Richard Hofstadter Would Recognize Today’s Right-Wing-Nuttery as Part of the “Paranoid Style” in American Politics
I hear that the dominant force driving the recent surge in gun sales is the widespread fear that Obama plans to take away all our guns, as part of his overall socialist agenda. Such right-wingnut ideas are not new. Sean Wilentz, in his 2007 Introduction to the Vintage edition of Richard Hofstadter’s 1965 book,…