Was Richard Hofstadter Wrong about American Politics

 By luck I ran across Chris Lehmann's What Richard Hofstadter Got Wrong: The late historian and author of “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” misdiagnosed the fate of modern conservatism on the New Republic site.

But of course the entire subsequent history of the modern right’s ascension to power makes precisely the opposite point. The alleged retreat of fundamentalists from public life since the Scopes Trial debacle in 1925 has always been something of a liberal cultural lullaby, as Matthew Avery Sutton demonstrated in his 2014 study, American Apocalypse. And the paranoid style, far from being an expression of powerlessness, has become perhaps the most potent and reliable model of retaining and expanding power on the American right—particularly as its leaders continue to cleave to a governing agenda that is unpopular with the polled majority of American voters. Overheated reveries depicting the cultural and political persecution of the right no longer merely drive crank ideological fantasizing and end-time sermonizing; they now fuel vast swaths of online and broadcast reporting on the right, while building an astonishingly insular narrative of relentless and unappeasable persecution within the Oval Office itself.

Okay, there is a point here, but when joined with the argument of this paragraph:

Indeed, for all the close attention Hofstadter gives to McCarthy, fundamentalist right-wingers, and various lapsed Populist bigots, his large body of work on the postwar American right says virtually nothing about a far more consequential figure of the time—Ayn Rand, who was not merely a woman, a Russian immigrant, and a toweringly pompous intellectual, but also an ardent atheist and modernist. Rand teemed with resentments and anxieties galore, Lord knows, but they had far more to do with her insatiable ambition and her sex life than with any status anxiety harking back to the simpler village society of the mid-nineteenth century.

I think there is a point for sure