on Hofstadter
I forwarded Michael’s comments about Hofstadter to a historian friend, who replies:
Well it’s true that some of his stuff - especially on populism - looks pretty thinly researched today and has come in for a lot of criticism. No one talks about “status anxiety” any longer. Hofstadter rarely did a lot of archival work, using mostly published sources. These led him to really overstate the role of anti-semitism in the Populist movement, in particular. The overall approach of the 50s liberals to McCarthyism tended to blame the volk and the culture instead of looking at the role of power elites and institutions in fomenting the red scare and in shaping the culture of anticommunism (which is the point of that Rogin book, another good book).
At the same time this kind of attack simplifies the thrust of a lot of Hof’s work - the American Political Tradition’s arguments that Americans have a political culture curiously impervious to a recognition of class differences, the paranoid style’s examination of certain important patterns in American history, the writing about conservatism and Goldwater. Hofstadter’s politics were more complicated than Michael P suggests here - he seems to have briefly been in the CP during the 30s and like a lot of the liberal writers of the 50s retained a deeply critical stance towards capitalism for some time afterwards. And then at the end of his life he began to write about violence in America.
Anyway, I think he had a lot more insight into American life than a lot of historians who probably did better archival work. The theses are more interesting than the historical research that backs them up is deep, if that makes any sense. I’ve always wanted to write an essay about Hofstadter - Michael’s response makes me want to even more!