In the paranoid style, as I conceive it, the feeling of persecution is central, and it is indeed systematized in grandiose theories of conspiracy. But there is a vital difference between the paranoid spokesman in politics and the clinical paranoiac: although they both tend to be overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, snd apocalyptic in expression, the clinical paranoid sees the hostile and conspiratorial world in which he feels himself to be living to be directed specifically against him; whereas the spokesman of the paranoid style finds it directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate affects not himself alone but millions of others.
-- "The Paranoid Style In American Politics," Richard Hofstadter
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