Richard Hofstadter on America

Always a liberal and never a leftist, historian Richard Hofstadter’s over-arching theme in explaining twentieth-century America was what he termed “status anxiety,” which seems to be an effort to explain too much with too little.

Richard Hofstadter: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Uncollected Essays, 1956-1965, edited by Sean Wilentz (1047 pages, The Library of America, 2020)

One of the latest entries in the Library of America series is a generous sampling of the prodigious production of American historian Richard Hofstadter. Edited by Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, this collection includes many of Hofstadter’s previously uncollected essays, as well as two entire books.

Having read Hofstadter assiduously and devotedly as a graduate student and as a young teacher, I thought an intellectual trip down memory lane might be worth at least a small chunk of what’s left of this retired historian’s time and energy.

Hofstadter died in 1970 at the age of 54. Having come of age at the height of the Great Depression, he became—and remained—a classic New Deal liberal. Much of his vast effort was devoted to explaining the necessity for, followed by a defense of, the progressive experiment in building an ever-more-powerful federal bureaucracy, otherwise known as the administrative state.

Always a liberal and never a leftist, Hofstadter’s over-arching theme in explaining twentieth-century America was what he termed “status anxiety,” which even then seemed to me to be an effort to explain too much with too little. (If I read Hofstadter assiduously and devotedly, I at least tried not to read him uncritically.)

Perhaps his emphasis on “status anxiety” was also an attempt on Hofstadter’s part to avoid a strictly economic interpretation of the first two-thirds of the American twentieth century. After all, such an approach might have resulted in his attempting to explain too much in a very different way. He also simultaneously avoided any intellectual lurch to the hard left and toward some version of a Marxist gloss on the American story.

With all of the above in mind I thought I would return to Hofstadter for the first time in… well… in a long time. What follows, however, is only a limited glimpse at what Professor Wilentz decided to include. Specifically, it is a commentary on one of the two full books, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and those previously uncollected essays that concern the post-World War II American conservative movement in general and the 1964 candidacy and campaign of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, or the “pseudo-conservative” standard bearer of the “pseudo-conservative” movement.

One more personal note before proceeding any further. I cast my first vote for president in 1964. Let me reveal that that vote did not go to the “pseudo-conservative” in the race. In all likelihood, I joined Richard Hofstadter in voting for the winner of that one-sided contest, Lyndon Baines Johnson. In all likelihood, Professor Hofstadter never came to regret his decision. I did—and do.

Re-reading Hofstadter with equal assiduousness and less devotion has only added to my sense of regret. Goldwater deserved better at the time. And he surely deserves better today.

Ostensibly, Hofstadter set out to explore the “non-rational side of politics.” A conspicuous element of that side for Hofstadter was the “conspiratorial mind” as a key manifestation of the “paranoid style” at work. As applied to mid-twentieth-century “modern” (if not necessarily pseudo) conservatism that mind evidenced “Manichean and apocalyptic carryovers” that were infused with an “evangelical spirit.”

For Hofstadter, all of this was in evidence in the “pseudo-conservative” Goldwater movement, a movement that was grounded in a “national anxiety” rooted in a “fear that the decline of entrepreneurial competition (would) destroy our national character.”

According to Hofstadter’s reading, the American political scene had rarely witnessed the “most acute varieties of class conflict,” but it had often been an “arena for uncommonly angry minds.”

The most recent example of that mind in action was the “extreme right wing” of American politics in the early 1960s. That would include the heart of the Goldwater movement and its “paranoid style,” as evidenced by “feelings of persecution” which were then “systemized in grandiose theories of conspiracy.” Why did all those psychiatrists have to pile on the senator from Arizona at the time when a historian was already doing their work for them?

No matter the issue, foreign or domestic, there was little legitimacy to the Goldwater movement, meaning that there was little legitimacy to the issues his campaign raised and little legitimacy to the conduct of the campaign.

