Hofstadt's fascination with courtesy and fear of the far right led to his overestimation of moderate Republicans. He tends to think of politics as a contest in which rational moderates are attacked across the board by extremists, and he selectively (not entirely honestly) portrays left-wing social movements — all signs of resistance to liberalism, a type of society that has emerged in the Trump era. Reading this anthology, it's easy to imagine Hofstadt writing an op-ed for The Atlantic or The New York Times warning of the dangers of populism and anti-intellectualism and emphasizing the need for all the good moderates to come together.
The author | Jitt Hill
Translated | Wei Wei
Proofreading | Chen Yang
The full text totals 14476 words and takes about 48 minutes to read
In 2020, the American Humanities Classics Series launched a collection of Hofstadter's writings. The nation magazine columnist Jeet Heer wrote a book review for him, emphasizing, "This anthology ignores many of Hofstadter's earlier works, particularly Social Darwinism in American Thought and The American Political." Works such as Tradition) make very selective descriptions that pander to the anti-populist sentiments of the current moderate liberals, refusing to introduce readers to the more radical ideas that defined the first half of Hofstadt's career...
And only by understanding Hofstadt's life can we understand why his later choice to embrace liberal consensus and anti-populist politics is understandable – but also a fatal mistake... There is also a more radical Hofstadter who is well aware of the dangers of liberalism, which is to indulge in nostalgia for past achievements, to adapt to current realities, and to create a more democratic future. The Hofstadter spent a lot of energy and wisdom to demonstrate how easily liberalism could be rigidified into a reflexive defense against the status quo without the push of the left. ”
In 1968, during that long, hot summer, Columbia University, like the rest of the country, was torn apart. Historian Richard Hofstadter appears to be the only one who can unite the school on the brink of collapse. Anti-war militants have demanded that Columbia end its close relationship with the Pentagon. Other protesters denounced Columbia's arrogance and disregard for its Harlem neighbors, starting with the gymnasium near Morningside Park, dubbed Gym Crow, which has different entrances for Columbia students and residents of the Harlem community, and has been accused of racial segregation because of unequal use of its facilities. After months of head-on clashes with Columbia's administration, students occupied the campus building and the school threatened to call the police, exactly what then-Columbia President Grayson Kirk did that spring. In the end, more than 700 people were arrested, and nearly 400 people complained about violent law enforcement by the police (in the process of arresting students).
As the graduation ceremony approaches, it's hard to imagine that the scornful President Kirk will give a speech at the graduation ceremony. So Columbia's administrators turned to Hofstadt for help, inviting him to speak at the graduation ceremony at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. In schools, conservatives, liberals, and many, though not all, radicals have a special respect for Hofstadt. For conservatives and liberals, he is a mainstay of school scholarship and service. To the radicals, he was one of the few professors who would listen to their complaints — so much so that after the students occupied Hamilton Hall, they left him a note that read: "The forces of liberation have finally decided not to destroy your office (because you are not one of them)." "It is hoped that Hofstadt's speech will bring some tranquility and solution to the turmoil of this spring."
Columbia University protests of 1968
Facing colleagues and students fidgeting on the bench, Hofstadter largely succeeded in doing so, and he aptly expressed his due diligence on this occasion. He sees Columbia as a time-tested safe haven for rational discussion, acknowledges that students' grievances are just, and calls for "reconciliation" and the search for "stability, peace, and mutual trust." Diana Trilling was part of the audience and cried as she listened to the speech. Many of Hofstadt's colleagues were also impressed by his sonorous rhetoric. But not everyone present felt that way: A large group of students walked out halfway through his speech and organized an anti-graduation campaign on campus. There, old left-wing radicals such as Erich Fromm and Dwight Macdonald joined them in speeches condemning the failure of the existing liberal order. Fromm asserts that if you don't lose your mind at these times, it means you don't have a sense of it. His claim wasn't entirely wrong: Just hours after Hofstadt's speech, news came from California that Robert F. Kennedy had been shot.
Hofstadt's own life was unfortunately cut off. Two years later, at the age of 54, he died of cancer. Hofstadt's life is somewhat similar to that of Robert F. Kennedy, who helped paint a picture of the ups and downs of Liberalism in 20th-century America. Born in 1916 as an adult during the Great Depression, when labor radicalism and social democratic movements were on the rise, Hofstadter happened to witness their push for equality in the workplace and their challenge to white supremacy. In the early days of the Cold War, Hofstadt fought against the revanchist right he feared, and when his moderate liberalism was attacked, he found himself powerless.
Perhaps because of these experiences, exactly 50 years after his death, Hofstadt's legacy remains as controversial as the liberalism he professed during his lifetime. For liberal scholars and more traditional political historians, he created a tried and tested framework for understanding the achievements of the liberal tradition and the much-debated it often faces. He praised the two-party system, preached bipartisan solidarity and friendship, and warned of the dangers of extremist ideologies. But for the activists and the generation of social historians who came after him, Hofstadter represented many weaknesses in liberal politics and the writing of history. In their view, not only was his centrism myopic short-sighted, but even his method of historiography was the same. They argue that he neglected to study archival material and focused only on the upper echelons of society, often with a simple and cursory understanding of the grassroots social movements he criticized.
