The trouble with spending much of the week watching the online campaign to free Tommy Robinson, as I did, is that you then can’t stop seeing it. There’s such a distinctive style to these messages of support, collated under the #FreeTommy hashtag. Mawkish, rather wallowing in victimhood, and frequently cultish. But there is more to the shtick than a cocktail of self-righteousness and triteness. It is, in that 1960s coinage of the American historian Richard Hofstadter, “the paranoid style”. Running through vast proportions of the online outpourings is an over-emotional conspiracism. People are afraid of us. People are trying to silence us. People will do anything to crush our leader. The idea that their leader could have got something wrong is a plot.

I will root antisemites out of Labour – they do not speak for me | Jeremy Corbyn Read more

Still, don’t take my word for it – take theirs. “A hero in the lion’s den”; “the establishment can’t control him and they can’t unmake him”; “a voice for the voiceless”; “see us rise MSM – you will not win”; “they can’t crush him”; “you sound scared. You have for a long time. Change can be daunting for the heavily indoctrinated”; “I have his back because he has mine”; “time to stand up to the establishment. Stand up to the media”; “we’re coming for it, all of it, and they are powerless against us”. And the inevitable variations on “I’m actually feeling quite emotional reading through all the tweets.”

Actually, you must forgive me – because I’ve done something faintly mischievous there. In fact, none of the above is from #FreeTommy, but are instead sentiments from a different hashtag that sprang up on Thursday: an online campaign called #WeAreCorbyn, designed to show passionate solidarity with the Labour leader in the wake of his latest self-inflicted antisemitism row. (I realise many will not forgive me for seeing the similarities, and frothingly angry people from both campaigns are thanked in advance for their always amusing correspondence.)

As I say, a lot of these share a distinctive, and in this sense interchangeable, style. Over to the genuine #FreeTommy ones now. “You may have tried to silence us, but we will prevail”; “they can’t silence all of us”; “we’ve got your back”; “the establishment is afraid of us”; “we shouldn’t be afraid of them – they should fear us”; “the government should be scared of us”; “I am proud and stand with you”. And the inevitable variations on “Feeling emotional reading all these”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Demonstrators campaign against antisemitism outside Labour HQ in London. Photograph: Steve Parkins/REX/Shutterstock

Before we go on, I should stress that I am not here to liken Jeremy Corbyn to a far-right rabble rouser – even though his bespoke antisemitism definition defends the principle of being able to compare pretty much anyone with Nazis. Look, I’m genuinely glad he’s worrying about inflation – and he’s hardly the first guy in history to shout about it at rallies.

I’m kidding. I’m honestly kidding. Unwisely so, given my experience of many Corbyn fans, who love it when you take the piss out of the Tories week after week, but get angrier over jokes about Jeremy than they do about seemingly anything else. So perhaps we’ll leave this blasphemous facetiousness there.

Peter Willsman’s rant points to a Labour party still blind to antisemitism | Gaby Hinsliff Read more

In many ways, certain similarities between various modern tribes should not be a surprise. These are troubled times. People are searching for heroes they can believe in, on either side of the political divide – as they have in previous eras of note. In his excellent and mind-opening book, How Democracy Ends, David Runciman discourages the knee-jerk historical reference of our times – the idea that this or that is most redolent of the 1930s.

Instead, those looking at contemporary politics and searching for historical parallels are directed toward the 1890s. Taking the example of the US, Runciman cites an economic crash, rapid disruption in ways of working caused by new technologies, uneven distribution of the benefits to such things, with most people seeeing their incomes fall, but a very few getting wildly rich, and so on. Into these currents come figures such as William Jennings Bryan, who won the Democratic nomination in 1896. Bryan was unconventional, he bypassed what we now call the mainstream media in favour of face-to-face interaction with voters and his own pamphleteering, he felt ordinary Americans had been ensnared by big finance. As for who was to blame, there were various culprits, “particularly bankers in the City of London with names like Rothschild …”

Ah yes. Well, you do get a bit of that with a lot of these movements, don’t you; often on the fringes, sometimes more centrally. As Hofstadter explicitly stated more than 50 years ago, the paranoid style is “far from new and not necessarily rightwing … It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.”

As always trumpeted, inflexibility is Corbyn’s USP. Yet it does not always connote strength

I do not know whether Labour NEC member Peter Willsman is more or less normal, but the leaked recording of his rant about Jewish “Trump fanatics” certainly falls into the paranoid style. Yet the recording shows Corbyn staying deafeningly silent. Perhaps he prefers his Jewish supporters to own these things for him, which is a funny form of leadership. They shouldn’t have to.

As for suggestions that Corbyn might make a conciliatory speech at the Jewish Museum in London, my favourite detail was the initial suggestion it would happen on Friday night. Oh man … Friday night. Any Jews got anything on?

Filling the vacuum, meanwhile, others point out that Corbyn’s perceived version of antisemitism has over the past couple of years been endorsed by former Ku Klux Klan chief David Duke, former BNP leader Nick Griffin, the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer ... these should be an alarm bell. I’ll lay various plots against Corbyn at the door of “the establishment”, but not those. I wonder if Corbyn has ever thought to himself: “I am in the worrying position of being endorsed by some thermonuclear horrors on my handling of this issue.” If he hasn’t, he is a weaker man than many assume.

The prevalent view among many close to him is that relentless media attacks have left his supporters feeling under siege. But which siege? There are sieges and sieges. It’s fair to say this current one isn’t Masada. This has been one of those weeks in the Labour leadership where it’s all felt a bit Waco.

Timeline: Labour, Jeremy Corbyn and antisemitism claims Read more

As always trumpeted, inflexibility is Corbyn’s USP. Yet it does not always connote strength. If he truly wants to govern for the many and not the few, he should consider the possibility that he is sometimes wrong, and horribly so.

A fundamentalist belief in one’s own moral probity is what did for Tony Blair, and what allows the likes of Robinson to think they know better than the law. Corbyn won’t start some messianic war, or collapse a trial, obviously – but he will make a messianically blinkered mistake on something else big and important. People who think they’re right about everything – and that they always have been – always do.

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist