Re: Why Richard Hofstadter Is Still Worth Reading butNotfor the Reasons the Critics Have in Mind
On Oct 10, 2006, at 5:23 PM, Jesse Lemisch wrote:
there was and is no truth to the idea of H and of so many others that popular movements are necessarily fascist
I’m still waiting for the textual evidence for this claim.
An hour earlier, Jesse wrote:
continuing the discussion of Hofstadter, the point of Rogin et al is that the orgins of “McCarthyism” (note the quotation
marks) were not with what you call the “toiling masses.” This offers the possibility that mass movements from below might be seen more
optimistically than Hofstadter and his gang saw them.
This is from “Pseudo-Conservatism Revisited - 1965,” an essay
included in the Paranoid Style volume (pp. 69-70):
“Part of McCarthy’s strength lay in his ability to combine a mass
appeal with a special appeal to a limited stratum of the upper
classes. As compared with Coughlin, whose following had been almost
entirely from a low-status public, McCarthy was able to win
considerable support from the middle and upper ranks of society,
mobilizing Republicans who had never accepted the changes brought by
the New Deal and whose rage at the long exclusion of the party from
presidential power was reaching a peak. There is evidence also that
McCarthy had a special appeal to the postwar newly rich. Most
prophetic of the future of the right wing was his strong appeal to
fundamentalist-oriented Protestants….”