Tag Archive

Anti-Intellectualism

That Other Big Book on Irrational Politics

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