Part of the controversy surrounding Hofstadt's legacy is due to the simplification of the issue. Hofstadt's enemies and friends tended to place him in the camp of Consensus historians who were active during the Cold War. Consensus historians, represented by Louis Hartz and Louis Hartz, argue that most Americans share the same ideology that transcends partisan divide and allows the United States to avoid the polarization typical of European politics. It is not without merit that Hofstadt is compared to Hartz and Bulsting. After all, a simple way to understand Hofstadt's work in the 1950s and 1960s is to cherish the words that begin with the letter C: "comity," "compromise," "conciliation," and "civility." Instead, words that begin with P make him purs his lips: "populism," "protest," "paranoia," "popular front."
In fact, Hofstadter became a fellow member of the Consensus School in the middle of his career. When he first elaborated on this view, it was a way of pointing out the constraints on American democracy. For the young Hofstadter, the liberal consensus that sets the boundaries for American politics prevents the country from moving beyond outdated, money-oriented individualism toward a true democracy.
In fact, he criticized the U.S. consensus as an ideological constraint. This critique is so convincing that it inevitably raises questions about his personal shift in thought: How did a thinker so alert to the painful divisions of American classes and races become a loyal advocate of the liberal consensus? How did he go from being a full-blown critic of the limits of American democracy to becoming the number one enemy of populism?
RICHARD HOFSTADTER: ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN AMERICAN LIFE; THE PARANOID STYLE IN AMERICAN POLITICS; UNCOLLECTED ESSAYS 1956-1965 by Richard Hofstadter, edited by Sean Wilentz, LIBRARY OF AMERICA, 2020）
The National Library of the United States recently houses a collection of Hofstadt's works, which historian Sean Wilentz has edited into a book and introduced, helping us answer these questions. Following the veins of Hofstadt's writings and writings, and pursuing his intellectual and political career, we can better understand the origin and evolution of Hofstadt's anti-populist ideas. However, this anthology ignores many of Hofstadter's earlier works, especially the very selective depictions of Social Darwinism in American Thought and The American Political Tradition, pandering to the anti-populist sentiments of current moderate liberals. Readers are refused to introduce the more radical ideas that defined the first half of Hofstadt's career. Although Hofstadt's critique of mass movements and radical politics had already sprouted in his early work and his youthful experiences with the left, this anthology only shows Cold War liberalism, a trend that emerged only after the Cold War, when Hofstadt's dissatisfaction with the left and fear of oppression combined to form the violent elitist style that he later showed in his later works. Only by understanding Hofstadt's life can we understand why his later choice to embrace liberal consensus and anti-populist politics is understandable – but also fatally wrong.
Hofstadt was born in Buffalo, New York, to a Jewish father and a Christian mother. The parents did not value his Jewish origins much, so as Hofstadt grew up, the Christian side of the family occupied a more dominant position: he was baptized in the Lutheran church, sang in the choir, and became an Anglican to please an overzealous aunt (which was redundant). But the cultural struggles within the family made him acutely aware from an early age that religious and ethnic differences are a huge divide that can even lead to political differences. This is also the central theme of his later works.
Life experiences in the 1920s also cultivated this insight in Hofstadt. At the time, economic issues gave way to more fundamental struggles over identity, beliefs and status. Hofstadter grew up in an America engulfed by culture wars marked by the Scopes monkey trial, the Immigration Act of 1924, the popularity of the second-generation Ku Klux Klan, and the stubborn nativism that defined the 1928 presidential election. In this election, anti-Catholicism helped Herbert Hoover defeat former New York Governor Al Smith and his vision of great-city inclusion.
While Hofstadter was a student at Buffalo University, he and many of his peers were being defined by a set of divisions that were no longer merely cultural in nature. If H. L Mencken," the hero of Hofstadter (author of Chinese, known for his sarcastic style of language) taught him the joy of sharp criticism in an era of cultural struggle, the Great Depression made him understand the reality of class politics. "First, you had to decide whether you were a Marxist or an American liberal," Hofstadt recalled. "When I was an undergraduate, I thought I was a Marxist, and I learned a lot from the study of Marxism."
The relationship with the highly inflammatory Felice Swados accelerated a radical shift in Hofstadt's thinking. Hofstadter became acquainted with Svados in 1933 and married him in 1936, shortly thereafter he entered Columbia University for a master's degree. As a member of the National Union of Students under the Communist Party, Svados was better at inciting the masses than Hofstadt. She wrote a pulp fiction novel, House of Fury, about a teenage girl in captivity (eventually adapted into the movie Reform girl). Svados' dedication to political radicalism inspired Hofstadt to join the Communist Party in 1938. Even so, he is often caught up in bookish contradictions, and he does so more out of despair of reality than out of positive hope for the future. "I hate capitalism and all its derivatives," he wrote in a 1939 letter to his brother-in-law, Harvey Swados. Harvey Svados, like his sister, was a budding radical writer. "But I also hate the grinning, dogmatic, religious-minded minions who make up the Communist Party."
