The Paronoid Style of American Politics by Richard Hofstadter

"Although American political life has rarely been touched by the most acute varieties of class conflict, it has served again and again as an arena for uncommonly angry minds.  Today this fact is most evident on the extreme right wing, which has shown, particularly in the Goldwater movement, how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority.  Behind such movements there is a style of mind that has a long and varied history.  I call it the paranoid style..." 3

"The sins of these enemies of Christ, and Christians, are of numbers and degrees which mock account and description.  All that the malice and atheism of the Dragon, the cruelty and rapacity of the Beast, and the fraud and deceit of the false Prophet, can generate, or accomplish, swell the list.  No personal or national interest of man has been uninvaded; no impious sentiment, or action, against God has been spared...Shall we, my brethren, become partakers of these sins?  Shall we introduce them into our government, our schools, our families?  Shall our sons become the disciples of Voltaire, the dragons of Marat; or our daughters the concubines of the Illuminate? (Jedidiah Morse, 1789)

The basic elements of contemporary right wing thought: first: "...conspiracy,  running over more than a decade, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt's New Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism....many would agree with Frank Chodorov, the author of "The Income Tax: The Root of All Evil, that this campaign began with the passage of the income tax amendment to the constitution in 1913."
Second: "top government officialdom has been infiltrated by Communists [or socialists]" and third: "the country is infused with a network of communist agents [socialists, liberals], just as in the old days it was infiltrated by Jesuit agents, so that the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media are engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans." 26-27

Economics for the Rest of US: Debunking the Science that makes life dismal by Moshe Adler

..according to conventional economic theory, what's good for the rich and powerful is good for "the economy." XV

The anti-intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstader

"The replacement of the New Dealers by the car dealers" (Adlai Stevenson on the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Nixon 4

"If you send your son to the colleges of today, you will create the Executioner of tomorrow."  From the right wing publication "Freeman" 1951.  14
  
"Intellect is the critical, creative, and contemplative side of mind. Whereas intelligence seeks to grasp, manipulate, reorder, adjust, intellect examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criticizes, imagines. The heart of the matter...is that the professional man lives off ideas, not for them." R. Hoffstader, "The Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. 25-27


"Intelligence will seize the immediate meaning in a situation and evaluate it.  Intellect evaluates the evaluations, and looks for the meanings of situations as a whole [a system]."


"It is this element--the fact that ends are set from some interest or vantage point outside of the process itself--which characterizes both the zealot, who lives obsessively for a single idea, or the mental technician, whose mind is used not for free speculation but for a salable end.  The goal here is external and not self-determined, whereas the intellectual life has a certain spontaneous character and inner determination.  It has also a peculiar poise of its own...established by a balance between two basic qualities in the intellectual's attitude toward ideas--qualities that may be designated as playfulness and piety."

‎"The figure of the school teacher may well be taken as a central symbol in any modern society. The teacher is the first professional representative of the life of the mind who enters into the experience of most children; and the feeling the child entertains toward the teacher, his awareness of the communities regard for the teacher, are focal points in the formation of his early, rudimentary notions about learning." R. Hofstadter.  309

"Extreme orthodoxy betrays by its very frenzy that the poison of skepticism has entered the soul of the church; for men insist most vehemently upon their certainties when their hold upon them has been shaken.  Frantic orthodoxy is a method for obscuring doubt."  R. Niehbuhr


"The role of the is inherited from the office of the cleric: it implies a special sense of the ultimate value in existence of the act of comprehension.  Socrates, when he said the unexamined life is not worth living, struck the essence of it."


"...the curiosity of the playful mind is inordinately restless and active. This very restlessness and activity gives a distinctive cast of its view of truth and its discontent with dogmas...The meaning of his intellectual life lies not in the possession of truth but in the quest for new uncertainties....the intellectual is one who turns answers into questions?"

"...In the United States the play of the mind is perhaps the only form of play that is not looked upon with the most tender indulgence.  His piety is likely to seem nettlesome, in not actually dangerous.  And neither quality is considered to contribute very much to the practical business of life." 33

"Intellect is dangerous. Left free, there is nothing it will not reconsider, analyze, throw into question. 'Let us admit the case of the conservative,' John Dewey wrote, 'If we once start thinking no one can guarantee what will be the outcome, except that many objects, ends and institutions will be surely doomed.  Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril, and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place" 45