Published soon after Arizona senator Barry Goldwater won the Republican Party presidential nomination over the more moderate Nelson Rockefeller, Hofstadter's article explores the influence of a particular style of conspiracy theory and "movements of suspicious discontent" throughout American history.
Frankfurt School adherent Herbert Marcuse similarly connected status anxiety to interest politics in a eulogy for the deceased Neumann during a memorial service at Columbia University in 1955.
In the words of McKenzie-McHarg, Hofstadter hoped to "find a quality shared by both McCarthyism and the patchwork of grassroots organizations that, in the aftermath of McCarthy's downfall, sustained the pseudo-conservative cause on a local level.
The notion of projective behavior in politics was influenced by Sigmund Freud's reduction of "paranoid" apocalypticism to a "primitive religion" in depth psychoanalysis, as well as Karl Mannheim's conception of worldview as a constellation of symbolic expressions.
[4] Historian Nicolas Guilot further contended that previous scholars of paranoia, even if not directly referenced by Hofstadter, believed that the "concrete paranoid experience" amounted to a Lacanian "original syntax" semiotics that was not "comparable to the intuition of objects which is that of the average civilized person".
Historian Nicolas Guilot argued that "Hofstadter had done away with Mannheim's sociological attention for the conflicts among social groups that stood behind styles of thought...the subtle line that distinguished the mind that scanned the world for signs of conspiracies from the one that distilled symbols and rhetoric into a dangerous mindset unaffected by the vicissitudes of history had become blurred."
He aimed his November essay in Harper's Magazine at the Barry Goldwater 1964 presidential campaign's and possibly John Birch Society's infusion of the post-McCarthy Right's paranoid style into mid-20-century Republican partisan understandings of libertarianism in the United States.
[16][17][nb 1] Another aspect of Hofstadter's thesis has been challenged by Samuel DeCanio's 2011 article "Populism, Paranoia, and the Politics of Free Silver", which argues that, instead of being a paranoid delusion, the People's Party's position regarding bankers' use of bribes to influence 19th-century monetary policy was largely correct.
DeCanio offers evidence that the Coinage Act of 1873, legislation that eliminated bimetallism and which the Populists denounced as the "Crime of 73", was influenced by bribes that William Ralston, president of the Bank of California, paid to Henry Linderman, director of the Philadelphia Mint.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick observed that Hofstadter's essay assumes "a presumptive 'we'—apparently still practically everyone" who regard conspiracy theories "from a calm, understanding, and encompassing middle ground".