Hofstadter's description begins:

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated — if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

Compromising with the evil Bush-Cheney neo-con cabal has always been verboten for the fightin' fightin' netroots. But their reactions to Palin have been extra nuanced:

But zeke L, in response to a post I made in DemFromCT's diary After Palin, Before McCain compares Sarah Palin to Leona Helmsley, then the White Witch from C.S. Lewis's Narnia books. Now this comparison piqued my interest. Now the White Witch was the embodiment of evil in the Narnia books. Is it reasonable to think of Sarah Palin as being that kind of agent of evil? That certainly seems the logical extension of the tidal wave of Palin diaries here. So rather than post yet another diary which implies that "Sarah Palin is evil" in a kind of subtextual way, I thought I'd do something a bit different. I thought I'd tackle the question head on.... Governor Palin is not really much like the White Witch. But to be fair to the witch, Governor Palin comes from a vastly more advantageous background when it comes to the development of moral character.

And there ensues a pedantic - and mostly wrong - lecture on Augustine, with arguments for and against Sarah Palin being the embodiment of evil. And, after evaluating arguments for both sides, here are the poll results from the end of the post:

And how does one construct this perfectly evil enemy? Hofstadter continues:

The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).

Depressed HuffPo blogger Adam McKay, yesterday:

So what is this house advantage the Republicans have? It's the press. There is no more fourth estate. Wait, hold on...I'm not going down some esoteric path with theories on the deregulation of the media and corporate bias and CNN versus Fox...I mean it: there is no more functioning press in this country. And without a real press the corporate and religious Republicans can lie all they want and get away with it. And that's the 51% advantage. Think this is some opinion being wryly posited to titillate other bloggers and inspire dialogue with Tucker Carlson or Gore Vidal? Fuck that. Four corporations own all the TV channels. All of them. If they don't get ratings they get canceled or fired. All news is about sex, blame and anger, and fear. Exposing lies about amounts of money taken from lobbyists and votes cast for the agenda of the last eight years does not rate. The end.

Hofstadter's critical point, of course, is that the vast conspiracy doesn't actually exist. These paranoid fantasies are excuses for conspiracy mongers to behave how they want:

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery.

"Secret organizations set up to combat [imagined] secret organizations." That's a fairly specific diagnosis - it'd be really suggestive if a predictive description that precise would end up being a netroots hallmark:

The liberal blogosphere — which usually erupts with ad hominem attacks on the messenger whenever it is subject to the mildest, even-handed criticisms — has been eerily silent since last week’s revelation that MyDD.com founder and DailyKos ally Jerome Armstrong is the subject of a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation for allegedly taking money to promote a stock on a prominent online bulletin board. The New Republic’s Jason Zengerle, writing on his magazine’s The Plank blog, uncovers an e-mail from Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the proprietor of DailyKos, that may help explain things. "TNR obtained a missive Kos sent earlier this week to 'Townhouse,' a private email list comprising elite liberal bloggers, including Jane Hamsher, Matt Stoller, and Christy Hardin Smith," Zengerle writes. "And what was Kos’s message to this group that secretly plots strategy in the digital equivalent of a smoke-filled backroom? Stay mum!".... He also asks his fellow liberal bloggers to keep quiet: "My request to you guys is that you ignore this for now. It would make my life easier if we can confine the story... Let’s starve it of oxygen."

And now the central point about imitation:

The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through "front" groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy. Spokesmen of the various fundamentalist anti-Communist "crusades" openly express their admiration for the dedication and discipline the Communist cause calls forth.

If anything, this is the basic progressive fantasy: Republicans don't win because voters agree with them but because they cheat. That cheating could be anything from being sneaky liars to rigged Diebold machines. And so grim leftists who want to "use the right's tools against it" oscillate between embracing pseudo-sophisticated pop psychology and posting videos on how to stuff ballots. But for sheer hysteria - and since this post is supposed to be about the left's reaction to Palin - this demonstration is hard to beat:

As another [DKos] comment added: This is about Power ... How it is obtained—and how it is wielded in ways that affects all of us... Are you telling me you would not destroy the love a family holds for one another, even if it meant letting someone who would destroy the constitution become president? None of use would use these tactics in a perfect world. It is not a perfect world. It is a fallen world. We have to judge costs and benefits, not moral absolutes. I know this is the way to fanaticism and destruction—believe me I do. But, when we face opponents such as the ones we face ... what else is there for us to do? What choice do we have? When faced with monsters, we have to be monstrous ourselves."

And as long as Hofstadter's batting a thousand, here's the beginning of his next paragraph:

On the other hand, the sexual freedom often attributed to the enemy, his lack of moral inhibition, his possession of especially effective techniques for fulfilling his desires, give exponents of the paranoid style an opportunity to project and express unacknowledgeable aspects of their own psychological concerns. Catholics and Mormons—later, Negroes and Jews—have lent themselves to a preoccupation with illicit sex.

And here's a post about a Palin three-way from some lefty blog. It's enough to prove the point all on its own. But take a glance at the recent-posts sidebar on the right of the screencap - the combination is paranoid-obsessive magic (click on the image for a larger version):

And here's now the final sentence of the passage:

Very often the fantasies of true believers reveal strong sadomasochistic outlets, vividly expressed, for example, in the delight of anti-Masons with the cruelty of Masonic punishments.

And like clockwork, here's the picture that Salon published today, via Hot Air:

So how does a political community end up this deranged? Well - I was kind of fibbing when said that I was going to blockquote Hofstadter's "enemies" section straight down. I actually started with the second paragraph, which is where he begins describing how conspiracy mongers pathologically imagine their enemies. The first paragraph is where he explains how they end up there:

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse. ("Time is running out," said Welch in 1951. "Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.")

And here's Nancy Pelosi a month ago about what's at stake with the Vice Presidency:

For those who thought this was just another election, Nancy Pelosi says to wake up: the planet is at stake in the choice between Barack Obama and John McCain. "We've got a planet to save. Nothing less is at stake other than civilization as we know it today," the California Democrat and speaker of the House told reporters Saturday afternoon in assessing the election and the nominating convention taking place here over the week. She said Mr. Obama's new running mate, Sen Joseph R. Biden Jr., was a good choice because he melds Washington know-how with an outsider's view. She pointed to his daily commute by train from his home in Delaware to Washington as evidence he is still a man of the people. "Joe Biden is the all-American boy," she said in a luncheon for reporters sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor.

Ladies and gentleman, the reality based community.

References:
* The Paranoid Style in American Politics [Richard Hofstadter]
* The Politics of Blood [First Things]
* Elite Liberal Bloggers to Themselves: Shhh! [NYT Opinionator]
* Great moments in media: Salon’s dominatrix/bestiality photoshop of Palin [Hot Air]
* Pelosi: Civilization at stake in November [WashTimes]

Previously:
* The 5 Stages Of Liberal Mourning Over Palin
* CNN Spends Evening Searching For Democrat Who Can Explain Why Anti-Palin Smears Don't Reek Of Sexism. Fails. (Plus: Guess When "Shrill" Used To Be Sexist)
* Turns Out, The Devout Republican Evangelical Governor Of Alaska Has A Soft Spot For Israel