Source of book: I own
this.
For this post, I read
both the title essay, and the additional related (and unrelated essays) in the
collection. This includes a set of thematically connected essays: “The Paranoid
Style in American Politics,” “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt,” “Pseudo-Conservatism
Revisited,” and “Goldwater and Pseudo-Conservative Politics.” The second part
of the collection are three essays that Hofstadter calls “Some Problems of the
Modern Era.” These are looks at historical movements, and turned out to be
quite fascinating, although not specifically related to the others or to each
other. These are “Cuba, the Philippines, and Manifest Destiny,” “What Happened
to the Antitrust Movement?” and “Free Silver and the Mind of ‘Coin’
Harvey.”
The first set was, to say
the least, a bit mind-blowing. I knew that the Fundamentalist and Conservative
subculture I grew up in was...problematic for many reasons. Indeed, the
paranoia and reactionism Hofstadter describes in these essays is the very core
of the belief system. What Hofstadter writes about as a mostly fringe movement,
connected to the John Birch Society - although it got plenty of traction with
the Goldwater campaign - was the bread and butter of religion and politics in
my subculture. Now, of course, what was an ultra-conservative and
fundamentalist wing of Evangelicalism has taken over American white
Evangelicalism completely, and what used to be the far-right kooks in the GOP
are now the entire fucking party, from Trump on down. Hofstadter noted that the
fascism kind of followed the other stuff, and he was right about that. But he
was wrong that it was likely to remain on the fringes of our politics - it has
now gone mainstream with enough of our population to win elections.
I took a lot of notes,
particularly in the first set, and wish I could just quote at length. I will
say that they should be must-reads for those who wish to understand our current
political situation, and how lunacy has gone mainstream.
The introduction to the
collection is really excellent, and I think succeeds at Hofstadter’s goal of
unifying at least the first four essays, which were written over the course of
16 years, in the 1950s and 1960s. He does an okay job of explaining the
connection of the last three essays to the rest: they deal with specific
problems that the United States had to deal with to come to terms with
industrialization and world power.
Some of the best lines
come in the introduction, when he summarizes the ideas. Let’s start with this
one: political writing tends to emphasize what he calls “structure,” rather
than “milieu.” In more simple terms, political writers tend to look at economic
and, say, racial realities, while neglecting the social environment. The
unfortunate result is that many political thinkers are puzzled by why white
conservatives seem willing to harm themselves economically. Why do they act
against their interests? As we have seen graphically demonstrated over the last
five years (and even before), social interests are more important to most
people than economic interests. And people - particularly those seeing their
social prestige fade - tend to vote for social status first, and other
considerations after that. I’ll get to some specific quotes on that idea later,
but here are some from the introduction.
Because my concern is in this sense a bit one-sided,
it is necessary to be clear - it is here that the intent of these essays is
most likely to be misunderstood - that my reasons for emphasizing milieu rather
than structure do not stem from the belief that, of the two, milieu is more
important. My case is a more moderate one: it rests - quite aside from the
pleasure I take in analyzing styles of thought - on two convictions: first,
that our political and historical writing, until recently, has tended to emphasize
structure at the cost of substantially neglecting milieu; and second, that an
understanding of political styles and of the symbolic aspect of politics is a
valuable way of locating ourselves and others in relation to public
issues.
The older conception of politics was that it deals
with the question: Who gets what, when, and how? Politics was taken as an arena
in which people define their interests as rationally as possible and behave in
a way calculated to realize them as fully as possible. But Harold Lasswell, who
made this monosyllabic question the title of a well-known book on the substance
of politics, was one of the first in this country to be dissatisfied with the
rationalistic assumptions which it implied and to turn to the study of the emotional
and symbolic side of political life. It became important to add a new
conception to the older one: Who perceives what public issues, in what way, and
why? To the present generation of historical and political writers it has
become increasingly clear that people not only seek their interests but also
express and even in a measure define themselves in politics; that political
life acts as a sounding board for identities, values, fears, and aspirations.
In a study of the political milieu these things are brought to the surface.
Hey, is this sounding
familiar yet? Think about vaccines and masks in the age of Covid. People are
literally willing to risk their lives and those of others for the emotional and
symbolic statement of “owning the libs.” Oh, and it gets better.
The findings of public-opinion polls have made us far
less confident than we used to be that the public responds to the issues as
they are debated, and more aware that it reacts to them chiefly when they
become the object of striking symbolic acts or memorable statements, or are
taken up by public figures who themselves have a symbolic appeal.
Um, Trump anyone? Someone
who was and is objectively unqualified, objectively horrible at governing, and
did nothing for the people who worship him. But he is a symbol, and
therefore perfect as an idol.
There is so much more in
the introduction, but I will leave it for the reader.
Moving on to the title
essay, it was written in 1963, and in some ways builds on the essays on
Pseudo-Conservatism. But it is a good one to start with, because I believe it
has the most clarity of ideas. The central idea, of course, is that of a
paranoid style of thinking about politics. These days, one could cite both the
“Big Lie” that Trump won the 2020 election and the Q Anon phenomenon generally.
But it goes back further than that. Hofstadter specifically looks at the John
Birch Society and related paranoid groups, but it is fascinating (in a dark
way) that the exact ideas made their way into Evangelical thought in the 1970s,
and by the time we left organized religion for good in 2017, it had become them
lens by which an overwhelming majority of white Evangelicals see reality. And
indeed, for my wife and I, we got in on the ground level, as some of the first
homeschooled kids in the early 1980s. While there were some good things in the
early movement, people like Rousas Rushdoony and Phyllis Schlafly and Michael
Farris (I cite him because I believe it was HSLDA that most pushed my parents
into fundamentalism) and others quickly redirected the movement from one
focused on a better education to one that was all Culture Wars™ all the time. And to do that, a
sense of paranoia about everyone else - particularly the Other Side™ was
carefully cultivated. For a variety of reasons - racial anxiety, fear of
feminism, declining numbers - white Evangelicals had no immunity to the
paranoid style, and over the course of the last three or four decades, it
became a systemic infection. So reading this book, I realized that these were
the thought patterns of my subculture, and so much of my own spiritual journey
has been to actively fight them. Anyway, let’s get into some quotes, because
Hofstadter says it better than I can. After talking the history of paranoia in
the US, dating from the early days, against “The Illuminati,” Jews, Catholics,
Masons, and other “flavors of the day,” he states the unifying idea.
