>As for Hofstadter, I think it's safe to say that almost no graduate
>seminars assign him anymore. And I suspect if you tried out his
>argument (about the masses and rightwing paranoia) with a room full
>of assistant profs, the first thing they'd say is that you can't
>talk about "the masses" because it assumes Americans were all alike.
>Which, again, has some truth to it, but it's a lens that places
>pretty firm limits (probably intentionally) on what you can say
>about American politics.
It's funny to hear this when I'm reading him for basically the first time. He clearly doesn't think that all Americans think alike. In fact, I just read a bit about how a first- or second-generation oilman from Texas would be different from a third-generation one in New York. Is it a Cox-like shyness about generalizing about patterns of thought, because everything is so incommensurate?
Doug