The Library of America deliberately chose to release its edition of Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics to coincide with the 2020 elections. But just as even Hofstadter could not have foreseen the grip that conspiratorial thinking now has on American politics, few if any at the start of last year could have foreseen the traumatic paranoid politics about to unfold. Are our fevered politics an alarming culmination of old trends as Hofstadter described them, or do they mark something new?

Sean Wilentz George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History; Professor of History, Princeton UniversitySean Wilentz studies U.S. political and social history. He received his Ph.D. in history from Yale University (1980) after earning bachelor’s degrees from Columbia University (1972) and Balliol College, Oxford University (1974).To view Sean Wilentz’s full bio, click here.