On Oct 10, 2006, at 4:26 PM, Jerry Monaco wrote:
> I accept Doug's defense of Hofstadter but I have to say in my
> memory Hofstadter did not even try to comprehend the Populist
> movement in the U.S. He was looking at Populism for roots of
> intellectual-cultural trends.
Poor guy seems to suffer from being characterized by people who remember their readings of him 20-30 years ago, filtered through his elitist/consensus reputation. He wrote about the deflation of the late 19th century, the pressures on farmers, etc. etc. But - and I have to admit this appeals to the urbanite in me - he does not romanticize the rural life. He emphasizes the commercial, even speculative motivations of farmers, who often preferred to flip land at a profit to tending it lovingly. They were small businesspeople getting crushed by the concentration of capital. It's not something I get choked up about.
The anti-Semitism rap is really unfair. There are about 5 pages in The Age of Reform about the anti-Semitic currents in populism. Though he doesn't say this, his analysis is perfectly consonant with the anti-Semitism that floats through a lot of populist politics that is anti-finance and anti-urban but not really anti-capitalist. The Jew becomes the symbolic repository of the cosmopolitanizing (?) trends of capitalism - that one's a hardy perennial. Hofstadter emphasizes that "it would be easy to exaggerate the intensity" of populist anti- Semitism - it wasn't a program of persecution, but more a rhetorical style, "a certain symbolic usage." He acknowledged that Henry Adams was a bigtime anti-Semite, too.
A lot of American leftists, historians and otherwise, want to romanticize the populists - and somehow seem surprised that a lot of populism today is pretty right-wing. So Hofstadter becomes the whipping boy for saying that there were right-wing tendencies in classic American populism. The same leftists want to believe in some deep radicalism in the American tradition, too, and are annoyed by his emphasis on the conservatism that runs through our history. Sorry, folks, it's there, and anyone alive today can see it. So why should it surprise us that today's paranoid, anti-intellectual, right- wing populism has a pedigree?
Doug