These writers illustrate the central preconception of
the paranoid style - the existence of a vast, insidious, preternaturally
effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of
the most fiendish character.
The anti-Masonic
conspiracy theory is actually really damn familiar to me. Also the Illuminati.
And the idea of a vast Catholic conspiracy (thanks to Jack Chick, whose propaganda tracts are one of
the minefields we tried to steer our kids away from at my parents’ house.) The
Mormons eventually got lumped in too - you can see this in the Sherlock Holmes
novel, A Study In Scarlet - even though the idea of Mormons and Masons
collaborating with each other AND the Jesuits is really implausible. Of course,
so is the Q Anon conspiracy and most of what Trump and his sycophants push. But
consistency has never been part of the paranoid style. This footnote really illustrates
what is at the core.
The status of those who were opposed by these anti
movements of the nineteenth century varied widely. Freemasonry was largely an
affair of the upper crust of society. Catholics were predominantly poor
immigrants. Mormons drew their strength from the native rural middle class.
Ironically, the victims themselves were associated with similar anti
sentiments. Freemasonry had strong anti-Catholic associations. Mormons were
anti-Catholic, and, to a degree, anti-Masonic. Yet their detractors did not
hesitate to couple staunch foes. It was sometimes said, for example, that the
Jesuits had infiltrated Freemasonry, and the menace of the Catholicism was
frequently compared with the menace of Mormonism. All these movements had an interest
for minds obsessed with secrecy and concerned with an all-or-nothing world
struggle over ultimate values. The ecumenicism of hatred is a great
breaker-down of precise intellectual discriminations.
Seriously, read that last
sentence again. It’s fantastic. And it, more than anything else, explains
today’s GQP.
Want to hear something
else familiar? How about this, from Lyman Beecher, perhaps best known as the
father of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher. As the latter said
about Lyman, he was continually involved in controversy. While his children
were abolitionists, he was better known for being anti-Catholic and
anti-immigration. (Of course, back then, that meant the Irish and the Germans
and the Scandinavians…) Here is how Hofstadter describes Lyman’s apocalyptic
tract, Plea for the West. (Meaning the western United States.)
Everything depended, in his judgment, upon what
influences dominated the great West, where the future of the country lay.
There, Protestantism was engaged in a life-or-death struggle with Catholicism.
Time was already running out. “Whatever we do, it must be done quickly…” A
great tide of immigration, hostile to free institutions, was sweeping in upon
the country, subsidized and sent by “the potentates of Europe,” multiplying
tumult and violence, filling jails, crowding poor-houses, quadrupling taxation,
and sending increasing thousands of voters to “lay their inexperienced had upon
the helm of our power.”
It goes on and on, and if
you haven’t recognized the screeds of Tucker Carlson and Trump and Ann Coulter
and....well, pretty much all the current American Right, well, listen a bit
closer. Just fill in “Muslim” and “Mexican” and “Shithole countries.”
Jumping forward to the
1960s, Hofstadter notes the way that the Right Wing feels. (And feel free to
substitute “2000s” here - it very much fits.)
The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that
they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their
country - that they were fending off threats to a still well-established way of
life in which they played an important part. But the modern right wing, as
Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has largely been taken away
from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and
to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues
have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old
competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialist and communist
schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by
treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and
foreigners but major statesmen seated at the very centers of American
power.
Um, yeah, that is LITERALLY
the shit that was in the water of my subculture. And it is the message of the
Religious Right. And now of the GQP. It is literally the message of the right.
We must “Make America Great Again.” And it is the TRUE faith of white
Evangelicalism, not anything having to do with Christ-following. Oh, and it
goes on!
The basic elements of contemporary right-wing thought
can be reduced to three: First, there has been the now familiar sustained
conspiracy, running over more than a generation, and reaching its climax in
Roosevelt’s New Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under
the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or
communism. Details might be open to argument among right-wingers, but many
would agree...that this campaign began with the passage of the income tax
amendment to the Constitution in 1913.
[Note: this is literally
what is taught in the A Beka curriculum we used, and is an article of faith not
just for the right-wing, but overwhelmingly for white Evangelicals generally.]
The second contention is that top government
officialdom has been so infiltrated by Communists that American policy, at
least since the days leading up to Pearl Harbor, has been dominated by sinister
men who were shrewdly and consistently selling out American national interests.
[Note: just add in
“atheists,” “feminists,” and “the gay agenda” to that, and you have the culture
wars in a nutshell.]
The final contention is that the country is infused
with a network of Communist agents, just as in the old days it was infiltrated
by Jesuit agents, so that the whole apparatus of education, religion, the
press, and the mass media are engaged in a common effort to paralyze the
resistance of loyal Americans.
[Note: again, substitute
the specifically religious concerns, and this is literally the belief system of
the Religious Right. Fascinating here is the footnote that cites Phyllis Schlafly for pushing these ideas. Yet
another reason I consider her one of the most evil persons of my time.]
Hofstadter then turns to
the lifestyle inherent in the paranoid style. And damned if this doesn’t seem
like living in Evangelicalism since my childhood. The never-ending sense of
apocalypse and Culture Wars, and the belief that everyone outside of the narrow
tribe was somehow on the side of the great satanic conspiracy.
Let us now abstract the basic elements in the paranoid
style. The central image is that of a vast and sinister conspiracy, a gigantic
and yet subtle machinery of influence set in motion to undermine and destroy a
way of life. One may object that there are conspiratorial acts in
history, and there is nothing paranoid about taking note of them. This is true.
