The New Class War by Michael Lind;

Author:Michael Lind;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC
Published: 2020-01-20T16:00:00+00:00

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THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY theory was first weaponized in American partisan politics in the 1950s. In The New American Right (1955), Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Peter Viereck, and others explained McCarthyism as an anti-intellectual revolt of working-class Americans afflicted by status anxiety.32 One of the contributors to The New American Right was the historian Richard Hofstadter, who adopted the term “pseudo-conservative” from the Adorno school.33

In several influential books and essays, Hofstadter tried to rewrite the history of the New Deal by downplaying the importance of organized farmers and organized industrial workers in order to make college-educated professional reformers the heroes of twentieth-century American history. To put it another way, Hofstadter sought to define the New Deal as a system based not on democratic pluralism under a broker state, but on top-down technocracy. Nils Gilman observes: “If populism as a general political phenomenon was a byword for the wrong sort of politics, anti-Communist liberals at the apogee of their mid-century technocratic self-confidence believed that ‘the right kind of revolution’ would be elite-led and technocratic—precisely what Hofstadter believed he saw foreshadowed in the Progressive movement, with its commitment to scientific management, evidence-based public policy, credentialing and professionalization, education as a mode of social control, and the idea of best practices (then called ‘one best system’).”34

As part of his project of rewriting America as a story of rational technocratic reform threatened by dangerous democracy, Hofstadter misled a generation of readers into thinking that the American agrarian populist crusade of the 1890s had been an essentially anti-Semitic and protofascist movement.35 Jon Wiener writes that Hofstadter “saw Joe McCarthy as a potential American Hitler and believed he had found the roots of American fascism among rural Protestants in the Midwest. It was history by analogy—but the analogy didn’t work.”36 The erroneous thesis that McCarthyism was the rebirth of agrarian populism was refuted by a number of historians, including C. Vann Woodward in his 1959 essay “The Populist Heritage and the Intellectual.”37 In 1967, the fatal blow to Hofstadter’s application of Adorno’s status anxiety theory was delivered by Michael Paul Rogin, who showed in The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter that McCarthy’s major supporters were suburban upper-middle-class Republicans, not rural populists.38

Although he was a poor historian, Hofstadter was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes for telling complacent, affluent elites in metropolitan enclaves what they wanted to hear about the alleged menace posed by the less-educated rabble. In a 1966 essay, Hofstadter coined a phrase, “the paranoid style in American politics,” which to this day is invoked by lazy journalists and thinly educated pundits, most of them neoliberals or establishment conservatives, to delegitimate leftists as well as populists or conservatives with working-class or rural constituents.39

In the 1960s, the rhetoric of “pseudo-conservatism” and “status anxiety” and “the authoritarian personality” was revived again by centrist Democrats and some moderate Republicans to smear the followers of the conservative Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964 as potential fascists. So many academic American psychologists and psychiatrists declared the Republican candidate for

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