RICHARD HOFSTADTER’S famous 1964 essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics is a diatribe against the hard right, appearing on the eve of Barry Goldwater’s Republican nomination for president.

The style though, of constantly pointing the finger outward and never inward to one’s own faults, is a constant tendency in American political thought from McCarthyism’s branding of the communist threat at a time when the Soviet Union was weakened from WWII to Reagan’s Nicaraguans who were about to attack the mainland to Trump’s border refugees fleeing the ravages of the Global South who are hell-bent on destroying the US.

What is new in this campaign is the embracing of that style by the liberal center or really center right, as the Democratic party candidate Kamala Harris welcomes the architect of the criminal war on Iraq Dick Chaney and his daughter Liz into the party’s “big tent.”