The Paranoid Style of Rudy Giuliani

At one level, one could see Giuliani’s statements as simply incorrect. Obama does love America; he does work hard for his country; he did not say everybody should hate the police. But Giuliani’s attacks on the President are not principally meant as assertions of fact. They are meant to tap into a deep wellspring of American political thought, one defined by the Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter five decades ago. In an article in Harper’sHofstadter described “the paranoid style in American politics,” which he said was characterized by “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.”

.. With his cosmopolitan background, Obama makes an especially tempting target for the paranoid style. He is so easy to portray as foreign, as other, as an emissary from alien civilizations who has managed to insinuate himself into the center of American power.