
  
  If America ever has a real educational system again, we should make civics and voter education a critical component of the curriculum. It’s a no-brainer for any political movement that wants to endure. Our daily battle has been with severely uneducated people.
  
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