Is Donald Trump a Populist?

Sixty years ago, one of America’s pre-eminent historians, Richard Hofstadter at Columbia University, published an essay, ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics,’ which looked at how what was then the most recent manifestations of alt-right political narratives — McCarthyism — reflected a rhetorical and organizational behavior which appeared on a regular basis beginning with the reaction to the rise of Jeffersonian democracy at the end of the eighteenth century.

Hofstadter defined paranoia in political terms as “a way of seeing the world and of expressing oneself.” He then went on to differentiate between a clinically-diagnosed paranoid personality versus the use of paranoia as a political narrative, with “the clinical paranoid seeing the hostile and conspiratorial world in which he feels himself to be living as directed specifically against him; whereas the spokesman of the paranoid style finds it directed against a nation, a c:ulture, a way of life whose fate affects not himself alone but millions of others.”

Now if this argument by Hofstadter doesn’t exactly define the verbal style and organizational ministrations of Donald Trump, I don’t know what does. And what Hofstadter sees as a recurring phenomenon, emerging into the American political process roughly every fifty years, is certainly evident in the American political environment today.