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The following are two excerpts from Jumping at Shadows: The Triumph of Fear and the End of the American Dream, including indications of how fear paved the path to a Trump presidency.
In 1964, Richard Hofstadter published The Paranoid Style in American Politics. In it, he detailed how American politics had, over the generations, produced a discouraging number of profoundly paranoiac movements and individuals. The paranoid style, Hofstadter believed, brought in its wake a self-contained worldview: history didn’t just sometimes generate conspiracies — plots, say, such as that which led to Julius Caesar’s assassination, or the secret gatherings of revolutionary agents in 1848 Vienna or pre-1917 Russia — but was actually at a core level shaped by conspiracy. In such a world, conspiracy became the driving force behind all of the vast political, economic, and cultural changes shaping modernity.
Thus, in the decade after the end of the Second World War and the onset of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, for the John Birch Society any and every change was the product of an international Communist conspiracy, one that roped in not just the usual lefty suspects on campuses and in art circles but even senior Republican Party figures. Birch Society founder Robert Welch went so far as to name President Eisenhower as being a part of this conspiracy. In the best-selling book None Dare Call It Treason, the author John Stormer asserted that the US Congress was complicit in a planned Communist takeover of the United States. Senator Joseph McCarthy talked ominously about Communists infiltrating the top levels of government, academia, and media. The…