For Hofstadt, what led to his distrust of the so-called minions in the party was not only the brutality of the Soviet purge movement or the obvious cynicism of Joseph Stalin's foreign policy, but also because he believed that the left's intellectual vanguard movement was promoting a kind of cultural philistinism that was working against itself. Hofstadter befriended New York intellectuals such as Alfred Kazin and accepted their combination of anti-Stalinism and cultural elitism.
For them, the People's Front represented not only the positive achievements of Dorothea Lange or Woody Guthrie, but more often the advancement of rough socialist realism, which Hofstadter scoffed at in later years as "the pathetic proletarianism that swept through many American intellectuals of the 1930s."
Hofstadt's time as a communist was short-lived. In 1939, he quit the Communist Party, and although he continued to call himself a radical until the 1940s, his exclusion of the Communist Party had solidified into a total distrust of the workers' movement. David S. Brown writes in his wonderful biography of Hofstadt that during this period Hofstadter came to believe, "If the workers really take over everything ... People like him and Svados, then, will be targeted for their intellectual habits, critical instincts, and petty-bourgeois backgrounds. "We are not workers, nor can we be workers," Hofstadt explained to his brother-in-law, "there is no place for us in the workers." "In short, we are petty-bourgeois intellectuals, and there is an inherent sense of alienation between us and the working class." In another letter, he wrote: "We are people who have no place to go. ”
Svados disagreed. For her, anti-Stalinism does not mean rejecting working-class politics and socialism; it merely points to a more democratic political imperative rooted in grassroots radicalism in the factories. But Hofstadt had lost hope in socialism and was increasingly skeptical of popular politics, concluding that in the postwar years his best option was to avoid political radicalism altogether and focus on his historical studies. "My temperament is quite conservative." In a letter, he explained why he was skeptical about signing a petition opposing the election of a scholar who was supposedly sympathetic to Spain's fascist dictator Franco as president of the American Historical Association. "I think, fundamentally, I'm a radical, and it's just because I can't use my intellect in other ways, not because I have real passion." (This assessment echoed Kazin, who at the time considered Hofstadt to be "a secret conservative of the radical period.") ）
To be fair, the "timid" character described by Hofstadter is a necessary strategy for survival in times of limited political and professional choices. Stalinism was a nightmare, but as a former communist and Jew, Hofstadter recognized that McCarthyism and anti-Semitism were also nightmares. As a graduate student at Columbia University, he was convinced that his Jewish identity had cost him the bursary he should have been given. Not only that, but years later, while teaching at the University of Maryland, he lost his johns Hopkins faculty because the history department feared that the chancellor would "cause trouble when he discovered that Hofstadt was half Jewish," wrote a friend of Hofstadter.' His experience with the Communist Party meant he was always easily carried away by congressional investigators. In 1941, after finding his first full-time teaching job at City College, he discovered that several of his predecessors, including the historian Jack Foner, had been fired by the school for being communists (the school apparently did not know Hofstadt's past).
In 1945, Felice Svados died of cancer, leaving Hofstadt alone to raise their young children. At the time, as a single father with young children, Hofstadt's future was fraught with uncertainty, and he had considered leaving academic circles and entering journalism. But then an unexpected opportunity arose: In 1946, when the country returned to peace after dispelling the haze of war, Hofstadt was offered a job offer from Columbia University. The following year, he married Beatrice Kevitt. She was a war widow and talented editor who played an important role in the creation of Hofstadt's work. During his personal ups and downs, Hofstadter triumphed and even published two books that reshaped American history.
Hofstadter and Atreus, circa 1958-59 (image from the State University of New York at Buffalo Archives)
Historical research almost always has an Oedipus complex side. In order to find their own way in this world, historians often compare themselves with those who helped them grow up. Hofstadt became a historian under the guidance of the so-called "progressive historian"—most directly Charles Beard, who corresponded with him, as well as Frederick Jackson Turner and Vernon Parrington—and it was Hofstadter who sought to overturn their research as a way to show the originality of his research.
In their seminal book, Beard, Turner, and Parrington defined American history as a series of fierce battles between peoples and special interests. As Parrington explains in his draft main Currents in American Thought, "On one side is the party of the present nobility —the party of the church, the gentleman, the merchant, the slave owner or the manufacturer; on the other is the party of the common people—the party of the peasants, the villagers, the small merchants, the craftsmen, the proletariat." The former has been trying to limit the power of the people in order to give a few people control of the government and thus serve the special interests, while the latter has tried to expand the power of the people. ”
Hofstadter, who emerged from the radical left, became interested in the American progressives' view of class conflict, but he had two criticisms of their claims: first, it did not resolve divisions within the "commonalities" of religion, ethnicity, and race; second, it failed to answer the question that all Marxists had struggled to solve: how did the ruling class maintain its dominance in class society?
