weekly newspaper. In 1964, Harper’s Magazine published an essay by Richard Hofstadter entitled “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”. Hofstadter’s essay — originally delivered as a lecture at Oxford the previous year — appeared against the backdrop of Barry Goldwater’s failed bid to win the US presidency as the Republican Party candidate. Hofstadter wrote that the Goldwater movement, which included the extreme-right John Birch Society, demonstrated “…how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority”. Hofstadter is regarded by many as the most influential American historian of his day, and this essay shows why. Written more than a half-century ago, its insights are as penetrating today as they were then. “I call it the paranoid style,” he wrote, “… simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind”. Those words could have been penned now to describe the far-right cult following of former president Donald Trump. Think, for example, of QAnon, or the baseless notion that the 2020 election was stolen.