A group of diplomats founded IB in 1968 as a common curriculum for their children.
Last year, a group of Republican state representatives pushed a bill to prevent local schools from subjugating themselves to “the governance of a foreign body or organization.” The threat to that sovereignty allegedly came from Bedford High School’s adoption of the International Baccalaureate Program, also used in Merrimack Valley. I’m not sure the Paranoid Style is any stronger today than it has been in past New Hampshire politics, but with many of the right and left firmly in its grip, now is as good as time as any to debunk some of the paranoid populist theories. Fear that some group of others is out to get us is timeless and widespread. Hofstadter traced the Paranoid Style back through Joe McCarthy, the populists of the late 1800s and the anti-Masonic and Jesuit movements. But he did acknowledge that “the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” was not limited to one side of the political spectrum. Richard Hofstadter began his 1964 essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, “American politics have often been an arena for angry minds.” Hofstadter erred in attributing this to Barry Goldwater, missing as most people did the nascent strain of American conservatism in Goldwater’s campaign.
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