All political behavior requires strategy, many strategic acts depend for their
effect upon a period of secrecy, and anything that is secret may be described,
often with but little exaggeration, as conspiratorial. The distinguishing thing
about the paranoid style is not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots
here and there in history, but that they regard a “vast” or “gigantic”
conspiracy as the motive force in historical events. History is a
conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power, and
what is felt to be needed to defeat it is not the usual methods of political
give-and-take, but an all-out crusade. The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of
this conspiracy in apocalyptic terms - he traffics in the birth and death of
whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is
always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning
point: it is now or never in organizing resistance to conspiracy. Time is
forever running out. Like religious millenarians, he expresses the anxiety of
those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set
a date for the apocalypse.
Um, yeah. And we believed
in the literal apocalypse and end times and the world about to end too. Which,
in practice, means a lot of parents decided that preparing their children for
the rapture was more important than preparing them to live in a global and
diverse world. Everything was a sign of the end times. Even women working outside
the home. Hofstadter notes that some of these ideas resonate with certain
religious beliefs. And he is right. And also about this:
As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of
perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused
public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as
something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working
politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good
and absolute evil, the quality needed is not a willingness to compromise but
the will to fight things out to a finish. Nothing but complete victory will do.
Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable,
he must be totally eliminated - if not from the world, at least from the
theater of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention.
Again, this is what Trump
tapped into, particularly in white Evangelicalism. His hate, his threats of
violence, his bullying, his unwillingness to compromise, his insistance on
“winning” (and of course, his promise to restore the mythical past.) Hofstadter
further points out that since total victory is pretty much not attainable in
the real world - particularly when it comes to social conflict - failure makes the
conspiracy theorist feel even more oppressed and desperate. There is so much
more in this essay, I really highly recommend it.
I do need to move on,
however, to the next one, “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt,” written in 1954.
This is actually the earliest of the essays, and it really states perfectly
something I have been thinking for a good decade: the American Right is NOT
conservative. Hofstadter calls it “Pseudo-Conservatism,” although I think
“Radical Reactionism” works too. It pretends to be conservative, but really, it
wants to burn our institutions and culture to the ground, and replace it with a
radically different one. In the case of Trumpism, it would be a return to
autocracy and white supremacy. For white Evangelicals, it would be theocracy.
And for the economic interests that fund the Pseudo-Conservative movement, it
would be to go back to the days of the Robber Barons, when big business was
free from taxation and regulation, and could plunder the environment and treat
workers as slaves with impunity. While Hofstadter couldn’t see the 21st Century
GQP, he did see its genesis in the post-war period. He contrasts the “liberal
dissent” that lead to the New Deal with the new dissent, which is not
conservative. I think reactionary is the best description, but here is what
Hofstadter has to say about it.
Unlike most of the liberal dissent of the past, the
new dissent not only has no respect for nonconformism, but is based upon a
relentless demand for conformity. It can most accurately be called pseudo-conservative
- I borrow the term from The Authoritarian Personality, published in
1950 by Theodor W. Adorno and his associates [note: highly recommended!] -
because its exponents, although they believe themselves to be conservatives and
usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, show signs of a serious and
restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions, and institutions. They
have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true
conservatism in the classical sense of the word, and they are far from pleased
with the dominant practical conservatism of the moment as it is represented by
the Eisenhower administration. Their political reactions express rather a
profound if largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways - a hatred
which one would hesitate to impute to them if one did not have suggestive
evidence both from clinical techniques and from their own modes of expression.
A-freaking-men. That is
exactly it. It is a deep hatred of modern American - indeed modern human
society and culture. And they are obsessed with conformity - particularly
gender conformity, but also racial conformity and cultural homogeneity - their
preferred culture of course. And they have no interest in compromise, let alone
learning from others. It is authoritarian to its core. As we found when we
dared to live slightly differently from the patriarchy culture.
Hofstadter also goes
where I applaud, by refusing to take the easy way out and assume that the
pseudo-conservative movement is just a reaction to the Cold War. Rather, he
traces it back to, among other movements, the Ku Klux Klan. Oh hell yes, he
went there. And pointed out that in the 1920s (the last major anti-immigration
spasm, by the way) there were over four million KKK members. Adjusted for
today’s population, that would be about fourteen million - totally believable
actually, in my opinion. Trumpism (and the Tea Party) are the modern KKK, and
they may have even greater numbers than that.
Hofstadter then turns to
what he thinks drives pseudo-conservatism. It isn’t “interest politics,” but
“status politics.”
In a country where physical needs have been, by the
scale of the world’s living standards, on the whole well met, the luxury of
questing after status has assumed an unusually prominent place in our civic
consciousness. Political life is not simply an arena in which the conflicting
interests of various social groups in concrete material gains is fought out; it
is also an arena into which status aspirations and frustrations are, as the
psychologists would say, projected. It is at this point that the issues of
politics, or the pretended issues of politics, become interwoven with and
dependent upon the personal problems of individuals. We have, at all times, two
kinds of processes going on in inextricable connection with each other: interest
politics, the clash of material aims and needs among various groups and
blocs; and status politics, the clash of various projective
rationalizations arising from status aspirations and other personal motives.
I think Hofstadter is
onto something here when he talks about prosperity. It isn’t those who are
struggling to make ends meet who are the big Trump supporters. Rather, it is
the less-educated but more wealthy white people who have $80,000 trucks and
nice houses and enough money to fly to DC and storm the Capitol. (There are
lots of these people on my block, and they held “Trump Train” parades every
weekend with giant flags saying “Fuck Your Feelings” and “Make Liberals Cry
Again.” And Confederate Battle Flags too, of course.) What these people are
fearing isn’t economic hardship - they are doing damn well - it is a loss of status.
Educated people look down on them, and the minorities they used to abuse with
impunity are growing in numbers and power. So they are losing status.
In prosperity, however, when status politics becomes
relatively more important, there is a tendency to embody discontent not so much
in legislative proposals as in grousing. For the basic aspirations that
underlie status discontent are only partially conscious; and, even so far as
they are conscious, it is difficult to give them a programmatic expression. It
is more difficult for the old lady who belongs to the D. A. R. and who sees her
ancestral home swamped by new working-class dwellings to express her animus in
concrete proposals of any degree of reality than it is, say, for the jobless
worker during a slump to rally to a relief program. Therefore, it is the
tendency of status politics to be expressed more in vindictiveness, in sour
memories, in the search for scapegoats, than in realistic proposals for
positive action.
The footnote is
interesting here too, quoting Samuel Lubell on isolationism:
The agitator seems to steer clear of the area of
materials needs on which liberal and democratic movements concentrate; his main
concern is a sphere of frustration that is usually ignored in traditional
politics. The programs that concentrate on material needs seem to overlook that
area of moral uncertainties and emotional frustrations that are the immediate
manifestations of malaise. It may therefore be conjectured that his followers
find the agitator’s statements attractive not because he occasionally promises
to ‘maintain the American standard of living’ or to provide a job for everyone,
but because he intimates that he will give them the emotional satisfactions that
are denied them in the contemporary social and economic set-up. He offers
attitudes, not bread.
Hmm, that really does
sound like Trump. Including the vindictiveness.
And this brings me to
another fascinating footnote, in a discussion of cultural change and
authoritarianism, paraphrasing Else Frenkel-Brunswik on parenting styles. It
particularly hit my gut, because it illustrates the progression - regression
really - in my birth family as the result of poisonous teachings on
childrearing. My parents started out as more love-based and less obsessed with
obedience. And, on a very related note, they were fairly progressive
(particularly compared to A Beka) on racial issues. But things changed when
they were in their late 30s: they got into Bill Gothard, the GOP went
anti-immigrant in California, my dad had an unpleasant encounter after the LA
riots, and they went quite a bit to the opposite side on both authoritarianism
and racial issues, eventually destroying relationships over social conformity.
Here is the footnote:
The author remarks concerning subjects who were
relatively free from ethnic prejudice that in their families “less
obedience is expected of the children. Parents are less status-ridden and thus
show less anxiety with respect to conformity and are less intolerant toward
manifestations of socially unaccepted behavior...Comparatively less pronounced
status-concern often goes hand in hand with greater richness and liberation of
emotional life. There is, on the whole, more affection, or more unconditional
affection, in the families of unprejudiced subjects. There is less surrender to
conventional rules.”
That was in so many ways
my life up until age 14 or so. If you had told me the future then, I would not
have believed you. But, as Dwight Yoakam sang, things
change.
The essay ends with a
great sentence, which seems all too prescient these days. Think about Covid,
vaccines, and masks - or climate change - and read it.
However, in populistic culture like ours, which seems
to lack a responsible elite with political and moral autonomy, and in which it
is possible to exploit the wildest currents of public sentiment for private
purposes, 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.
That is indeed the world
we live in right now. One party, and a sizable minority of our country have
zero interest in seeking the common good, in rationally pursuing our well-being
and safety, whether it comes to Covid or climate change. And that has made
positive change difficult. I hope and pray that it has not become
impossible.
Next up is the
fascinating 1965 revisitation of the issues from the prior essay in
“Pseudo-Conservatism Revisited - 1965.” This was written after the Goldwater
campaign, and led Hofstadter to reconsider some of his conclusions in the essay
a decade earlier. The primary reconsideration is this: in his earlier essay, he
assumed that recent immigrants might join the pseudo-conservative movement in
an attempt to increase their social status. While he didn’t abandon that idea,
he did recognize that the heart of the Pseudo-Conservative movement - embodied
in Goldwater - was racist to its core. [Note: Hofstadter was both right and
wrong on this as applied to the Trump campaign. A number of Hispanics,
particularly males, were attracted to his campaign for various reasons, including
its toxic masculinity. That said, it is also true that white supremacy is the
core value of Trumpism, as it was to the Goldwater campaign.]
Hofstadter also decided
to talk more about religious fundamentalism in the second essay, as he
underestimated the role of that demographic previously. (And he hadn’t seen
NUTTIN yet…) There are some great quotes, once again. I have pieced together a
few here.
I made only passing reference in a footnote to the
role of fundamentalism, and it is plain that this is one of the salient
elements in the right wing, an element whose importance has becoem increasingly
evident in the last decade.
…
In this respect, my emphasis on ethnic factors in the
pseudo-conservatism of 1954 now seems to me analogous to the strategy of
generals who are prepared to fight the last war...But the radical rightism of
the 1960s is predominantly a movement of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Republicans,
with only a fringe of ethnic support.
Oh, and also this one,
regarding Joe McCarthy:
Most prophetic too of the future of the right wing was
his strong appeal for fundamentalist-oriented Protestants, who now took a
significant place with their Catholic counterparts.
It is definitely
instructive how much Fundies LOVE that nasty-ass inquisitor, who ruined the
lives of so many people for failing to live up to his idea of orthodoxy. (See,
for example, Part of Our Time,
Murray Kempton’s thoughtful book on the 1930s.) Hofstadter made another
perceptive analysis of Fundie thought:
I use the term “fundamentalism” in a rather extended
way to describe a religious style rather than firm doctrinal commitments, since
no one knows how many evangelical right-wingers adhere to a literal view of
Scripture and other fundamentalist tenets. Two other qualifications should be
made: first, there are large numbers of fundamentalists who interpret their
religious commitment as a reason to withdraw from worldly politics, in which
they see no more hope than they do in the other things of this world; and
second, many fundamentalists have inherited generous views on domestic economic
reforms which they do not easily give up. But on certain issues of cultural
politics, fundamentalists have always been rigid, and when such issues become
more salient the fundamentalists become more responsive to the blandishments of
pseudo-conservative prophets.
…
Under the aegis of right-wing politics, rigid
Protestants of a type once intensely anti-Catholic can now united with
Catholics of similar militancy in a grand ecumenical zeal against communism and
what they take to be a joint defense of Christian civilization. The malevolent
energy formerly used in the harassment of Catholics can now be more profitably
spent in the search for Communists, or even in attacks on the alleged
subversiveness of liberal Protestant denominations. The Manichean conception of
live as a struggle between absolute good and absolute evil and the idea of an
irresistible Armageddon have been thinly secularized and transferred to the
cold war. The conflict between Christianity and communism is conceived as a war
to the death, and Christianity is set for as the only adequate counterpoise to
the communist credo.
Hofstadter proceeds to
note the increasing connections between John Birch Society thought and
religious fundamentalists, which was pretty complete by the end of my childhood.