From Hofstadt's point of view, the two parties do not appear to be enemies of the same coin, and even have a lot in common: both parties are made up of white Protestants committed to protecting property rights. The dichotomy between the general populace and the special interests also fails to explain the conflict between the white Protestant majority and the various minorities. Racism is a defining issue in American history, but liberal support for individualism has also hindered the resolution of social problems. To prove this, Hofstadter devoted a critical study of the left wing in the New Deal in his master's thesis at Columbia University, arguing that Franklin Roosevelt's agricultural policies consolidated the power of white landowners at the expense of black self-employed farmers. In 1944, Hofstadter published an important article in the Journal of Black History that went further on the subject—he believed that the research of the eminent slavery scholar Ulrich B. Phillips was full of racist assumptions. In fact, W.E. .B. Du Bois and other black scholars have long pointed this out, but Hofstadt reiterates it again. Moreover, in his first book, Social Darwinism in American Thought, he pointed out how these racist assumptions were pervasive in American social thought.
Social Darwinism in American Thought
The emphasis on ideology is at the heart of Hofstadt's radical critique of progressive historians. Progressive historians argue that competition over material interests is the driving force behind social conflict, while Hofstadter insists that such conflicts also occur in the realm of social thought. Ideology is crucial to explaining the paradox that progressives often overlook: if history is a struggle between people and special interests, how exactly did a few capitalists maintain their rule?
The most satisfying answer to this question among 20th-century Marxists was Antonio Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony, which he elaborated in Prison Notebooks. Gramsci argues that training public loyalty to the existing political system in seemingly non-coercive ways is central to maintaining the capitalist order. Hofstadt did not quote this view at the time, as the Notes from Prison had not yet been translated into English. Instead, like many of his contemporaries, Hofstadt had to become a Marxist like Robinson Crusoe, bound by the antiquated social environment of the time, who could only formulate the basic theoretical framework with his bare hands. In fact, his vision of cultural hegemony is the basis of consensus theory.
Social Darwinism in American Thought depicts a particularly waning phase of consensus theory, but in The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, published in 1948, he provided a complete portrait of liberal consensus in American history. On the surface, the book seems to break with the usual rhetoric of political history: "The American Political Tradition and Its Founders" provides an overview of American history from the Revolution of Independence to World War II, portraying a series of scathing and revisionist images that introduce everyone from the Founding Fathers to President Roosevelt, who are no less rude than Mencan. But as American Gramsci, Hofstadter made a strong indictment of the hegemony that dominates American politics, and believed that opponents of hegemony were constantly emerging.
In a brief but broad preface, Hofstadter summarizes the book's basic arguments: the sanctity of private property, the right of individuals to dispose of and invest in property, the value of equal opportunity, and the social order in which self-interest and self-assertion naturally evolve into good within a broad legal context have become the dominant principles of American political ideology. These beliefs were largely shared by politicians such as Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Cleveland, Brian, Wilson, and Hoover. He labeled the legacy with harsh words: "It's greed, not fraternal democracy." ”
Hofstadt is adept at discovering paradoxes, and he often subverts the general stereotype of American leaders. A primitive Marxist class critique is found in John C. Calhoun's book Defending Slavery, and a hidden conservative idea is found in Woodrow Wilson's progressive reforms. In keeping with Hofstadt's anti-traditional radicalism, Wendell Phillips (a radical abolitionist) seemed so admirable, but the aristocratic demagogue's abolitionist and socialist ideas took him out of tradition.
While the irreverent and radical nature of American Political Tradition and Its Founders may have offended conservatives, its hilarious pocket biographical stories make it a darling in the classroom. Over the past 70 years, it has sold more than 1 million copies. It is not just a series of introductions, but also tells the story of the rise and dominance of the ideology of individualism based on free property rights. The Founding Fathers wrote it into the Constitution. During the Andrew Jackson era, this ideology was adapted at the right time to meet the needs of popular democracy, or at least white male democracy. On the eve of the Civil War, it faced its first existential crisis, as it began to divide into two camps, two theoretical systems of property and personal development: one controlled by the South (ownership of slaves was an integral part of property rights) and the other held by the North (freedom could only be based on the acquired individualism of free labour).
After the Civil War, the rise of corporate mergers triggered a crisis of personal property rights, and during the Great Depression, the original opportunist Roosevelt responded with a hodgepodge of innovations that helped create space for a new liberal consensus that was more amenable to that era. After World War II, Hofstadt insisted that the United States seemed to be uneasily groping for a new form of free expression that recognized that under industrial capitalism, the needs of society could and should transcend the limitations of individualism centered on property rights.
