Sublime

to participate in the great decisions of government. There was, Lippmann brooded, no “intrinsic moral and intellectual virtue to majority rule.” Lippmann’s disenchantment with democracy anticipated the mood of today’s elites. From the top, the public, and the swings of public opinion, appeared irrational and uninformed. The human material out of wh

the web, of course) a study conducted by some very clever researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.

In the 1960s, Hofstadter saw paranoia as a pernicious and growing influence in American life, citing the rise of groups like the anticommunist John Birch Society. He laid out a blueprint for the paranoid style that, even after all these years, sounds familiar to anyone who ever watched Glenn Beck sweat onto his chalkboard.

And while those furies sometimes ebb, they also sometimes flow. In a November 1963 lecture that formed the basis of a Harper’s cover story and of a book, the Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter defined what he called “the paranoid style in American politics,” a recurring popular tendency to adhere to extreme conspiratorial theories about threats

Therefore, as in all social fears, there will be an increasing belief in the coming decade that the federal government is in the hands of conspirators.

In 1947, studying for his citizenship exam, Gödel reportedly claimed to have found a loophole in the US Constitution that would allow Americans to elect a dictator.

The antimonopoly fervency in America traces back to Andrew Jackson and earlier. Hofstadter locates it in a culture of “farmers and small-town entrepreneurs—ambitious, mobile, speculative, antiauthoritarian, egalitarian, and competitive.”