Richard Hofstadter is enjoying a bit of a vogue on the lefty internet these days. His "major works", Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and The Paranoid Style in American Politics, have become reference points when talking about the Tea Party movement, the rise of loonies like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, and the general popular discontent with the course our country, even now, seems destined to slide down.
The problem is, Hofstadter's "major works" are crap. I can say this because, unlike some of those who are so quick to drop his name, I've actually read him. Hofstadter was disingenuous, ignorant, and a servant of a particular post-WWII consensus that, not to put too fine a point on it, was hostile to the many popular movements that arose in the first generation after the defeat of Fascism. I have grown quite tired of reading him referenced, as if he had any authority.
Via Sadly,No!, I have found a wonderfully concise, succinct overview and dismissal of Hofstadter and his work.
Everything from the direct election of United States Senators and the federal income tax (originally designed to do precisely what contemporary Republicans whine about, redistribute wealth downward) to the two-day weekend, wage-and-hours regulations, and health and safety regulations at the workplace were not born in elite universities by public intellectuals, but were the public agenda of a variety of populist groups operating over time and distance in the history of the United States. Our country, as bad off as it is now, would be far worse if not for these groups and their constant agitation. Hofstadter's casual dismissal of them, and contemporary "liberal" disdain for right-wing rage posing as "populism" is part of our national problem.
I would add just one voice, one text, to those of Hofstadter that have had such a pernicious influence on our elites. In the mid-1920's, disillusioned, first, with Socialism, then with Wilsonian Progressivism (especially its post-WWI variety, in which Wilson began to be, how can we put this, megalomaniacal), a still-young but already influential Walter Lippmann wrote a short book called Public Opinion that, to sum up, considered the vox populi stupid, easily managed through a rhetoric of splash and dash, but labile - he thought "public opinion" to be a kind of barely-contained mob mentality, to be held at bay and controlled. Lippmann's views are still with us, as are Hofstadter's.
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