American Political Tradition and Its Founders
By Richard Hofstadter
Translated by Wang Shijie
The Commercial Press December 2010 edition
Seventy years after the publication of American Political Tradition and Its Founders, the American story it tells is still compelling. The book, written by Hofstadt, who was still radical at the time, argues that revitalized New Deal liberalism might be able to deliver on the unfulfilled promises of social democracy and racial equality. It was no accident that John Lewis left the book in his backpack during the Selma parade in 1965 (Hofstadter took part in the second march as a member of a delegation of historians). In American Political Tradition and Its Founders, Hofstadter finds a way to strike an extraordinary balance between the radical mind and the conservative mind. He had a clear understanding of the solidity of individualism based on free property rights, as well as its weaknesses—a view that sat in the middle of the middle between the Marxism he believed in in his youth and the liberalism he embraced in the mid-20th century. If he had continued to seek a new liberal consensus, the book American Political Tradition and Its Founders could well have marked the beginning of the fusion of postwar radicalism and liberal thought. But, on the contrary, it came to a certain end: by the time it was written, Hofstadt had become alert to the social movement necessary for the realization of this new convergence of ideas, and in subsequent writings—from The Age of Reform to Anti-Intellectualism in American Life to The Paranoid Style of American Politics—he began to suddenly retreat into an eccentric anti-populist centrist line.
At first, Hofstadt's anti-populism began with a fear. In 1950, Joseph McCarthy became a nationally famous figure, which terrified him. The Wisconsin senator's success as a demagogue shows that liberal consensus can easily unravel, giving way to disorderly politics dominated by rabble-rousers blinded by the flames of anger and hatred, while former radicals like Hofstadt are vulnerable. Historian William Leuchtenburg, who was a graduate student at Columbia University at the time, recalls "how McCarthyism led Hofstadter to begin to distrust the minds of the masses."
Hofstadt's ideological shift to the liberal center (the aforementioned moderate liberalism) is already evident in the books published after American Political Tradition and Its Founders, such as The Age of Reform in 1955. In The Age of Reform, he takes pleasure in the growing conservative tendencies of American intellectuals. He wrote: "In 1952, a cautious and calm gentleman like Adlai Stevenson aroused great enthusiasm among them, and this is the most prominent evidence of this conservatism. "Stevenson himself said during the campaign that the Liberals have become the true conservatives of our time."
Hofstadter is one of Stevenson's most optimistic supporters. He argued that the Illinois governor "had the image and appeal of mainstream tragic heroes, while intellectuals tended to associate his career with their own." Stevenson was wise enough to describe the professors' fascination with this fanaticism as "the ecstasy of the nerd." But that didn't stop Hofstadter, who insisted stevenson's gentleness was more popular than the "embarrassment of the Truman administration," such as his "shameless temptation to Wall Street."
Like many liberals, Hofstadter doesn't seem to be bothered by this: from civil rights issues (Stevenson had suggested that "anti-Seminalism" could be compared to "anti-Blackism") to labor issues (he supported the Taft-Hartley Act) to social democratic projects (he opposed public housing and did not support federal aid for education and federal health insurance), Stevenson was more conservative than Truman. But at least in Hofstadt's eyes, Stevenson is admirably presented in a polarized America, where he represents an image of humility and courtesy, avoiding disorganized partisan strife, and he even goes so far as to say of the opponent who is about to compete with him in the first of the two presidential elections: "No one can beat Eisenhower right now, and I don't see any reason to beat Eisenhower." ”
In Hofstadter's view, Stevenson proved that liberals were true conservatives, not only because they had begun to recognize the need to perpetuate tradition and maintain stability, but also because their enemies, the McCarthyian Avengers, were the real radicals. In a way, he's not wrong, because mcCarthyists are indeed extremists. But in making this point, Hofstadt also subverted his own theory of consensus. He now believes that this consensus is not so much a constraint as a shield caught between liberal intellectuals like him, his peers and the rabble. In a 1964 article published in Encounter magazine, Hofstadter explained: "Although the U.S. Constitution was originally original, it would not have been sufficient for the government of this sprawling continental nation without the subsequent bipartisan production, which has a diverse mix of interests and a difficult and often violent masses of people." And those "uncontrollable, often violent masses of the people" can only be subdued by an enlightened elite committed to compromise and comity.
As he moved closer to the centrists, he began to fear the movements he might have been involved in as a radical in his youth—those that sought to form a new egalitarian consensus. "Populism" became his umbrella term for these movements, which he believed tended to be extremist, conspiracy theories and anti-intellectualism. Hofstadter wasn't the only one to do so: He joined a close-knit community of scholars, mostly from Columbia and Harvard, working in the social sciences, who came together in the 1950s to interpret the anti-populist ideas implicit in McCarthyism. Daniel Bell is the leader of this anti-populist group, known as pluralists for its emphasis on comity, which includes sociologists Seymour M. Lipset and Edward A. Shils.
The trajectory of many pluralists is similar to that of Hofstadt: activists in their youth, and after experiencing post-war bourgeoisization and middle age, they began to alienate left-wing groups (by the 1950s, Hofstadter was already famous at Columbia University, where he had a second home in Cape Cod and sent his children to local private schools). These once radical intellectuals are now helping to maintain the liberal and anti-communist status quo. In the early 1950s, the Fund for the Republic, the CIA's forefront group, even funded the distribution of 25,000 copies of Hofstadt's anti-populist articles to opinion makers.
