I skimmed the History News Network (cute name) article, and it seems to convey a pretty accurate general picture of Hofstadter's work. I was headed out to lunch when I spotted your post, so I'll read it more carefully later. In the meantime...

This is indeed a subject that's long been near and dear to my heart, especially in recent times, as the problem of understanding the Conservative Mind has taken on such existential urgency.

The study of the CM can probably be said to have formally started after World War II, when psychologists started to examine the similarly existential question of what happened to German society that sent them down the road to Hitler and war. The phenomenon that emerged from the research was named "authoritarian conservatism", which seems to be an unfortunate choice of words, because of its power to make rightwing heads explode on contact. Tom will be here shortly.

But nevertheless, it's a useful concept, describing a general mechanism in which fear, primarily, with a dose of nationalism and tribal loyalty, aligns a population on the State as a paternal authority figure, one both beloved and feared.

One thing I find interesting about this theory is the way that it applies with equal validity to totalitarian societies regardless of political ideology. It described Nazi Germany, and described the Soviet Union equally well.

Another thread in my thinking has had to do with the notion of the collective, and how all human societies are some sort of collective. (And why Ted Kaczinski is the closest real-life example of Ayn Rand's ideal of the egotist individual.) What distinguishes them is their height, that is, the extent to which a collective is hierarchical (tall), or egalitarian (flat). The US is a collective (a fact I admit I delight in tormenting rightwingers with), one with a technically flat hierarchy, but, after two centuries of laissez-faire capitalism, is in fact quite tall and rigid. It's perhaps tangential to the main point, but it helps to understand that even the most rabidly self-proclaimed individualist actually operates within a human herd; the rightwing echo chamber, for example.

Around 1954, Richard Hofstadter began thinking about these issues, and over the next decade published a series of essays which were eventually gathered together under the title of the collection's most famous essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. I picked up a copy just this August, and found Hofstadter's analysis both pointed and timeless. The rhetoric has evolved and become even more vicious, but the psychology remains the same.

Here's an excerpt on the idea of the paranoid scholar:

A final aspect of the paranoid style is related to that quality of pedantry to which I have already referred. One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is precisely the elaborate concern with demonstration it almost invariably shows . One should not be misled by the fantastic conclusions that are so characteristic of this political style into imagining that it is not, so to speak, argued out along factual lines. The very fantastic character of its conclusions leads to heroic strivings for “evidence” to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed.

...

The typical procedure of the higher paranoid scholarship is to start with such defensible assumptions and with a careful accumulation of facts, or at least of what appear to be facts, and to marshal these facts toward an overwhelming “proof” of the particular conspiracy that is to be established. It is nothing if not coherent— in fact, the paranoid mentality is far more coherent than the real world, since it leaves no room for mistakes, failures, or ambiguities. It is, if not wholly rational, at least intensely rationalistic; it believes that it is up against an enemy who is as infallibly rational as he is totally evil, and it seeks to match his imputed total competence with its own, leaving nothing unexplained and comprehending all of reality in one overreaching, consistent theory. It is nothing if not “scholarly” in technique.

...

What distinguishes the paranoid style is not , then, the absence of verifiable facts (though it is occasionally true that in his extravagant passion for facts the paranoid occasionally manufactures them), but rather the curious leap in imagination that is always made at some critical point in the recital of events. John Robison’s tract on the Illuminati followed a pattern that has been repeated for over a century and a half. For page after page he patiently records the details he has been able to accumulate about the history of the Illuminati. Then, suddenly, the French Revolution has taken place , and the Illuminati have brought it about. What is missing is not veracious information about the organization, but sensible judgment about what can cause a revolution. The plausibility the paranoid style has for those who find it plausible lies, in good measure , in this appearance of the most careful, conscientious, and seemingly coherent application to detail, the laborious accumulation of what can be taken as convincing evidence for the most fantastic conclusions, the careful preparation for the big leap from the undeniable to the unbelievable. The singular thing about all this laborious work is that the passion for factual evidence does not, as in most intellectual exchanges, have the effect of putting the paranoid spokesman into effective two -way communication with the world outside his group— least of all with those who doubt his views. He has little real hope that his evidence will convince a hostile world. His effort to amass it has rather the quality of a defensive act which shuts off his receptive apparatus and protects him from having to attend to disturbing considerations that do not fortify his ideas. He has all the evidence he needs; he is not a receiver, he is a transmitter.

Amazingly spot on, isn't he?

One testament to the timeless nature of Hofstadter's insights is the way that his work fuels modern analyses of the Conservative Mind. Salon had a three-part series starting this August (I think everybody around then was anticipating the Tea Party's threatened October Revolution, and wanting to be armed with knowledge). The Tea Party's Paranoid Aesthetic's title acknowledges the debt to Hofstadter, and I think does a nice job of going beyond his 1950s description to analyze the unique features of the modern Teahadis.

The second part is The conservative crackup: How the Republican Party lost its mind, also from August. Part 3: Modern GOP is still the party of Dixie, which views the problem from the unique angle of traditional Southern local power arrangements--the car dealer, the plant owner, etc.--and how Federal initiatives encroach on these feudal baronies. Interesting point of view.

That should give you something to chew on while I go get some lunch.