Here's Richard Hofstadter from the Paranoid Style in American Politics. The full piece from the November 1964 issue of Harpers can be found here.
American
politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years, we have seen
angry minds at work, mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now
demonstrated, in the Goldwater movement, how much political leverage can be got
out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But, behind this, I
believe, there is a style of mind that is far from new, and that is not
necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style,
simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated
exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.
The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of
amoral superman — sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving.
Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast
mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his
limitations. He wills, indeed, he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or
tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises,
starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then
enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s
interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken
as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will.
Very often, the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of
power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a
special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).
It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy
is, on many counts, the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him.
The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the
paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret
organizations, set up to combat secret organizations, give the same flattery.
The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and
an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through “front” groups, and preaches a
ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those
it finds in the Communist enemy. Spokesmen of the various fundamentalist anti-Communist "crusades" openly express
their admiration for the dedication and discipline the Communist cause calls
forth.
We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is
a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the
rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.
Here is Ahab creating his Moby Dick out of his own paranoia and determining that the whale needs to be destroyed, even if he takes the Pequod down with him.
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