Re: Powerlessness Corrupts

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

> *
> <http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/conspiracy_theory/the_paranoid_mentality/the_paranoid_style.html>
> The Paranoid Style in American Politics
> By Richard Hofstadter?
> Harper's Magazine, November 1964, pp. 77-86.
>
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

This is a VERY interesting article:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061023/wiener
America, Through a Glass Darkly

by JON WIENER

[from the October 23, 2006 issue]

David Brown's biography of Richard Hofstadter has attracted an unusual 
amount of attention for a revised dissertation, riding the wave of 
nostalgia that surrounds the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and liberal 
icon of the 1950s and '60s. At the New York Times Book Review, the book was 
the subject of the longest review of the year, and one of the most 
admiring, written by the editor himself, Sam Tanenhaus, who declared 
Hofstadter "more relevant than ever." The New Republic ran an even longer 
piece by Bancroft Prize winner Sean Wilentz about Hofstadter's "enormous 
mystique today." That mystique reflects a deeper nostalgia for a time when 
historians who addressed the political issues of the day (among them 
Hofstadter, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and C. Vann Woodward) had immense 
intellectual authority and a wide readership, a time when essays written 
with style and grace were honored and a time when writing about great white 
men did not make you look obsolete or reactionary.

The Hofstadter nostalgia boom is also fueled by readers who find in his 
work a foreshadowing of their own anxiety about the irrationality of 
populist movements. His feeling that populism posed a danger to democracy 
seems to liberals and conservatives alike to speak to our own time--as 
indeed in many ways it does. Many writers seeking to understand the 2004 
"red state" phenomenon turned to Hofstadter's essays on "status anxiety" 
and "the paranoid style in American politics"--especially after George W. 
Bush mobilized his supporters with a good-old-boy rhetoric that was proudly 
stupid.

There's no question that Hofstadter's writing was wonderful. But his 
understanding of the American past now seems narrow and flawed, and marked, 
inevitably, by the preoccupations of a generation that lived through Hitler 
and Stalin, by a gnawing anxiety that some kind of American fascism, a 
vicious right-wing movement coming out of the heartland, was not only 
possible but likely. (Such anxiety has not, to be sure, entirely dissipated 
among American liberals; early next year journalist Chris Hedges is 
publishing a book, American Fascists, about the Christian right.)

Hofstadter died in 1970, just as a new generation of historians was 
transforming the profession by turning away from the study of elites. 
Inspired by British historians of the working class like E.P. Thompson, and 
by American New Left historians like Herbert Gutman, they began exploring, 
and celebrating, how history was made by ordinary Americans: by 
working-class immigrants in the tenements, the taverns and the factories, 
and by African-Americans and other oppressed groups. This "history from 
below" represented a defiant challenge to Hofstadter's kind of history.

But if Hofstadter seems newly relevant today, it's not for the reasons 
imagined by Tanenhaus and others. Despite his fame and success, he was 
always more of an outsider than his establishment admirers have understood. 
He disdained the 1950s celebration of consensus; he was deeply skeptical of 
the liberal heroes, especially FDR; he was never much of an anti-Communist; 
and when the student antiwar movement excoriated the hypocrisies and 
failures of the universities, Hofstadter, virtually alone among his entire 
cohort, refused to condemn the students and agreed with them on some key 
issues, even as he rejected their militant tactics. Thus while Hofstadter 
was in some ways a predictable member of his generation, in others he was 
politically more complicated and intellectually more surprising. It is 
these elements, rather than his particular arguments, that make him 
significant for us today.

Hofstadter was born in Buffalo in 1916 and came of age in the era of the 
Popular Front. He went to college at the University of Buffalo and became 
president of his university's chapter of the National Student League, a 
Communist-led antiwar organization that, according to a government report 
quoted by Brown, "attempted physical disruption of campus activities which 
led to arrest, suspensions and expulsions of its members" (foreshadowing 
his students at Columbia in '68). In his early twenties, he went to 
Mississippi with his passionate left-wing wife, Felice Swados, and visited 
black sharecroppers at Delta Cooperative, the subject of a famous series of 
photographs by Dorothea Lange for the Farm Security Administration. His 
1938 master's thesis at Columbia was a fierce indictment of the New Deal's 
Agricultural Adjustment Act for supporting Southern planters rather than 
poor farmers.

The Spanish Civil War was raging during his graduate school days, and in 
October 1938 he responded, as many of his peers did, by joining the 
Communist Party--in his case, the CP unit at Columbia. "My fundamental 
reason for joining," he wrote his brother-in-law, "is that I don't like 
capitalism and want to get rid of it.... I join without enthusiasm but with 
a sense of obligation." (Brown does not quote the letter, which Eric Foner 
cites in a chapter on Hofstadter in his book Who Owns History?) Four months 
later, in February 1939, he quit the party. His reason, according to fellow 
student Kenneth Stampp (who later achieved renown with his history of 
slavery, The Peculiar Institution): "He couldn't stand the people." But 
even after that, in October 1939, he wrote his brother-in-law (in another 
letter not quoted by Brown): "I hate capitalism and everything that goes 
with it." In 1941 he got his first full-time job, directly as a result of 
anti-Communism: He replaced a faculty member forced out by City College 
because of alleged Communist Party ties: Jack Foner, father of Eric. (Eric 
would later fill the same chair at Columbia that Hofstadter had held. You 
might call that the irony of history.) Three years later Hofstadter 
published his first book, a blistering exposé of capitalist ideology, 
Social Darwinism in American Thought.

The turning point for Hofstadter was 1945: That year Felice died of cancer, 
depriving him of the most important leftist connection in his life, and 
Columbia hired him. He was 30 years old. The transformation from 1930s 
radical activist to 1950s liberal intellectual was under way.

The American Political Tradition, published in 1948 and widely regarded as 
Hofstadter's best book, is still selling briskly almost sixty years later: 
Recently it had an Amazon ranking of 4,400, which would be envied by most 
historians with books on the market today. (Brown's, for example, was at 
22,000 on the same day.) Knopf's 1948 publicity marketed the book as a work 
of consensus history: "In this age of political extremism, this young and 
brilliant Columbia historian searches out the common ground among all 
American parties and factions." In fact the book was more subtle, and much 
more interesting, than that. Hofstadter wrote the book from a vantage point 
on the left. While others, like Daniel Boorstin, celebrated consensus, 
Hofstadter was openly critical. It opens with a description of an 
"increasingly passive and spectatorial" state of mind in postwar America, a 
country dominated by "corporate monopoly," its citizens "bereft of a 
coherent and plausible body of belief" and adrift in a "rudderless and 
demoralized state."

The book consists of twelve biographical portraits of key American 
political figures, ranging from the slaveholder John Calhoun to the 
abolitionist Wendell Phillips, from the free-market Republican Herbert 
Hoover to the welfare-state Democrat FDR, from Jefferson the patrician to 
Andrew Jackson the common man. Hofstadter's thesis was that all shared 
fundamental assumptions about the goodness of private property and the 
value of "progress." The archaic assumptions of The American Political 
Tradition are all too evident today. Hofstadter believed he was studying 
something called "the American mind" when he profiled American Presidents, 
and that their stories and those of other elite white men were 
representative of our political tradition. But while presidential biography 
may be of limited value--to the study, albeit not the marketing, of 
American history--several of Hofstadter's essays in The American Political 
Tradition remain compelling works of the genre that have seldom been 
surpassed.

(clip)

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