The New York Times / March 10, 2010 An Old Essay Used to Explain a New Movement By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
NEW YORK — The name Richard Hofstadter has been summoned up a lot lately in liberal opinion columns and the blogosphere as an eloquent and intellectually impeccable explanation for political developments like the Tea Party movement, the stardom of Sarah Palin, and the claim on right-wing talk radio that Barack Obama is a “socialist,” maybe even a “bolshevik” leading America to ruin. Mr. Hofstadter was the highly respected, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at Columbia University among whose most famous essays was one called “The Paranoid Style of American Politics,” published in Harper’s Magazine in 1964, which is the piece of writing being cited most often these days. “I call it the paranoid style because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind,” Mr. Hofstadter wrote, describing what he viewed as a menacing proneness in America to irrational anger and passion. Quite a few commentators lately have cited Mr. Hofstadter as a useful guide for the politics of an angry and passionate minority today. Or, as Thomas Frank, author of “The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule,” put it in the Wall Street Journal recently, “The Paranoid Style of American Politics” is “a work that seems to grow more relevant by the day.” <snip> And yet, while instances of what Mr. Hofstadter would have seen as exaggerated, suspicious, and full of conspiratorial fantasy are legion, it’s not so clear that all those references to Mr. Hofstadter these days are entirely on the mark. Some of his colleagues feel that his evocation of a paranoid style hasn’t actually withstood the test of time. “I don’t think these concepts have worn very well,” Mr. Foner, once a student of Mr. Hofstadter’s, said. “Like anybody, Hofstadter was a product of a particular historical experience, and I don’t think he was putting forward a theory for all of American politics.” “He became more and more nervous over what he saw as the dangers of grass-roots politics,” Mr. Foner continued. “There was a perfectly good reason for that, but today scholars tend to think that his paranoid style was a little unfair to various social movements.” Mr. Hofstadter’s essay was in part a reaction to the McCarthy witch hunts of the late 1940s and early ’50s, when a small group of politicians brandished the idea that America was being subverted by a vast and treasonous Communist conspiracy — “on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man,” as Senator Joseph R. McCarthy himself put it in 1951. A comment like that, surely both paranoid and demagogic, goes well beyond even some of the more outrageous things that are being said today. Ms. Palin, for example, though often held up as an illustration of Mr. Hofstadter’s ideas, is no Joe McCarthy, even if she does blame a biased mainstream press rather than her own pratfalls for her public image. The Tea Party movement also, while providing venues for comments like those of Mr. Tancredo, is too young and essentially formless to qualify in any definite way for the Hofstadterian label. In his essay from the floor of the Nashville convention, Mr. Raban writes that quite a few of the conventioneers seemed more turned off than enthused by a good deal of what was said. In other words, not every upsurge of a radical populism or unrestrained irritation qualifies as paranoid; nor is it certain that rational good sense won’t prevail among most Americans. Ms. Palin, for example, sold a lot of copies of her book and is clearly a celebrity with a worshipful following. But, as Mr. Raban pointed out, a recent Washington Post/CBS poll shows her losing support even among conservative Republicans. Mr. Hofstadter, who died in 1970 when he was 54, is justly revered by historians, but he has been criticized and reviled as well, in part by those who saw his deep mistrust of virtually all populist movements, his complaint that they were backward-looking and bigoted in reality, as not only excessive but possibly undemocratic. In other words, his essay on the paranoid style, compelling, seductive and brilliant as it is, may offer a somewhat too handy explanation for the contemporary scene. His ideas are on the shelf seductively within reach, but they should probably be used with caution. E-MAIL: [email protected] A key difference, I'd say, between the "paranoid style" of the Truman-McCarthy era and the one today is that back then there was a full-scale alliance between the state (think J. Edgar Hoover) and the red-baiting populist movement, with the latter having the upper hand at times. Nowadays, the grass-roots populists (teabaggers) behind Palin, Tancredo, and their ilk are hardly allied with the state, though (as is usual in politics) they have likely succeeded in pushing Obama even further to the right. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
