In 1964, as Barry Goldwater’s firebrand conservatism was reaching fever pitch in the United States, the historian Richard Hofstadter detailed the emergence of an incendiary style of politics. This style was not, Hofstadter emphasised, attached to any particular political ideology: it could be found on both the left and right. Nor was it the product of a particular time and place: you can find examples scattered throughout the “museum of incompetence” that is political history.

What characterised the style was a conspiratorial worldview and a willingness to excite the “animosities and passions of a small minority” for political leverage. Hofstadter called it the “paranoid style, simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy I have in mind”.

When Hofstadter speaks of the “paranoid style”, he is not using the word “paranoid” in any clinical sense. Indeed, while the clinically paranoid and the spokesperson for political paranoia can occasionally sound alike –“they both tend to be overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic in expression” – there is a vital difference between the two. Where the clinically paranoid interprets all the hostile forces in the world as directed specifically against himself, the paranoid style finds those hostile forces “directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate affects not himself alone but millions of others”.

The 2015 Canadian federal election is still a tangle of subplots. But, as we head into the final week, one overarching theme of the narrative is starting to emerge. This election has witnessed the full blossoming of a paranoid style of Canadian politics – a Manichean worldview characterised by suspiciousness, exaggeration, conspiratorial fantasy and apocalypticism.

There’s no gainsaying that opposition leader Thomas Mulcair and his New Democratic party have been revelling in these energies when they paint the prime minister as some bloodthirsty Caligula. But it is Stephen Harper’s own campaign that has recently adopted the paranoid style as the lingua franca of its political discourse.

Take last week’s announcement of an RCMP “tip-line” to alert the authorities to “barbaric cultural practices against women and girls” – practices including child and forced marriage, polygamy, rape and sexual slavery, female genital mutilation and “honour” killing. The obvious fact that all of these practices are already illegal in Canada is in some sense beside the point. These “barbaric cultural practices” pose no more threat to 21st-century Canadians than the Bavarian Illuminati or the masons posed to 18th- and 19th-century Americans. These groups exist as “social problems” only insofar as they serve to inflame paranoid passions for political leverage.

Of course, this being Canada, our own version of the paranoid style requires a certain artful indirection and deniability. Harper has not come out in the manner of Donald Trump and warned against immigrant rapists. Instead, he warns against “opening the floodgates” to potentially radicalised immigrants. He points out that Islamic State “has tortured and beheaded people, raped and sold women into slavery, slaughtered minorities and kidnapped innocent victims”, then hastens to add that “Canada [i]s a potential target”, that Isis must be stopped from attacking nations “including Canada”, and that the government’s role is to “protect Canadians”. Harper’s art is one of insinuation and juxtaposition, making sure that the relevant terms – rape, torture, beheading, sex slavery – are rhetorically proximate to Canada and Canadians.

Above all, the paranoid style habitually frames debates in terms of “values”. As Hofstadter wrote: “The paranoid disposition is mobilised into action chiefly by social conflicts that involve ultimate schemes of values that bring fundamental fears and hatreds, rather than negotiable interests, into political action.”

As the Conservatives began to slip in the polls, “values” suddenly became the inescapable term. “We need to stand up for our values,” Chris Alexander, the minister of citizenship and immigration, said recently. “We need to do that in citizenship ceremonies. We need to do that to protect women and girls from forced marriage and other barbaric practices.”

Here’s the thing. Canadian politics – at least, the non-paranoid variety – can be boring. It should be boring. In the normal, humdrum course of events, our parliamentary democracy is characterised by measured compromise, a process of give and take on policy matters as we fumble toward incremental progress. But the paranoid style is utterly uninterested in the niceties of negotiation. In the paranoid worldview, we are perpetually confronted with a fundamental clash of values, an existential crisis capable of undoing our very way of life from within.

“Never will I say to my daughter that a woman has to cover her face because she is a woman,” Harper proudly affirmed in the French debate. Well, why would he? But to quarrel with Harper for being “illogical” is in some sense beside the point: there are no “reasons” one can muster against such a statement, because we are not dealing in reason. Harper’s sudden swivel to “values” may strike us as new, but it has a long and violent lineage.

If “anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan,” as Hofstadter asserts, then anti-Muslim paranoia is the pornography of the contemporary Conservative. What fuses the two is a paranoid style of politics, one that unites angry and fearful minds across the centuries.