WATB Round-Up

Hoftstadter, cherry-picked by a guy at Salon, meaning he draws from more than The Paranoid Style.

Greatest Revelation: The newly paranoid right does hate America, as has been suspected for some time. (Some time around 1954, to be specific.)

The notion that paranoid movements were activated not by negotiable interests but by “fundamental fears and hatreds” was a more general and abstract version of the argument Hofstadter had made in an essay he wrote 10 years earlier, “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt – 1954.” Hofstadter opened that essay by arguing that the new far-right dissenters were not in fact conservatives at all. “[A]lthough they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, [they] show signs of serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions and institutions. They have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word … their political reactions express rather a profound if largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways – a hatred which one would hesitate to impute to them if one did not have suggestive evidence both from clinical techniques and from their own modes of expression.”

And then it goes on & on & on, but read it anyway. Minutes of amusement; few things are better than seeing one's despicable enemies demolished through dime-store psychology.