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Scarcely a week goes by without an appeal — whether in print or on video — to Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics. This has been true for the last decade. When the Tea Party emerged roughly ten years ago, Newsweek placed the Hofstadter essay on its “What You Need to Read Now” list. From tea parties to birther frenzy, allusions to Hofstadter's piece were widespread. Then, with Trump's candidacy and electoral success, Hofstadter became the go-to historian for light on how a reality TV star ended up the 45th president of the United States.
Hofstadter's choice of the term paranoid — though he insisted that he was not “speaking in a clinical sense”1 — suggests his familiarity with psychology and/or psychoanalysis. He was not alone. Indeed, this ease was characteristic of his generation, a generation for whom, as W.H. Auden put it, Freud was “no more a person … but a climate of opinion.” For better or worse, they were all Freudians. Freud had molded their intellectual manners and fundamentally altered how they thought. But by the 1970s, the weather had changed: borrowing from psychoanalysis had ceased to inspire commentators of one sort or another. And now the weather has shifted once more. The current crop of pundits is again comfortable with a psychoanalytic frame of reference. Two items stand out.
The first is projection. It directs attention to the way specific impulses, wishes, aspects of the self are imagined to be located in some object — object being psychoanalytic parlance for person — external to oneself. It goes hand in hand with denial, that is, one denies that one feels such and such emotion, has such and such a wish, but asserts that someone else does. The enemy, Hofstadter wrote, “seems to be on many counts a projection of the self: both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him.”2
The second is introjection (often used synonymously with internalization). The critical agency known as the superego is famil