Hofstadter, however, did concede that there was at least “something to be said for the Protestant principle of individuality and freedom” (neither of which was apparently either a Catholic or a Jewish principle). For that matter, there was a similar something to be said for the “nativist desire to develop in North America a homogeneous civilization.” A nativist desire, but not an American desire?

Beyond that Hofstadter hesitates to go by way of any concession on his part that the concerns and grievances of the Goldwaterites were at all legitimate. He also places the same stamp of illegitimacy on the same pseudo-conservatives when he seeks to explain how they conducted their battles. It was always all or nothing, because catastrophe, or at least the “fear of catastrophe,” was always just around the corner.

If there was a genuine (as opposed to pseudo) conservative on the American political scene in the 1950s, or the decade during which the Goldwater movement was just beginning to build up a head of steam, it was none other than Adlai Stevenson.

By that point liberalism was no longer the “dynamic force” that it had been in the 1930s. But no matter. Dynamism was no longer needed, especially not when an Adlai Stevenson was on hand to offer a much less demanding brand of enthusiasm. For Hofstadter, this was especially evident at the 1952 Democratic convention when candidate Stevenson brought an “air of poised and reliable (as opposed to pseudo?) conservatism” to the party faithful.

Apparently, Hofstadter’s idea of reliable conservatism meant conserving and preserving the legacy and reality of the New Deal, a task he hesitated to risk being placed in the hands of a “mediocre politician” by the name of Eisenhower, let alone those to Ike’s right—and especially those to his far right.

At some point along the right-to far right political spectrum one ceases to be a conservative in any ordinary sense of that word and becomes a “pseudo-conservative” instead. In fact, at one point in one of Hofstadter’s previously uncollected essays, Goldwater ceases to be labeled a pseudo-conservative at all and is instead defined as a “wild utopian.”

To be sure, in these pages Goldwater is many other things as well. In one instance, he is nothing more than a “small town politician.” Shortly thereafter he is a “kind of political Grandma Moses, whose “mental world” is somewhere in “another century,” thereby making it somehow impossible for historian Hofstadter to “enter it.” And of course Goldwater is a “simpleton” with an accompanying “lust for banalities and absurdities.”

The pejorative term that is missing here might be “deplorable,” whether in reference to Goldwater’s ideas or his followers.

Hofstadter does manage to credit Goldwater with at least one significant, if dubious, accomplishment. He was able to secure the Republican presidential nomination in 1964 by refusing to make any accommodations with more moderate party leaders. Instead of working to achieve party consensus and unity, Goldwater turned his “forces” loose as “infiltrators” to take control of the GOP. As a result, the party of Lincoln became little more than a “front organization for a minority point of view.”

Hofstadter credits this accomplishment (?) with paving the way for a positive result, namely a Democratic victory in the November elections. And that victory served a genuine (as opposed to pseudo) conservative purpose, namely the preservation and expansion of New Deal liberalism.

That political triumph also brought about the defeat of a “new kind of political union”—at least a union as defined by Hofstadter. That would be a coalition of those who favored “jingoism, economic ultra-conservatism, and racial animosity.”

A preview of coming attractions was offered by Goldwater’s memorable acceptance speech at the San Francisco Cow Palace. Much of that speech was written by Harry Jaffa, founding father of the Claremont Institute and author of Crisis of the House Divided, which dealt with the enduring significance of the Lincoln-Douglas debates and the vital importance of Abraham Lincoln, founding father of the GOP.

Hofstadter recalls the line in that speech that at once raised the roof of the Cow Palace and brought that particular house down: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

Those very words were written by Jaffa and double underlined by Goldwater when he first read them. But Jaffa is not mentioned by Hofstadter. Instead he is simply dismissed as an unnamed “hard core right winger.” Whether such an individual also qualifies as a pseudo-conservative, paranoid or otherwise, goes unmentioned and unexplained.

