[lbo-talk] Hofstadter

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Thu Mar 9 15:54:31 PST 2006


Chip Berlet wrote:


>Hmmph. Push my button!
>
>
>
>Richard Hofstadter, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", in
>The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York:
>Alfred A. Knopf, 1965);
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>Thumbnail critique: Not a bad analysis, but over-reliance on
>psychological theories and "pluralist" school theories that the
>proto-neoconservatives used to bash the left and dissent in general
>as "extremist."

Well, I've been reading some of the essays in the collection over the last few days, and I'm impressed by the continuity between then and now. The "pseudo-conservative" coalition, with right-wing businessmen financing right populist-fundamentalist movements, sounds an awful lot like what's the matter with Kansas. Resentment of intellectual, rather than economic, elites is a pretty old American story, but we keep forgetting that.

I can see how it could be used to "bash the left and dissent in general," but there's some really weird shit in American minds that can't be understood without some kind of psychological theories (and he seems to use Adorno pretty heavily). I like the point about how in crisis times, like the Depression, politics is very programmatic, but in relatively prosperous times, psychological issues around status take the foreground.

Doug



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