>> gst: definitely i think that i am a product o my training and nobody writes books like hofstadter any more and to some dree thaisn't so gat because we tend to be a lot more specialized and demand a lot more footnotes and we don't make grand statement about this as the american-style so he was very much a product of his era. i think what most influenced me as a scholar is i started out thinking the investigations o the fbi and cia after the church committee investigations and after i published that book in 1996, a lot of people started contacting me with stories aut this w an academic book, it was my dissertion. yet i got a lot of feedback from pele around the country very engaged in the subject o believed they were the victims of government cspiracy and sometimes it was difficult to look at their stories and tel if they needed medication or if they'v really had been spied on by the fbi. so i bame very intested in a sword of figuring out this relationship. >> host: i know the feeling. i studied a psychiaic hospital atne point of my career and there was a patientinng a mob was out t

some of our greahistorians, like richa hofstadter and rry wills, have written abou this. you go back to the foundations of our rublic, first ofll, we have two documents-- "creedal documts" they're sometimes called--ore or less at war witone another. e declaration of independenc sa one thing, and the constitution ss another. >> moyers: theeclaration says.. >> ...says that we will ben egalitarian society in wch all rights will bevailable to one and all, and the cstitution creates a complex polical system that ops that change from happening. so, there'a clash right at the beginning. now, what we've en is that certain groups among us-- an sometimes it's been the ft-- have bn able to dominate the conversation and transform politi into a kind of theater. and that's what we're seng now. >> moys: when you see these people in e theater of television, you callhem the insurrectionis, in your book, what do you thk motivates them >> one of the interestg velopments in our politics, just the past few mohs, although you could see signsf it earlier, the emergence of the demographic we alw

. >> ht: in that regard it seems to me your analysis really derts from richard hofstadter's analysisnd the paranoid style in american politics. which really goes much farther down the psonality path. >> gue: yes, i does. hofstadter wrote his book in the 1960's and it is a really brilliant book comin in which she argued conspiracy theories are a current feature in americ politics and he located these conspiracy theories on the fringes rather than in the ceer of american life and he believed that americans have this, not that there were more prone to conspiracy theories but that they were, they didn't have this paranoid style in their politics. he w very interested in mccarthyism and very affected by. obviously is writing after the mccarthy period so he wanted to understand is indie manly selves paranoid as a right-wing phenomenon and an irrational phenomena. he saw it as the disease and the ask the question, why are americans so paranoid? it is a really usel question but i am a historian of government seccy and my research was in the 1990's and it seems to me in my own research i foun

richard hofstadter in 1952 argued the case for adlai stevenson because he was a true conservative. you can spend that infinitely. you can call any one a conservative who follows policies you like but the point is that the politics of accommodation and a flexibility is something that has fallen very much into disrepute in our time. i think obama's strengtsane to parnes on a fight and his weaknesses, when he doesn't end the i thank and i don't want to seem as though i have jumped t much into your camp if i say one thing th struck me as teresting about obama and davidemnick of all people told me he is writing aut this is if you actually look t the intellectual genealogy of obama there is very little we would call liberalism. there really is a kind of leftism and if it is true that he and his administration have not learned the lesson that i think clinton actuay did, he teamed up with gingrich to end welfare as we know it. george will objective at the time and so did patrick moynihan but there you have it. it could be a problem. to answer the question abou what should be don h will tel

my own research i saw a lot of examples of real government conspiracy and so i wanted to push hofstadter's question further and looked at how things have changed since the 1960's and how real government conspiracy and the revelation of their government conspiracies have influenced conspiracy theories about the government. in the 1960's it wasn't so, it was logical for hstetter to put americans on the couch but after watergate and after the revelation that i looked at in my first book about the cia and thebi in the early cold war it was not so irrational perhaps for americans to believe in conspiracy theories abo their governnt so i went do look at what is the relationship and tillie update this in light of recent events. >>ost: it is not only a change in what is hapning out there in the world that there are these government nspiracies which i wanto return to later also but also that fashions change for lack of a better word in academic analysis an intellectual analysis. you probab wld not have a popular analysis within the academy of the took the freudian approach these days so how much an