And this comes straight from the top of the Democratic establishment. Where once the right had sleepless nights over Communist (mostly Russian) agents, so today liberals think Vlad lurks behind Trump’s every move. Today, the conspiracy theory du jour is that Trump is ‘Putin’s Puppet’, a useful idiot in hock to the Kremlin and being used as a weapon against Western civilisation. McCarthy acolyte Robert H Welch once accused President Eisenhower of being ‘a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy’. And the parallels with the Fifties are striking. Yes, Donald Trump’s more vociferous online fanboys are wont to push heavily footnoted theories about Hillary Clinton being terminally ill and/or plotting a ‘socialist dictatorship’ but even respectable critics of Donald Trump are tapping into the paranoid style. With the US election looming, Hofstadter’s essay is as pertinent today as it was then – but not in the way you might think.
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