On Oct 10, 2006, at 12:43 PM, Michael Pugliese wrote:
> http://hnn.us/articles/30629.html
I've just read five of Hof's books, and I gotta say Jon Wiener is deeply, but all too typically, unfair in this paragraph:
> Hofstadter's argument that the historical roots of McCarthyism lay
> in the Populist tradition, on the other hand, is simply wrong. He
> argued that the Populist movement of the 1890s was deeply
> irrational and essentially proto-fascist. The Populists saw the
> principal source of injustice and economic suffering in rural
> America in what they called "the money power." In Hofstadter's
> analysis, this was evidence of irrational paranoia, of "psychic
> disturbances." Moreover, Hofstadter argued that these denunciations
> of "the money power" were deeply anti-Semitic. Alas, his evidence
> of Populist anti-Semitism was embarrassingly thin: a handful of
> lurid quotes from a few Populist leaders about the "House of
> Rothschild" and "Shylock," and an argument that Henry Ford's anti-
> Semitism came from his background as "a Michigan farm boy who had
> been liberally exposed to Populist notions."
This is a tremendous exaggeration. Hofstadter conceded the populists had reasonable complaints and many virtues. The passages on anti- Semitism take up just a few pages, and are not the centerpiece of his analysis (and, though he doesn't mention this, isn't Bryan's choice of imagery, "crucified on a cross of gold," rhetorically interesting, coming from a time when the Jews were blamed for nailing up Jesus?). He points out that American populism is a political ideology of petty producers - and rightly, I think, underscores the radical departure of the New Deal from the individualist roots of American radicalism for something much more collective. That kind of collectivism, which lasted into the 1970s, is exactly what the New Right has been trying to reverse all along, and they've accomplished a good bit of the task. Hof's emphasis on the individualism of American white protestantism is highly relevant now - it illuminates what's the matter with Kansas, since American white protestants love The Market as an instrument of reward and discipline. That love is not some recent confidence trick perpetrated by Karl Rove, but has deep roots.
Doug