They really think we are crazy. Here is a classic paranoid schizophrenic by the name of Jared Loughner who shoots a moderate Democratic member of the House and where does intellectual opinion put the blame? It is all those psycho right wingers like Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and limited government Tea Partyists who inspired him.

Who are we and they? “We” are conservatives and “they” are an incredible retinue of progressive intellectuals: The New York Times editorial board, its top columnist Paul Krugman, Jonathan Alter of Newsweek, NBCs Kelly O’Donnell, MSNBCs Keith Olbermann, CBSs Nancy Cordes, Dana Milbank and Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post, Paul Packer of the New Yorker, Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos, and even E.J. Dionne, Jr, of the Brookings Institution, twice, among many others.

You get the idea. For a while we believe they just think we are wrong or ignorant, which is fine, but then it explodes in contempt and condemnation. When President John Kennedy was assassinated it did not matter then or even today that his killer was a Marxist; it was the right that did it because of the “climate of hate” they created criticizing this good liberal and his policies. Every mass killing since from Columbine to Virginia Tech and beyond, no matter the murder’s background, it is the right that did it. Now it is for shooting poor Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others, including a conservative judge.

What do you do with such sick and angry people? You send them to a shrink, teach them how to speak moderately and where to live – preferably in an institution with bars and soft cells, where we cannot hurt them or even ourselves. It is apparently irrelevant that Loughner first stalked Congresswoman Giffords in 2007 when Palin was an unknown governor of a far-away state and Glenn Beck was still struggling on Headline News. Nonetheless, progressives are convinced we are “out to get them.”

Where do they get such ideas? Progressives get frustrated. President Kennedy’s program was going nowhere in 1963 no matter all his kind intentions so it must be the rightwing that stopped his program even though both houses of Congress were Democratic. Things are even worse for progressives today. Here they had a very popular President Barack Obama with an overwhelming majority in the House and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and after 60 years of trying they pass an historic government takeover of health care, plus what President Obama called “the toughest financial reform since the Great Depression,” plus the largest expenditures on “stimulus” spending ever, and even business regulation everywhere including that of greenhouse gas by EPA fiat. But what happens? The voters reject them. It must be the right’s fault. What else could it be?

The intellectual basis for progressive fear comes from a classic article by Columbia University Professor Richard Hofstadter for Harper’s magazine in 1964 called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Meyerson even cited the article by name in his recent rant. Notice this hallowed writing did not even appear in a refereed academic journal but it became one of the most reprinted article in university books of readings on politics and government. Generations of students have been schooled in the professor’s mantra that “In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority.”

While this “small minority” of conservatives reached almost four in ten Americans in the following presidential election, they all were apparently paranoid and needed professional psychological help. It did not matter that during the following 1970s many mainline liberal professors tried to demonstrate empirically that conservatives were crazy and held the beliefs Hofstadter claimed but could not do so. Mainline political science basically concluded that the thesis was unproven. But that did not affect the popularity of the reprints and what the professors taught their students, who did not have access to the research and have become today’s progressive intellectuals and journalists.

As far as Palin using the term “blood libel” for its  presumed rhetorical links to the Holocaust, certifiably progressive Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz responded that the term now has a “broad metaphorical meaning” and that there was “nothing improper and certainly nothing anti-Semitic in Sarah Palin using the term.”  Regarding Beck’s use of militant and gun imagery, how about President Obama saying during the 2008 campaign, “If they bring a knife…we bring a gun”?  For Rush Limbaugh’s passion about politics generally, as John Fund has noted, he has been on the air for 22 years at the same level of intensity and from the Oklahoma City bombing to the IRS Kamikaze plane, not one of the suspects has had Limbaugh material or even been traced as one of his listeners.

The inability to separate unfounded fears from reality is called paranoia. It is significant that President Obama has separated himself from this disability in his memorial speech to the victims at the University of Arizona. He recognized the desire to “impose some order on the chaos” of the shootings but retorted that “we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who happen to think differently than we do.” He said it was “important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.” He concluded that “if, as has been discussed in recent days, their deaths help usher in more civility in our public discourse, let us remember it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy — it did not — but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to the challenges of our nation in a way that would make them proud.”

After all of these years, is it possible to separate progressive intellectuals from their indoctrination in the Hofstadterian paranoia about conservatism? There is no indication as yet of any remorse on the part of the usual suspects even after the president’s high-minded rebuke to his supposed intellectual betters. In the meantime, conservatives should have compassion for those suffering afflictions they cannot control.

Donald Devine was the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985 under Ronald Reagan and is Senior Scholar at Bellevue University’s Center for American Vision and Values and the editor of ConservativeBattleline Online.