But it was this statement in a footnote that stood out particularly, in light
of recent events.
This is not the first period in our history in which
fundamentalist leaders, anguished over the general repudiation of their beliefs
and values, lent their energies to political reaction. During the 1920s they
gave heavy support to the Ku Klux Klan, particularly in the South.
Hofstadter gives numerous
examples of this “synergy,” where Fundies and the KKK found common cause on
issues from Evolution to political candidates. Oh, and the leaders of the KKK
were often Fundie preachers. Oh, and this too:
Such church groups have created a vast religious
public, once poor and depression-ridden but now to a large degree moderately
prosperous, whose members sometimes combine the economic prejudices of the
newly well-to-do with the moral prejudices of the revolt against modernity.
Man, the hits just keep
rolling. This is literally how I can describe my parents’ and grandparents’
generations. Just removed from the immigrant poverty by that free land they
inherited via the homestead act, then the beneficiaries of both union wages for
unskilled labor and the recipient of free college, they have certain economic
prejudices related to that...combined with a revolt against modernity. And this
turns out to parallel the same phenomenon in the 1920s.
During the 1920’s small-town and rural Protestants
were waging a vigorous defense of their cultural values against their rapidly
gaining foes - the advancing Catholics and minority ethnic groups on one side
and the modernists in religion and secularists in intellectual culture on the
other. The Ku Klux Klan, Prohibitionism, the campaign against evolution in the
schools, anti-Catholicism and the whispering campaign against Al Smith were all
aspects of this struggle. On one count, immigration restriction, the old guard
scored an important and permanent victory, and on another, Prohibition, they
scored a gratifying if temporary success. But on the others they continued to
lose ground. They substantially lost the fight against teaching evolution in
the public schools, which exposed them to humiliating ridicule throughout the
world. Lost, too, was the fight against modern relaxation in manners, morals,
and censorship. Again the effort to contain the influence of immigrants in
politics was lost within the Democratic party.
White Evangelicals have
been furious about this ever since. And have spent their energy trying to
reverse these losses of 100 years ago.
And then, opportunists in
the business community have co-opted this into a support for unregulated
klepto-capitalism. Just one quote here.
In the intellectual synthesis of contemporary
ultra-conservatism, the impulses of Protestant asceticism can thus be drawn
upon to support business self-interest and the beautiful mathematical models of
neo-classical economists.
Eventually, as Hofstadter
notes at length, it is difficult to translate these status issues into policies
that actually accomplish anything.
Such persons believe that their prestige in the
community, even indeed their self-esteem, depends on having these values
honored in public. Besides their economic expectations, people have deep
emotional commitments in other spheres - religion, morals, culture, race
relations - which they also hope to see realized in political action. Status
politics seeks not to advance perceived material interests but to express
grievances and resentments about such matters, to press claims upon society to
give deference to non-economic values. As a rule, status politics does more to
express emotions than to formulate policies. It is in fact hard to translate
the claims of status politics into programs or concrete objectives (national
Prohibition was an exception, though ultimately an unsuccessful one); and for
the most part the proponents of such politics, being less concerned with the
uses of power than with its alleged misuse, do not offer positive programs to
solve social problems. The operative content of their demands is more likely to
be negative: they call on us mainly to prohibit, to prevent, to censor and
censure, to discredit, and to punish.
Once again, it is so
obvious that this is the endgame we see in the GOP: Trump offers the emotional
component of grievance, McConnell and others make it clear that there are no
ideas for dealing with social problems other than more state violence, more
policing, more incarceration, more censorship, and more blaming of the poor and
minorities. It is all about the expression of resentments and grievances than
about solutions. It continues:
In many areas of life, the style of status politics
has been shaped in large measure by rigid moral and religious attitudes, and
those who are moved by the issues of status politics transfer these attitudes
to social and economic questions. On many occasions they approach economic
issues as matters of faith and morals rather than matters of fact. For example,
people often oppose certain economic policies not because they have been or
would be economically hurt by such policies, or even because they have any
carefully calculated views about their economic efficacy, but because they
disapprove on moral grounds of the assumptions on which they think the
policies rest.
That, in a nutshell, is
the subculture in which I was raised. Universal healthcare is BAD. Not because
of benefits or logic - in fact, the rest of the first world overwhelmingly
demonstrates that it costs less and gives better results - but because of the
religious and ideological belief that giving “those people” healthcare would
feed their laziness. That this is subconsciously racist as fuck does not occur
to them most of the time, and when it does, right wingers openly double down on
the racism with some modern version of “but
the lazy n------rs won’t work if they have free healthcare.” The closing
ideas reiterate that Hofstadter feels that economic prosperity in general lead
those who are doing well to focus on increasing their status - and voting their
prejudices.
We have noticed that whereas in depressions or during
great bursts of economic reform people vote for what they think are their
economic interests, in times of prosperity they feel free to vote their
prejudices.
The final essay in the
first set is all about Goldwater and his channeling of pseudo-conservativism.
Of course, looking at this from 2021, Goldwater was both far more intelligent
and yet also less successful than Trump, who captured the essence of the
movement, without feeling the need to support it with any intellectual content.
Throughout this essay, you can substitute “Trump” for “Goldwater” in most cases.
Unquestionably
Goldwater’s [Trump’s] ideas do retain some shreds and scrapes of genuine
conservatism, but the main course of his career puts him closer to the
right-wing ideologues who were essential to his success, who shaped his
tactics, who responded to his line of argument, and whose extremism he chose to
defend at the vital moment of his career. Without invoking these formative
affiliations, how are we to explain the character of a “conservative” whose
whole political life has been spent urging a sharp break with the past, whose
great moment as a party leader was marked by a repudiation of our traditional
political ways, whose followers were so notable for their destructive and
divisive energies, and whose public reputation was marked not with standpattism
or excessive caution but with wayward impulse and recklessness?
Yeah, that sounds
familiar, doesn’t it? How about this?
