[lbo-talk] Why Richard Hofstadter Is Still Worth Reading butNotfor the Reasons the Critics Have in Mind

[Jesse Lemisch]

I don't know any historians today who are, as Doug says "surprised that a
lot of populism today is pretty right wing." Generally, we are not religious
mystics in our hopes for better popular movements. We know there are popular
movements of the left, right and in between. What those of us arguing
against Hofstadter are saying -- and I just don't think Doug is listening --
is that there was and is no truth to the idea of H and of so many others
that popular movements are necessarily fascist, and that's what's there in
his argument for the continuity between a supposed right-wing Populism and a
supposed grassroots McCarthyism. I hope that Doug might reconsider his
romanticization of bad guys like Hofstadter and envision the possibility of
a left-wing populism. It had long been my impression that Doug was in favor
of that as a prerequisite for democratic change, but now I'm not sure what
he's for.

Jesse Lemisch

----- Original Message -----
From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com>
To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 10, 2006 4:51 PM
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Why Richard Hofstadter Is Still Worth Reading
butNotfor the Reasons the Critics Have in Mind


>
> 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
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