America's PARANOID-STYLE POLITICS: "An arena for uncommonly angry minds."

by Geoffrey Dunn

"Forty-five years ago this November, political historian Richard Hofstadter published a provocative essay in Harper's Magazine entitled "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," in which he argued that our nation "has served again and again as an arena for uncommonly angry minds."


Hofstadter, a widely celebrated professor at Columbia University who had just won a Pulitzer Prize for his book "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," was then confronting both the ghosts of McCarthyism and the more immediate significance of Barry Goldwater's candidacy for president of the United States. Hofstadter was particularly concerned about assessing "how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/05/ING219GKJL.DTL#ixzz0QM3zzsUr

Geoffrey Dunn is always a good read. He is at the forefront of exposing Palin for the lying, hypocritical, religious-zealot, idiot she is.