The two-party system, as it has developed in the
United States, hangs on the common recognition of loyal opposition: each side
accepts the ultimate good intentions of the other. The opponent’s judgement may
be held to be consistently execrable, but the legitimacy of his intent is not -
that is, in popular terms, his Americanism is not questioned. One of the
unspoken assumptions of presidential campaigns is that the leaders of both
parties are patriots who, however serious their mistakes, must be accorded the
right to govern. But an essential point in the pseudo-conservative world view
is that our recent Presidents, being men of wholly evil intent, have conspired
against the public good. This does more than discredit them: it calls into
question the validity of the political system that keeps putting such men into
office.
Hey, we had a disputed
election (which Trump STILL refuses to concede), chants of “lock her up”
directed at Hilary Clinton, and now a series of voter suppression laws targeted
at making sure that voters cannot elect Democrats again. Oh, and this started with
the decision by the GOP to stonewall President Obama on everything. Which may
or may not have been related to the fact that he was the first Black
president.... Goldwater, like Trump, refused to concede at first, and even when
he did, he used the opportunity to insult President Johnson.
Another excellent
observation is regarding the way that pseudo-conservatives treat our past. This
goes double for white Evangelicals, by the way.
Although the ultras usually speak with nostalgia about
the supposed virtues of our remote past, they have a disposition to repudiate
the more recent past, and it was in character for Goldwater to write off as
unacceptable the Republican conservatism of recent years.
For the
Evangelical-Fundie subculture I grew up in, this was certainly true. The recent
past - meaning perhaps everything before 1900...or was it since the Civil War?
was bad. It was only before that - before Darwin, before Dewey, before the
income tax, before desegregation, before feminism, before...well, it was all
about a mythical remote past anyway, and facts be damned. And that is the
appeal of MAGA too. It doesn’t matter exactly when that past was, or what
it looked like. It was when the MAGAts think they had power and prestige and
didn’t have to bother with the feelings of other people not like them. Ditto
for white Evangelicals. That mythical past was when they had unquestioned
political and cultural power, and people different from them could go fuck
themselves.
And also, actually governing
is hard. Really hard. And neither Goldwater nor Trump nor today’s right wing
have any intention of doing that hard work. Nor do they have any interest in
actually appealing to a majority, which is why fascist rule is so appealing to
them.
Party workers raised on the professional code want
above all to find winners, to get and keep office, to frame programs on which
they can generally agree, to use these programs to satisfy the major interests
in our society, and to try to solve its most acute problems. If they find that
they have chosen a loser, they are quick to start looking for another leader.
If they see that their program is out of touch with the basic realities, they
grope their way toward a new one.
But Goldwater’s [Trump’s] zealots were moved more by
the desire to dominate the party than to win the country, concerned more to
express resentments and punish “traitors,” to justify a set of values and
assert grandiose, militant visions, than to solve actual problems of state.
More important, they were immune to the pressure to move over from an extreme
position toward the center of the political spectrum which is generally exerted
by the professional’s desire to win.
Trump and his followers
have zero ideas for how to actually solve the issues in our society. They are
content to persecute immigrants and minorities, and thump their chests. And
Trump’s loss of an election has not convinced them to change course and find
another leader and better policies. It goes on and on, giving overwhelming
evidence that Goldwater was a proto-Trump, and that Trump voters are the same
sorts as Goldwater voters. Another example is the way that Trumpism punishes
any fellow Republicans who fail to show personal loyalty to Trump.
The convention showed the nation for the first time
how well organized the right-wing movement was, but it also proved, as the
subsequent campaign was to prove again, that the right wing, though brilliantly
organized for combat, was not organized to conciliate or persuade.
Having convinced themselves that the forces they were fighting were
conspiratorial and sinister, not to say treasonous, they found it impossible to
shake off the constricting mental framework of the paranoid style. The sudden
and startling outburst of wild applause, the jeers and fist-shaking at the
broadcast booths and press stands...was a key to the prevailing mood. Animated
by a profound resentment, and now at last on the verge of a decisive victory
over their tormentors, the Goldwater [Trump] zealots were filled with the
desire to punish and humiliate, not appease and pacify.
Again, anything sound
familiar?
Hofstadter also talks a
bit about the pseudo-conservative narrative, that all these “socialist”
policies have ruined the country. The problem is that these policies - Social
Security, Unemployment, workplace safety regulations, environmental
regulations, and so much more, are damn popular because they work.
But this difficulty, seen in a larger context, is only
one manifestation of a nagging problem confronting ultra-right spokesmen. As
they see it, we have been committed for many years, for decades, to economic
policies which are wrong morally and wrong as expedients, destructive of
enterprise, and dangerous to the fabric of free society. At the same time,
every informed person recognizes that we have become much richer doing all
these supposedly wrong and unsound things than we were when we had hardly begun
to do them.
Alas, starting from the
1970s and accelerating with Ronald Reagan, these good policies were unraveled,
leading to the transfer of wealth and income upward to the ultra-rich, and
other nasty social consequences. We have not only the evidence that Hofstadter
saw in the 1960s, but literally 40 years of proof that Goldwater and Reagan’s
economic policies are catastrophic for all except for the ultra-rich. Which is
why Trump ultimately downplayed the economic policies of Paul Ryan and Mitch
McConnell, and ran on racial grievance. Nevertheless, Goldwater (and Trump),
while promising to “drive the politics out of politics,” gave priority to
certain wealthy and favored interests.
A vital difficulty, of course, is that Goldwater
[Trump] was not consistent in this effort to surmount interest politics. There
is no record, I believe, of his appearing before the National Association of
Manufacturers to urge them to be less solicitous about their tax burdens or of
his appearing before segregationist audiences to urge that then move over and
make some place for the Negro. The abandonment of interest politics, then, is a
one sided affair. One need not question Goldwater’s [Trump’s] sincerity to see
that politics, as he practiced it, would leave certain favored interests free
to continue to seek their advancement through political action while
encouraging large masses of the people to commit themselves to the more
abstract effort to fulfil high moral ideals.
Throughout this essay, it
was clear that while there were differences - Trump is utterly amoral, with
zero intellectual content, totally devoted to his own power and aggrandizement
- Goldwater and Trump appealed to the same grievances and the same people. The
big difference is that by the time Trump appeared, the transfer of racist white
people to the Republican party was largely complete, and geographical sorting
allowed him to win the electoral college. One time, at least.
