>The other problem is special pleading - the author adds more and more conditions on what constitutes the "paranoid style", until he's able to isolate the phenomenon to mostly the right half of the political spectrum. Meanwhile one can make a career of blaming everything on capitalism, colonialism, racism, or whiteness [1], and remain safely in the clear.

The author already answered in the second paragraph:

"Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content."

Or here:

"In the history of the United States one find it, for example, in the anti-Masonic movement, the nativist and anti-Catholic movement, in certain spokesmen of abolitionism who regarded the United States as being in the grip of a slaveholders’ conspiracy, in many alarmists about the Mormons, in some Greenback and Populist writers who constructed a great conspiracy of international bankers, in the exposure of a munitions makers’ conspiracy of World War I, in the popular left-wing press, in the contemporary American right wing, and on both sides of the race controversy today, among White Citizens’ Councils and Black Muslims."

>Meanwhile one can make a career of blaming everything on capitalism, colonialism, racism, or whiteness [1], and remain safely in the clear.

Yeah, there is a difference between blaming things on a shadowy tiny hidden cabal of vaguely-defined conspirators whose existence you don't even attempt to prove, and blaming... you know... the people actually in charge.

I mean, the people in power during most of the last centuries and decades have been white, racist, colonialist and capitalists. That's a fact. That is how they defined themselves openly.

So, you are in effect saying that "reality has a well-known liberal bias".