In this brief essay, I take up Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964) to discuss key social and psychic energies at work across the United States today. Although they have longstanding roots in the United States, these paranoid tendencies have only intensified in recent years. I see this in two, intertwined ways–new social and psychic vulnerabilities as well as the rise of so-called “eliminationist” rhetoric.