Hofstadter, however, does not ignore the paranoid pseudo-conservatism of Senator Goldwater’s foreign policy notions. If anything, he is harsher on this version of Goldwaterism than he is on the senator’s domestic agenda. What he doesn’t seem able to decide is whether the real Goldwater is a throwback to the old pre-World War II isolationists or a General Buck Turgidson-like Cold War war monger with an itchy finger on the nuclear trigger.

Goldwater enthusiasts, Hofstadter tells us, liked to compare their man to Theodore Roosevelt. To a degree, Hofstadter seems to agree: “As a westerner (real as opposed to pseudo), a flier, a horseman, and an enthusiastic hobbyist” Goldwater is at least “reminiscent” of TR, albeit without the latter’s appeal to progressives and intellectuals.

Still, Hofstadter is not entirely convinced. He borrows this from a Goldwater enthusiast: “Barry is my idea of a TR who is right for this time…. I think he would make a great president if this country ever got into another war.”

Here Hofstadter is not at all convinced. This “incautious sentence inverts… the fear of those most disquieted by Goldwater.” As if there might be any doubt, Hofstadter then proceeds to mark himself as one of the fearful: a President Goldwater might well “make another great war.” But would he have presided over the disaster that was the war in Vietnam?

Hofstadter’s evidence for Goldwater’s itchy nuclear trigger finger is the senator’s suggestion of the possible use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam. What goes unmentioned is that Goldwater was actually responding to a question concerning American military options in that war. The senator listed a number of possible options, including a nuclear option, before adding that he was not recommending it.

That qualification, however, did not prevent the Democrats from running the infamous daisy petal plucking commercial against Goldwater in the fall campaign. The question is asked; the candidate answers; and the opposition takes it from there. Apparently, the media-Democratic complex was at work long before now.

Hofstadter, in sum, does not go quite as far as the legion of psychiatrists who declared Goldwater unfit for the presidency. But this historian’s use of history for political purposes was surely an attempt to play a similar game.

Is there room for this type of historical analysis today? Maybe so. How about a study of the paranoid style of something called pseudo liberalism? Surely one could make a much more credible case that to declare that “climate change” is an existential threat is evidence of paranoia in action. So far as this historian knows Barry Goldwater never claimed that the end of the world would be at hand if his policies were rejected. But come to think of it his opponents did suggest as much, if he did reach the presidency.

Then there is the Russia hoax. Has that been paranoia on display? Or was it simply an old-fashioned, well-calculated, if now exposed, dirty trick?

Declaring that the major threat facing America today is something called white nationalism might be another prime example future historians would discover, if they ever choose to go on a hunt for political paranoia.

Here there might be a parallel to Goldwater. After all, Hofstadter tells us that the senator did claim on at least one occasion that he was more fearful of Washington than the Soviets. But did he ever express concerns of the sort that some Democrats do today, namely that they are more worried about the behavior of American citizens than of America’s enemies.

Hofstadter, of course, was able to breathe a sigh of relief when the Goldwater “cult” went down to defeat in 1964. Given that defeat and his relief, Hofstadter let it be known that he did “not share the widespread foreboding among liberals that this form of dissent will grow until it overwhelms our liberties altogether and plunges us into a totalitarian nightmare.”

That stipulated, he did not think that we were necessarily home free: “However, in a populistic culture like ours, which seems to lack a responsible elite with political and moral authority, and in which it is possible to exploit the wildest currents of public sentiment for private purposes, it is at least conceivable that a highly organized . . . minority could create a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.”

Unfortunately for Richard Hofstadter, or maybe fortunately, he didn’t live long enough to be able to comment on the political career of a certain former movie actor who delivered a televised speech for candidate Goldwater late in the 1964 campaign. That career would eventually include a presidency that culminated in a peaceful and successful conclusion to the Cold War.

Fortunately for Hofstadter, he died long before cultish elements on the left began to dominate the political party of his youth and middle age, thereby positioning themselves and the party they infiltrated (to borrow from Hofstadter on Goldwater) to be the very totalitarian threat that a relieved Richard Hofstadter tells us that the country dodged better than half-a-century ago.

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