On Sunday afternoon, several hundred Yes voters today met for a rally outside the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. It was, as one speaker admitted to me, the political equivalent of “comfort eating”: self-congratulatory lauding of the bravery of Yes voters fused with anger at the grotesque unfairness of it all.
Fifty years ago, Richard Hofstadter attacked “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”. Hofstadter defined its practitioners as displaying “qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy”, observing that “the feeling of persecution is central” to the paranoid style. Without stretching the point, a comparison could be made to some of the most fervent independence campaigners in Scotland.
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