WINGNUTS FOREVER

This article on the rift on the GOP between the Baggers and all the rest led me to think back to the late 50s when the John Birch Society began to exercise so much influence over Republican politics.  From there it was a short step to recalling Richard Hofstadter's famous essay on the paranoid style in American politics.   Some 20 years after its publication, Daniel Patrick Moynihan found that Hofstadter's analysis was still valid in the 1980s and gave this wonderful example from a letter written by John T. Dolan of the National Conservative Foundation of Alexandria, Virginia:

Machinery.
The liberal machine in Washington, D.C. is powerful and entrenched. The federal bureaucracy consists of increasingly powerful career "civil servants" who are totally out of touch with grassroots America. They have consistently wasted untold billions of dollars of taxpayers' money every year on irresponsible federal programs that have accomplished absolutely nothing. Worse still, theirs is a socialist agenda predicated on their "right" to spend our money at will on totally unproductive programs.

Treason at the Top.
The bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. are strongly supported by the liberals in Congress who share the same philosophy. These legislators are clearly out of step with their constituencies, and continue to fund the welfare state that the American public has so soundly rejected.

The Hidden Network.
The third, and possibly most irresponsible liberal group fighting the conservative movement is the liberal media. You will never hear the media report on the untold billions of dollars that liberals waste every year. Instead, the liberal media repeatedly blasts the Reagan Administration for "massive" budget cuts while maintaining that conservatives are antipoor, racist, etc. You and I know this is simply untrue and is the height of hypocrisy.

Over 25 years later, it is obvious that the paranoid style is still with us.