Participation in liberal pluralism and anti-communism projects in the mid-1950s allowed Hofstadt to collaborate with some of America's leading social theorists, such as Bell and Lipser, who began to draw increasingly on their sociological research, applying theoretical concepts such as authoritarian personality, paranoia, and status anxiety to his research. This indiscriminate borrowings (magpie borrowings, according to Webster's dictionary, the word 'magpie' contains the meaning of one who collects indiscriminately) helped Hofstadt to push his historical research into the realm of cultural analysis, but on the other hand, he too hastily applied under-digested categories to historical roles, weakening his ability to see them from their own perspective. Moreover, he selectively applied these theories, always describing the social elite as purely rational and pragmatic when discussing mass movements.
The Age of Reform
The book "The Age of Reform" is Hofstadt's first comprehensive attempt to reshape American history with his increasingly anti-populist theoretical framework. The book is a hostile portrayal of the populist party of the 1890s and the resulting populist and progressive culture, portraying one of America's most important democratization movements as the product of a group of fanatical, paranoid thugs.
Previous historians have mostly taken a positive view of the populists, believing that they led a radical reform movement that struck a blow at the rule of the Gilded Age plutocrats and bankers over the United States. Hofstadter countered that the populists were often irrational and often reveled in an untenable nostalgia, that their economic problems were largely their fault, that they preferred unrealistic monetary theories such as the gold and silver double-digit system, and that they often used city dwellers, especially Jews, as scapegoats. The book "The Age of Reform" gives the impression that populists resemble the out-of-the-ordinary characters of James Dickey's novel Deliverance, who seek revenge on the old and old in the city.
Hofstadter does not deny that after experiencing McCarthyism, his hostility toward the Populists and their successors increased. "My own interest has been drawn to populism and progressivism, and especially to the populist side, which seems to foreshadow very strongly some aspect of the eccentric pseudo-conservatism of our time," he wrote. Even so, he was reluctant to praise the positive democratic exuberance that the populace and their spirit had sparked in American politics, insisting that "the ideas of the populace have survived in our time, in part because of regional discontent, popular and democratic rebellion, skepticism, and undercurrents of nativism."
The more Hofstadter was ideologically inclined to anti-plebeians, the more his tone sounded like the literary hero of his heart, Menken. On the bright side, Hofstadt's articles are as clear, vocal, and lively as Menken's. But in the worst case, it is imbued with the vices of the baltimore saints: the burgomaster complacency, inclined to replace analytical arguments with satire and invective. Nowhere in this book can we see the extremely brutal laborer debt-servicing system of the late 19th century. At one point, Hofstadter hinted that if farmers were smart enough, they would follow "the usual tactics common in business." But that doesn't happen because "when the economy continues to be sluggish, farmers tend to reject their business role and the failures associated with it, retreating to the role of injured small farmers." ”
The simple fact is that it doesn't matter if these "wounded farmers" are good at doing business. The accumulation of enormous wealth by the super-rich is bad for farmers, which makes them miserable because the gold standard (supported by the bipartisan political elite) sets the tone for deflationary monetary policy for decades after the Civil War, meaning that whatever farmers do, they will fall into deeper debt – exacerbated by mergers of businesses in key industries such as railroads. Rather than being seduced by some whimsical ideas, the Populist movement pushed a series of monetary policies (paper money and a gold and silver double-standard) that would have improved the fortunes of most Americans. In fact, populists have better political and economic ideas than their plutocratic rivals.
Hofstadter's most incendiary accusation is: "The Tradition of the Greenback Paper Money Party (an early American political party designed to maintain or increase paper money circulation, representing the interests of lower- and middle-class farmers) activated most of the modern anti-Semitism prevalent in the United States." He added: "I am confident that the full history of modern anti-Semitism in the United States will reveal its substantial populist pedigree." To be sure, there are indeed anti-Semitic tendencies in the minds of some populist adherents and propagandists, but as C. Vann Woodward wrote to Hofstadt in 1963, his book gives "the impression that nativism and racism are characteristics of poor and semi-illiterate populists." I think it should be noted that these prejudices were very prevalent among the New England aristocracy and the intellectual elite on the East Coast. Woodward could also add that the anti-Semitism experienced by Hofstadt came not from populist peasants fighting against monopolies, but from the high-profile Columbia University and Johns Hopkins University, where Woodward got positions that Hofstadt had not previously been offered. So it's self-evident that it wasn't the populists who created anti-Semitic restrictions in the Ivy League.
In 1959, Woodward further noted in an article for The American Scholar that Hofstadter's anti-populism led him to downplay the fact that the Plebeian Party was one of the few political groups that united white and black Americans in the post-Reconstruction period. This interracial solidarity, though fragile and not lasting long, flourished for a time. Hofstadt acknowledges this in only one sentence, which clearly acts as a protective side clause.
Of course, all historical writings are temporary and are influenced by new evidence and arguments. But Hofstadt's anti-civilian works are more vulnerable to attack than most because they are based on shockingly weak evidence. When Hofstadter wrote The Age of Reform, he was more of an essayist rather than a scholar of Edmund Wilson (a well-known American critic and writer who had been editors of Vanity Fair and New Republic magazines and a reviewer of the New Yorker); Hofstadt rarely consulted the original documents, calling those who consulted them "rats stuck in the archives." This is an acceptable approach when it comes to portraying presidents and political leaders, as he does in American Political Tradition and Its Founders. But the only way to get a broad overview of the real grassroots movement is to delve into it, digging up argumentative material from old newspapers and organizers' private documents.
