Synthaholic
Diamond Member
- Jul 21, 2010
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This is from a Charlie Sykes Op-Ed about Alex Jones:
Mr. Jones, Matt Drudge and President Trump himself have played a role in reviving what Richard Hofstadter called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Reread in light of today’s politics, Hofstadter’s 1964 essay seems eerily prescient.
The paranoid spokesman, he wrote, saw the world “in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point.”
At the center of the paranoid worldview, Hofstadter wrote, was a sense on the right that “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.”
Since the situation is so dire and the stakes so high, the paranoid spokesman is not interested in half-measures. “He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician,” Hofstadter wrote.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/17/opinion/sunday/the-danger-of-ignoring-alex-jones.html
Mr. Jones, Matt Drudge and President Trump himself have played a role in reviving what Richard Hofstadter called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Reread in light of today’s politics, Hofstadter’s 1964 essay seems eerily prescient.
The paranoid spokesman, he wrote, saw the world “in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point.”
At the center of the paranoid worldview, Hofstadter wrote, was a sense on the right that “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.”
Since the situation is so dire and the stakes so high, the paranoid spokesman is not interested in half-measures. “He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician,” Hofstadter wrote.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/17/opinion/sunday/the-danger-of-ignoring-alex-jones.html