I do have a few things to
say about the remaining essays. While the ones on the paranoid style, and
pseudo-conservatism generally, were prescient, relevant, and far too familiar
to me as an exvangelical for comfort; I found the other essays to be a lot of
unexpected fun. Hofstadter is first and foremost a historian, and I gained a
better perspective and greater knowledge of three historical periods in our
history as a result.
Some history on the first
one, “Cuba, the Philippines, and Manifest Destiny.” There is a lot to unpack
here, but my own family is connected to this. My dad was born and grew up in
the Philippines, as a missionary kid. The legacy of both Spanish and US
colonialism is strong there, and a lot of what I learned about the difference
between Christianity and American Cultural Imperialism came from my dad.
(Sadly, before he regressed to reactionism starting nearly 30 years ago.) This
essay looks at the Spanish-American War, triggered by the death
throes of the Spanish empire and the Cuban movement for independence. Before
this war, the US version of imperialism was limited to the North American
continent and its surroundings. This war is when the US crossed over into world
imperialism and global colonialism, and the effects of that still reverberate
in our current endless wars overseas. I can’t begin to summarize this amazing
essay, but it says so much that explains Vietnam, Iraq, and our current failed
Middle Eastern wars. It was written in 1951, with some later revisions, but it
is amazingly relevant 70 years later. As Hofstadter puts it in the
introduction:
My assignment was to analyze the decision made when
our entry into and retention of the Philippine Islands after the war with Spain
caused the nation to turn itself on a course of world imperialism. What were
the issues, what were the consequences for the national mentality, when a
democratic country, committed by its creed and its very origins to
self-government and self-determination, was confronted with the prospect of
taking by conquest distant territory inhabited by an alien and all but unknown
people?
Since then, the US has
had a series of colonialist and proxy wars that have turned out badly. (The
only war we won in any meaningful sense was World War Two, and that was because
defeating aggressors was the goal and the other parties in Europe and Japan
retained their sovereignty. All the rest, from World War One to our current
debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq, have utterly failed to win lasting peace.)
This post is already insanely long, so I won’t get into all of the details, but
Hofstadter does an excellent job of tying the swerve to imperialism to the
specifics of the political situation at the time, from the “closing of the
west” to efforts at Prohibition.
One thing of particular
note is the very much of-their-time attitudes about war and “honor” that drove
the major parties. It looked likely that Cuba would become independent without
US intervention, but we wanted war. And the Spanish wanted to lose a war with
us rather than with the Cuban people.
Americans seemed to want not merely the freedom of
Cuba but a war for the freedom of Cuba. The Spanish government, insofar as it
confronted the realities at all, seemed to think that it was preferable to lose
the island “honorably,” as the consequence of a war, than to back down.
McKinley was caught between the aggressive irrationality of his own people and
the decadent irrationality of the ancient Latin power.
There are some parallels
to our own situation too, I think. Hofstadter pointed out that the war started
with good intentions - humanitarianism and the wish to free people. But, like
wars of this type usually do, it ended up with imperialism and
annexation.
One fascinating bit that
is too long to quote is the statement by William James, who deplored the war fever, and
warned about where the humanitarian impulse would ultimately end. Indeed, he
correctly predicted that while the US would choose not to annex Cuba, it would
annex Puerto Rico and the Philippines. It is easy to forget - we aren’t usually
taught this in schools - but the Philippines didn’t gain independence from US
rule until 1946. And Puerto Rico continues to be in an awkward position: as a
colony, it is ruled by the US, but it lacks statehood and therefore
representation in Congress or a say in the presidency.
Particularly disturbing
in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War is the way that clergy compared
the victory to the great victories of Israel in the Bible, justifying the
conquest and plunder of an island thousands of miles away on the other side of
the world as “god’s will.” Unsurprisingly, this also went along with a view of
white people as superior, and entrusted with, as Kipling put it, the “white
man’s burden” to rule the world. Here is a particularly nasty quote from
Senator Albert Beveridge.
“We will not renounce our part in the mission of our
race, trustees under God, of the civilization of the world. God has not been
preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for
nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. No! He has
made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos
reigns. He has made us adepts in government that we may administer government
among savages and senile peoples.”
I forgot to note an exact
quote, but Hofstadter also talks at length of the myth of American invincibility.
We have been privileged with a land that is largely protected from invasion by
two giant oceans. With the exception of the Civil War, which we brought on
ourselves, we have yet to fight an actual war on our own soil. So it was all
too easy to believe that we couldn’t be beaten...except by treachery. Which is
why so many on the right still think we could have won in Vietnam. Twenty years
of disaster in Afghanistan have chipped away at that now, and, as in Vietnam,
we are having to admit that there is no “victory” there. Either endless
colonialist occupation, or withdrawal in defeat. And, having destroyed the
institutions that might have grown into modern states, and sullied the name of
democracy with our violence, there is no good result possible - at least that
we have any control over. The sooner we realize that there are things we cannot
do, the sooner we will stop wasting vast amounts of money and ending large
numbers of lives pursuing these chimeras.
Next up is Hofstadter’s
essay on the antitrust movement. This one is fascinating, because he details
all the failures of the movement over the years, but concludes that in the end,
the ideas behind the movement morphed into functional regulatory authority and
rules that have accomplished a lot of the same goals, but without fanfare.
Unfortunately, many of those gains were eroded from the 1980s on by Republican
policies, but I think at the time Hofstadter wrote it (1964), it was fairly
true. And still, some of those gains do remain, and today’s anti-corporate
movement is growing once again. I did note a few good quotes in this one as
well. Hofstadter correctly identifies the goals of the movement. First is
simply the economic belief that greater competition produces the best results,
and that any combinations that lead to de facto monopoly have negative results.
Regardless of your beliefs about capitalism or markets generally, it is
difficult to disagree with this basic idea. Too much economic power vested in a
small number of entities is a bad thing.
The second one, however,
is less known these days, but it thoroughly describes the problems we are
currently facing with corporate power.
