I have been on a bit of a Richard Hofstadter kick, and at the moment I am (slowly) rereading both The American Political Tradition and the Men who Made It and The Paranoid Style in American Politics. I was struck, in the latter, by this paragraph toward the conclusion of the title essay.

The distinguishing thing about the paranoid style is not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they regard a “vast” or “gigantic” conspiracy as the motive force in historical events. History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power, and what is felt to be needed to defeat it is not the usual methods of political give-and-take, but an all-out crusade.
The paranoid spokesman sees the face of this conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, who systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point: it is now or never in organizing resistance to conspiracy. Time is forever just running out.

Although some of this is at work across the American political spectrum, it is hard to read this diagnosis and not think immediately of QAnon and the apocalyptic fantasies of the far-right and, to a great extent, the Republican Party.