AMERICA'S PARANOID STYLE: THE 1692 VERSION

Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692 (New York: Little, Brown, 2015) ("As dogma, the crusade against evil, and the ecstatic embrace of justice combined in Salem, they do too in what has been termed the paranoid style in American politics. When Richard Hofstadter described 'the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy,' the national distempers that occasionally descend upon us, he could have been describing Essex County in 1692. That apocalyptic, absolutist strain still bleeds into our thinking. . . . We are regularly being scarified to our heathen adversaries; in troubled time, we naturally look for traitors, terrorists, secret agents. Though in our imaginations, the business is indeed sometimes not imaginary. A little paranoia may even be salutary, though sometimes when you anticipate a hailstorm, one eerily comes crashing down on your head.  Id. at 314. This blogger has little doubt that early twenty-first-century America is in the embrace of paranoia, both right and left, some justified (e.g., Ferguson, Missouri; Black Lives Matter)), much not (e.g., the Obama administration allegedly commandeering closed Walmart stores as detention camps). "In its permanence, a witchcraft accusation resembled an Internet rumor. The majority of women who were hanged had faced earlier accusations or were daughters of women who had. Indelible stains did not attach themselves to accuser in 1692." Id. at 360, fn.).