However, Hofstadt did not do that. Relying on the work of some writers of this period, he painted an incomplete picture, but was insensitive to the social and economic context of the rise of the popular movement, and he himself admitted that these writers were often "hillbillys" but not necessarily "representative of the peasantry themselves". Hofstadter's approach to writing is like someone writing a book about the political left in the Trump era, focusing only on Marianne Williamson's New Age Theory, Louise Mensch's conspiracy theory tweets, and Michael Moore's specious climate change documentary.
The basic research work that Hofstadt avoided would be done by a group of historians after him. Major works refuting Hofstadt include Walter T.K. Nugent's The Tolerant Populists, Lawrence Goodwyn's Democratic Promise, and Bruce Palmer's Man Over Money), Michael Kazin's A Godly Hero and Charles Postel's The Populist Vision. As Goodwin pointed out in 1991, "Today, Hofstadter's interpretation is buried by mountains of opposing arguments. Goodwin's book is a strong revival of the interpretation of the civilians as radical democrats.
Hofstadt's study of the revanchist right is equally flawed. Whether it's about McCarthyism, the John Birch Society, or Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign, Hofstadter repeatedly portrays those associated with them as marginal extremists, very different from the esteemed mainstream conservative forces. Hofstadt, then, preferred to use the term "Godwater cult," claiming that "Godwater's men infiltrated the Republican Party, just as the Communists infiltrated the liberals in order to use them as front-line organizations," without considering that Goldwater's conservative forces were able to take over the Republican Party so quickly precisely because it exploited the political ideas that were deeply ingrained and widely shared within the party. After all, Goldwater's libertarianism is little more than the latest variant of individualism based on liberal property rights, and Hofstadt himself has shown that this was the consensus of the vast majority of periods in American history.
In the decades since Hofstadter's death — after republican politicians like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney, and Donald Trump — it's touching to look back at the historian's naïve belief that moderate Republicans are the true soul of the Republican Party. But the main mistake Hofstadt made in his later years was not his failure to spot a link between the far right and Republican conservatives, but his belief — as in today's liberals — that the bipartisan consensus between liberals and the moderate right could effectively counter the low-end far right. The opposite, however, is true: it is the bipartisan consensus reached by liberals and the moderate right that creates space for the far right with revanchism. As historians such as Ellen Schrecker have told us, the McCarthy and John Birch Society is but a classic example of an American political tradition fostered by a political center dedicated to destroying the left. The first Red Scare was not a product of far-right forces, but was waged by Wilson's liberal government. The machines of McCarthyism—the Smith Act, the House Committee on Non-American Activities, the Oath of Loyalty—were built under the leadership of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Compared to McCarthy, Edgar Hoover was more responsible for the Red Scare because he had the support of presidents from Coolidge to Nixon. In 1952, Hofstadter's hero Stevenson praised Truman for "putting Communist leaders in the place where they should be— "in prison."
Truman's apocalyptic remarks about the global communist threat, combined with the standoff in North Korea, opened the door for McCarthy. Republican elites, who seemed wise to Hofstadter, including figures like Robert Taft, also egged McCarthy. Hofstadt himself contributed to the Cold War consensus: in 1949, for example, he refused to criticize the University of Washington for firing communist professors, a move not only as a personal failure but also as part of his broader loyalty to Cold War liberalism. In 1957, he gladly took on the task of writing a far-right analysis for the Republic Fund, which was funded by the CIA. David S. Brown, a writer who wrote his biography, said Hofstadter prepared a memorandum at the time stating that "the far right is partially correct on many issues and completely true on several others." Communists have infiltrated the federal government; U.S. foreign policy in Asia and Europe has also experienced setbacks; and it is conceivable that the country will not fare worse than it does now, provided that a new set of conservative policies is adopted at home and abroad. ”
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
Translated by He Bochao
Yilin Publishing House, March 2021 edition
In his 1963 book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Hofstadt applied his growing conservatism to the teaching of history, arguing that democracy did not allow American intellectuals to flourish, but rather strengthened their anti-intellectual tendencies. He argues that "anti-intellectualism is built in the democratic system and egalitarian sentiments of this country." His arguments are also striking in other ways, but there is only a cursory touch on African-American activism. Considering that Hofstadter began writing the book after the brown v. Topeka Education Bureau verdict, it would seem strange that such a book on education had missed this information. Hofstadt's focus included white evangelical Protestant culture, the disdain of union leaders for learning that had no practical benefit, and the tendency of the philosopher and reformer John Dewey's followers to turn education into an instrumental task that merely acquired skills.
