An Old Essay by Richard Hofstadter Used to Explain Tea Partiers

The name Richard Hofstadter has been summoned up a lot lately in liberal opinion columns and the blogosphere as an eloquent and intellectually impeccable explanation for political developments like the Tea Party movement, the stardom of Sarah Palin, and the claim on right-wing talk radio that Barack Obama is a “socialist,” maybe even a “bolshevik” leading America to ruin.

Mr. Hofstadter was the highly respected, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at Columbia University among whose most famous essays was one called “The Paranoid Style of American Politics,” published in Harper’s Magazine in 1964, which is the piece of writing being cited most often these days.

“I call it the paranoid style because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind,” Mr. Hofstadter wrote, describing what he viewed as a menacing proneness in America to irrational anger and passion....

Others, including The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, have found Mr. Hofstadter useful to explain the utter absence of any restraint in emotionally fervent attacks on Mr. Obama’s health care reform — congressional Republicans, for example, rallying under images of Nazi death camps with the caption “National Socialist Healthcare.” The liberal Huffington Post has published so many references to Mr. Hofstadter these days that it requires several pages to list them all.

“His paranoid style has been bandied about lately,” the Columbia University historian Eric Foner said of Mr. Hofstadter’s famous essay, “and if he were alive I’m sure he would apply it to the Tea Party and other things.”

David S. Brown, a professor of history at Elizabethtown College and author of the book “Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography,” said, “He would have a strong feeling of déjà vu.”...

And yet, while instances of what Mr. Hofstadter would have seen as exaggerated, suspicious, and full of conspiratorial fantasy are legion, it’s not so clear that all those references to Mr. Hofstadter these days are entirely on the mark. Some of his colleagues feel that his evocation of a paranoid style hasn’t actually withstood the test of time.

“I don’t think these concepts have worn very well,” Mr. Foner, once a student of Mr. Hofstadter’s, said. “Like anybody, Hofstadter was a product of a particular historical experience, and I don’t think he was putting forward a theory for all of American politics.”...

In other words, not every upsurge of a radical populism or unrestrained irritation qualifies as paranoid; nor is it certain that rational good sense won’t prevail among most Americans....