Richard Hofstadter was required reading when I was in college. But these days the name is barely mentioned.
The blogger Article of Faith in Athens, Georgia opines it’s because he was as hard as the New Left of the 1960s as on the right.
I have slugged this as part of The 1966 Game, because Hofstadter was at his height then. But there is no Hofstadter today, no one comparable.
You may well ask why.
It’s partly because Hofstadter wrote at and for a different time. He wrote in the 1950s and early 1960s, at the height of the FDR era, the third straight generation of American liberal dominance. (Republicans were the liberal party until the 1930s.)
So books like Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, first published in 1963, were, like Jane Goodall’s contemporary studies of chimpanzees, academic forays to a foreign shore. Hofstadter wrote of the KKK, and the religious Populists, in the way that we might write of the Byzantine Empire.
But after Hofstadter wrote, we moved there. Most of us became anti-intellectual yahoos, salivating when politicians rang the bell marked Harvard and doing just what our masters told us in response.
The Nixon Era is the
first true conservative political era in America since the early 19th
century, and Jacksonian Democracy. In this environment hate groups of
all kinds thrive — hate even becomes policy. It certainly becomes an
instrument of policy-making, which was the KKK’s idea. (See an example at left, yahoos destroying Dixie Chicks CDs because they dared question Dear Leader. I especially like the fat bitch in the back holding the American flag.)
So conservatives don’t read Hofstadter because it’s uncomfortable.
Liberals don’t read him because they’re living in what he considers a
foreign land, where Christianity has become an armored fist, where
questioning authority is considered treasonous by those in power, and
where the liberal values Hofstadter assumed as universal have been, on
the whole, repudiated.
Still I do wish we did read him. I wish we followed him. If only to
understand just how far we have to go, in terms of our political
maturity, to reach the heights he scaled over 40 years ago.
