The Populist Persuasion: An American History by Michael Kazin

Author:Michael Kazin [Kazin, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, pdf
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2014-10-29T04:00:00+00:00

THE GREAT LIBERAL FEAR

But red hunters on the Right gave liberal intellectuals a terrible shock. How could millions of Americans—perhaps a majority—share such irrational, inchoate resentments against thinkers and high officials who were on the same side as they in the Cold War? Perhaps grassroots insurgencies that spoke a populist idiom were themselves the problem. Perhaps “the people,” who were all but deified in the age of FDR, could no longer be trusted in the age of Joe McCarthy.

In 1955, an anthology of essays appeared whose main ideas rapidly became established wisdom among academics and journalists seeking to understand mass support for the red scare. The New American Right, edited by Daniel Bell, featured articles by such well-known writers as Richard Hofstadter, Seymour Martin Lipset, David Riesman, and Bell himself. The seven contributors—five of whom were Jews—approached the problem from a variety of sociological and historical perspectives. But, as Bell wrote, “they showed a remarkable convergence in point of view.” Most salient was a suspicion of mass democracy unrestrained by institutional rules and rulers and unmediated by rational intellects like themselves. “[I]n a populistic culture like ours, which seems to lack a responsible elite with political and moral autonomy,” wrote the Columbia historian Hofstadter, “…it is possible to exploit the widest currents of public sentiment for private purposes.” Given the right circumstances, Hofstadter warned, “it is at least conceivable that a highly organized, vocal, active and well-financed minority could create a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.”79

This was the great fear of the liberal intellectuals: social movements of the ill-educated could destroy what made America such a good place in which to live, write, and teach. In the 1930s, most of the future contributors to The New American Right were youthful activists in one faction or another of the Marxist Left. But, twenty years later, American socialism was moribund, and industrial unionists, newly reunited with their old AFL antagonists and seemingly content to protect gains already made, seldom proposed transforming America from the shop floor upward. Liberal intellectuals responded by discarding nearly all sentimental vestiges of the producer ethic. Most also made peace with what appeared to be the unquestionable success of corporate capitalism, although they did not entirely abandon hope for a new opening on the Left.

At any rate, these writers maintained, their erstwhile embrace of socialism and the CIO had been a rational passion, rooted in class grievances and informed by a body of theory—rigorous, erudite, Talmudic. While riddled with naive and romantic flaws, the proletarian cause, it was argued, had nothing in common with the verbal crudities of anti-Communist crusaders like McCarthy or the thousands of vigilantes around the nation who were banning books from libraries, sacking teachers and entertainers with left-wing pasts, and generally treating heterodox expression as un-American. The red scare, Hofstadter implied in his essay, smacked more of fascism than of true conservatism, which had always honored the legitimacy of learning and deferred to responsible elites.

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