Given that one of the themes of the book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life is the tension between vocational and humanistic education, the lack of discussion of the intellectual life of black Americans is even more striking. Hofstadter completely ignored the debate between George Washington Carver (a prominent African-American educator and agronomist), Booker Washington, and Du Bois. A lecture on African-American history will test Hofstadter's argument that the main sources of anti-intellectualism in American life are "democratic institutions" and "egalitarian sentiments, because racism has always been a much more powerful motivator." Before the emancipation of slaves, many states had anti-literacy laws that prohibited enslaved people and even free people of color from learning how to read and write. Schooling in the Southern United States is generally lagging behind, and more subtly, white supremacy tends to exacerbate fears of learning. In an autobiographical essay, Hofstadter admits: "There is no doubt that I tend to put the basic reality of power on the back burner, which is one of the weaknesses of my writing. The basic facts about how racism shaped American society were selectively ignored by him in The Anti-Intellectualism of American Life, so that Hofstadter could confidently pursue his anti-populist description of American history.
In Hofstadt's later works, this whitewash of American historical reality becomes more apparent. In a 1964 article, he said: "The achievements of the Democratic Party over the past 30 years prove the validity of the spirit of consensus. For example, since the Roosevelt era, the Democratic Party has been the primary tool for meeting the needs of black Americans and expressing their political aspirations; yet at the same time, despite some stagnation, the Democratic Party has been the traditional Southern party. Of course, such an arrangement has not satisfied either party, which has declined over time and with the intensification of ethnic tensions. Notably, this book on the New Deal era is a far cry from his master's thesis he wrote while at Columbia. His master's thesis recognized that the consensus created by the New Deal often meant sacrificing the interests of blacks in exchange for the interests of whites in the South.
In fact, many of the compromises that have led Americans to consensus have come at the expense of black Americans — just that Hofstadt doesn't want to discuss that. From the three-fifths compromise in the U.S. Constitution to the Missouri Compromise of 1820, from the Kansas-Nebraska Act to the 1877 compromise that ended reconstruction, the most important adjustments in the U.S. consensus process ended in the harm of black Americans. Any sincere tribute to consensus must do its utmost to confront that fact. However, Hofstadt failed to do so.
The first edition of Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) and Paranoid Styles in American Politics (1965) were both published by Alfred A. Knopf.
Despite his flaws, Hofstadt remains an important figure in his research, and his work deserves to be housed in the National Library. But now the problem with this anthology is not only what it contains, but also what it misses. Willenz seems to have chosen some material to confirm the boastful image of liberalism that Hofstadter presented in his later research: 20th-century liberalism formed a center of reason surrounded by extremism and anti-intellectualism. Thus, we get Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (which Hofstadter himself considers inferior to his earlier writings), Paranoid Styles in American Politics, and a selection of papers, some of which have never been published before. But The American Political Tradition and Its Founders—arguably his most important book, and perhaps his most radical book—was not included in this anthology, not even Social Darwinism in American Thought and his master's thesis.
In addition to American Political Tradition and Its Founders, a suitable Hofstadt anthology should include The Age of Reformation, a flawed but important work, and a selection of essays that present the full picture of his ideas, including his more radical early works (his master's thesis was particularly useful in highlighting how he predicted the work of later scholars on the New Deal).
In contrast, The book edited by Willenz is so focused on Hofstadt's later critique of populism that we overlook where his work is worth reading. What we see is not a liberal who is equally sharply critical of liberalism, but a thinker who has only sidelined the problems of American society, as if all of America's problems can be blamed on fundamentalist missionaries and conspiracy theorists in tin foil hats.
This kind of smug liberalism is no stranger today. Hofstadt's fascination with courtesy and fear of the far right led to his overestimation of moderate Republicans. He tends to think of politics as a contest in which rational moderates are attacked across the board by extremists, and he selectively (not entirely honestly) portrays left-wing social movements — all signs of resistance to liberalism, a type of society that has emerged in the Trump era. Reading this anthology, it's easy to imagine Hofstadt writing an op-ed for The Atlantic or The New York Times warning of the dangers of populism and anti-intellectualism and emphasizing the need for all the good moderates to come together.
However, this is only one side of Hofstadt, not his entire legacy. There is also a more radical Hofstadter who is well aware of the dangers of liberalism, which is to indulge in nostalgia for past achievements, to adapt to current realities, and to create a more democratic future. The Hofstadter spent a lot of energy and wisdom to demonstrate how easily liberalism could be rigidified into a reflexive defense against the status quo without the push of the left. Moreover, without the restoration of a complete Hofstadt, we cannot understand how his early works found a middle ground between radicalism and liberalism.
In the coming years, the United States will recover not only from Trump's racial revenge, but also from the systematic failure of liberal hegemony, which has given criticism of the status quo to the right that has allowed Trump to win the election. The only feasible way is to revise the liberal consensus, as in the New Deal and the Great Society era, to first integrate criticism of socialists and anti-racists and to seek to broaden, rather than narrow, the horizons of liberalism. In his best work, Hofstadt shows us how to do this.
The original text of this article, "At Liberalism's Crossroads: The vexed legacy of Richard Hofstadter", was published on The Nation website with the author's permission and translated by Wei Wei, a doctoral student at the School of History of Wuhan University, and the original text is copyrighted by the author and The Nation.