Please note that Hofstadter specifically rejects the use of "paranoid style" as an entry to arguing that to be conservative is to be clinically paranoid. As many of yall may have experienced in your own circles, people who are otherwise fully functional and pleasant company can get suckered into the paranoid style and its assumption of a hyper-competent, all pervasive plot by hostile forces to subvert society.
To be sure, some of them are nuts. But much more of them are our cousins, secretaries, lawyers, phlebotomists, blind dates, and PTA fundraiser organizers. But what's the most important historian of the 20th century say about the birthers?
American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.
now re-read that, replacing the word Goldwater with Limbaugh
There's more than just fear mongering going on from the talk radio charletans.
The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy 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 does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated — if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention.
re-read that, replacing the words paranoid spokesman with Glenn Beck
Hofstadter tied this paranoid style not to religiosity (he was writing at a time when the main political focus of Christianity in the country was on ending segregation) but on the American desire for identity and a sense of certainty in the world--he termed it "status" but by this means a feeling of strong cultural foundations rather than socio-economic prominence.
We Americans are always trying to raise the standard of living, and the same principle now seems to apply to the standards of hating. So during the past fifteen years or so, the authoritarians have moved on from anti-Negroism and anti-Semitism to anti-Achesonianism, anti-intellectualism, anti-nonconformism, and other variants of the same idea, much in the same way as the average American, if he can manage it, will move on from a Ford to a Buick
here, replace anti-Achesonianism and anti-nonconformism with anti-healthcareism and (alas) anti-Negroism
He cites two German Jewish sociologist ex-pats who came to the United States fleeing Hitler's rise and who did research on the character of the people who agitate and rile up the gullible crowds in their 1949 book,
Prophets of Deceit.
See also the comments of Leo Loewenthal and Norbert Guterman on the right-wing agitator: “The agitator seems to steer clear of the area of material needs on which liberal and democratic movements concentrate; his main concern is a sphere of frustration that is usually ignored in traditional politics. The programs that concentrate on material needs seem to overlook that area of moral uncertainties and emotional frustrations that are the immediate manifestations of malaise. It may therefore be conjectured that his followers find the agitator’s statements attractive not because he occasionally promises to “maintain the American standards of living” or to provide a job for everyone, but because he intimates that he will give them the emotional satisfactions that are denied them in the contemporary social and economic set-up. He offers attitudes, not bread.”
Change material need to "health care" or "unemployment benefits" or "actually capturing bin Ladin"
Required in all this is the need for the enemy to be flawless in his evil plans and as stealthy as the shadows. It's the commie under your bed, the UN helicopters lurking just past your neighbor's hedge, the spy tapping your phone, the NASA techies filming Neil and Buzz in a Hollywood sound stage, the one-worlder slipping Islamic propaganda into your kids' history textbooks, and the CIA agents manning robot planes and planting controlled demolition charges on every floor of the World Trade Center without ever being caught.
The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman — sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction...
No one ever blows the whistle on them. There's only the long list of those who "died under suspicious circumstances" on the Bush and Clinton and (soon-to-appear) Obama/ACORN "death lists."
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We should start offering attitudes along with the usual bread. 
