RALEIGH – Richard Hofstadter once famously wrote about “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” He was referring to conspiracy theories popular among some American conservatives during the 1950s and 1960s. But I think it’s becoming clear that the paranoid style is back with a vengeance – in the American Left.

It began with the 2000 Florida election imbroglio. Given the closeness of the race, the confusions of butterfly ballots, urban myths about electoral intimidation, and the presence of the Republican presidential candidate’s brother in the governor’s office, some furious with the eventual certification of President Bush’s narrow but legitimate victory birthed the notion that the Florida vote had somehow been manipulated. (There was also excoriation of the U.S. Supreme Court for “selecting” Bush, but this argument was simply wrong, not paranoid.)

This year, with what would seem like a set of facts far less congenial to such flights of fancy, there are so many fanciful flying things that otherwise-sensible people are getting smacked in the face with them and, in the resulting befuddlement, are alleging that President Bush has “stolen the election for the second time.”

Believe it or not, a primary piece of “evidence” for this idea is that the early exit polls for the news media showed Kerry leading in most of the battleground states. The GOP conspiracy must have rigged the computer-voting machines to deliver a different outcome. Don’t you see? The pieces all fit together. I mean, all this talk of flawed exit polling is just the 2004 equivalent of the Magic Bullet Theory – an implausible cover story that is accepted only because of the conspiracy’s powerful, propagandistic control of the media.

I tempted to think that it would be pointless to argue with those who would buy such a silly argument. But in the interest of rational discourse, I’d recommend a recent posting over at the Mystery Pollster blog that addresses the matter. In particular, argues the man who ran the exit polling, the sampling was off about as much in places with optical scans, punch cards, and other manual voting procedures as it was in places with computerized voting. That means the statewide polling, not the statewide vote counts, went screwy.

There is such a thing as vote fraud. There are obviously many problems with the vote-counting process that need to be addressed right here in North Carolina. However, we can just all stipulate right now that Bush didn’t steal the election, that nationwide vote-machine conspiracies are highly implausible, and that Martians aren’t secretly running the Vatican’s drug-running cartel?

Everyone knows it’s really the Stonecutters.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.