It is easy to assume that people who disagree with us politically are crazy, especially when their beliefs seem irrational.  With the rise of the Tea Party, birtherism, pizza-gate, MAGA Republicanism, and the spouting of blatant absurdities by candidate and (later) President Donald Trump, it was not surprising that Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics enjoyed a revival amongst progressives.  Twenty-first-century right-wing delusions of a “deep state” or a stolen election bear a family resemblance to 1950s right-wing phobias about an “immense” Communist conspiracy or the fluoridation of public water supplies.  Conspiracy theories have proven to be a Read more