Hofstadter published “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” in 1964. The regularity with which it’s cited now suggests that there hasn’t been any solid follow-up work on the subject in the last 53 years. That’s akin to writing about pop music and stopping at the Beatles playing Shea Stadium. I think it’s clear why: the subject in general, and its specifics in particular, is a tangle of third rails: you touch it, you’ll get burned. That’s not because some dark forces will crush you, it’s because consensus institutions like academia and journalism, staffed for the most part by reasonable, intelligent, liberal-leaning cosmopolitans, can’t cope. Why is that?