WRD 104: Composition & Rhetoric II Rotating Header Image

Paranoid Style

“Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content. I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric. The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent.”

The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Harper’s, Nov., 1964.
By Richard Hofstadter