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

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Tue Oct 10 17:21:09 PDT 2006


On 10/10/06, Jerry Monaco <monacojerry at gmail.com> 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.
>
> I think that the aftermath of fascism, the rise of the second Red Scare, and
> the currency of popular racism brought Hofstadter to emphasize mos forcely
> only one side of the Populists, the side that helped to explain current
> treds. It seems to me that the thesis of the time was that Populism led to
> the popular racism of the Dixiecrats and Hofstadter accepted that thesis..
> Doug am I wrong that Hof simply accepted this? I think that this thesis is
> one sided to say the least.

It's true that Hofstadter holds populism responsible for not only its own -- which he says was "a mode of expression, a rhetorical style, not a tactic or a program" (The Age of Reform, Vintage, p. 80) -- but also subsequent anti-Semitism: "It is not too much to say that the Greenback-Populist tradition activated most of what we have of modern popular anti-Semitism in the United States" (p. 80).

On 10/10/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> 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.

For the time being, there is no "really anti-capitalist" politics to speak of in the USA, but, fear not, there is no "anti-finance" politics to speak of either. :->

There was practically no popular opposition to the bankruptcy reform, which would have been a good political target if there had been either "anti-finance" politics or "really anti-capitalist" politics.

It's odd to be arguing against a movement -- in this case, an anti-Semitic and anti-finance populist movement -- that does not exist here now. Isn't it a hallmark of the paranoid style to incite a fear of a non-existent menace? -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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