The second class of goals was political; the antitrust
principle was intended to block private accumulations of power and protect
democratic government.
This is why I believe
that the existence of the ultra-rich is a moral obscenity, and unhealthy for a
society. And why I support heavy wealth taxation not just for the good that
money could do elsewhere, but because reducing the private accumulation of
power and wealth is in itself a legitimate - indeed necessary - goal.
I also want to quote a
bit from his discussion of the dilemma that the right faces.
Though they [right wingers and the beats/hippies]
would hate to admit it, they are both bedeviled in different ways by the same
problem; each of them is trying to make its variety of nonconformism into a
mass creed - which is a contradiction in terms. The beats opt out of corporate
uniformity in their own uniforms and erect themselves into a stereotype. The
right-wingers sing their praises of individualism in dreary, regimented
choruses and applaud vigilantes who would kill every vestige of genuine dissent.
In politics, of course, it is the right-wingers who
really count - it is they who have the numbers, the money, the political
leverage. They can also invoke the old-fashioned American who believes that
federal fiscal policy is just like the family budget. Much of our conservative
writing echoes with concern over the decline of the older kind of economic
morale, which it identifies with small entrepreneurship. But conservatives
understandably fear to make the large corporation the object of their criticism;
this smacks too much of subversion. They have a safer and more congenial outlet
for their animus against the organization of modern life in the form of
denunciations of big government. In this way, the large corporation escapes its
proper share of odium. But, historically, it was the giant corporation far more
than government policy that eclipsed the old-fashioned economic morality.
Ironically, today’s right
resists what would probably be the biggest encouragement to entrepreneurs:
universal healthcare. As a self-employed person, I know full well that I am
able to do what I do in part because my wife has corporate-provided health
coverage. Our costs are so much more predictable that way. I suspect many more
would be willing to hang out a shingle if they didn’t worry that their
healthcare costs would double or triple in a few years. But that is one way to
see that the American right is all about hypocrisy: they preach individualism
to browbeat the poor (and particularly poor minorities), while enacting policies
that increase corporate power of workers.
Another fascinating idea
is that institutions end up being what matters. (The Trump Era has been proof
of that - it is the institutions which he smears as the “Deep State” that have
prevented him from destroying democracy.)
But the fate of antitrust is an excellent illustration
of how a public ideal, vaguely formulated and often hopelessly at odds with
stubborn realities, can be embodied in institutions with elaborate,
self-preserving rules and procedures, a defensible function, and an equally stubborn
capacity for survival. Institutions are commonly less fragile than
creeds.
Finally, I have to quote
the end of the essay, which could be the motto for the best of today’s
progressive movement. It encapsulates the difference between the parties, and
also just how much we have lost over the last 40 years of neo-conservative
economic policy.
Today our greatest domestic danger lies not in our
failure to produce enough goods because we do not have enough competition, but
in our failure to render certain humane, healing, humanly productive and
restorative social services that are not comprehended at all in the ethos of
competition. At its best, big business will not perform such services. At its
worst, it can sustain a class of men who will prevent them from being
performed.
The final essay is about
“Coin” Harvey and the Free Silver movement. I had not heard of Harvey, and my
knowledge of the movement was mostly limited to “William Jennings Bryan gave
the famous Cross of Gold speech.” Bryan is mostly known for his role in the
Scopes trial these days, but it is easy to forget that he was a social
reformer, a crusader for social justice, and a pretty brilliant if
demagogue-ish politician. Most likely, had he been elected to the presidency,
it would have been a mess. But he wasn’t wrong about everything.
In retrospect, the whole
Silver movement as well as the Gold Standard seem a bit silly and misguided.
These days, most economic thinkers agree that ALL currency is fiat currency -
you can’t eat gold or silver, and their uses are decidedly limited - so money
is worth what we agree it is worth. But in practice, the question of gold
versus silver had everything to do with relative valuations and global money
policy. Switching from gold to silver would have had geopolitical
complications, to put it mildly. This essay caught me by surprise. It wasn’t
about something I cared about particularly, but it turned out to be just a
fascinating and well-written piece about history. The other essays were more
relevant, but this one was just fun.
“Coin” was a character in
a tract by William Harvey, “Coin’s Financial School,” who was a child who
lectured the supposedly smarter adults about economic policy, specifically
advocating for “free silver.” That it lacked nuance, got facts wrong, and had
numerous internal inconsistencies didn’t stop it from becoming the best-selling
tract of the 1890s. It was “pop-policy” of its time, perhaps like talk radio
was in the 1990s. In explaining how a money crank gained such popularity,
Hofstadter looks at the history of the US before we adopted central
banking.
Each depression has been a prolific breeder of
panaceas, panacea mongers, and monetary pamphleteers. The striking thing about
the depression of the nineties was how rapidly the cry for free coinage of
silver shoved other reform proposals from the center of the stage.
The central problem was
that each depression resulted in currency deflation, which caused great
hardship for most people, while enriching the wealthy. To understand this,
imagine that you, like most of us, have debts related to our daily life. In our
case, mortgages and car loans and perhaps student loans. Back then, farmers in
particular had debts - they would borrow each spring for seed and fertilizer
and such, then pay it back out of the harvest. In a deflationary period, the
value of those debts would go up, while incomes stagnated or went down. This
enriched lenders at the expense of debtors. This is why some degree of
inflation is a good thing. It discourages the hoarding of currency and wealth,
and encourages investment. Hyperinflation is bad, for various reasons, but a
slow and steady rate of inflation has generally positive economic
benefits.
For the most part, I
didn’t write down much about this essay. However, my final observation is on
the history of associating bankers with Jewish people and anti-semitic stereotypes.
While most of the rhetoric of the Free Silver movement was directed at the
British banking industry, and thus was a carryover of bad feelings from the
American Revolution, already the anti-semitism was showing its head in the form
of screeds against the Rothschild family. “Coin” Harvey, as he aged, became
more and more anti-semitic, and his bigotry came to be shared by other cranks,
including the viciously racist Father Coughlin and fascist sympathiser Ezra
Pound. The sad part of this is that, as it so often happens, legitimate
anger at wealthy financiers as a class devolves into hatred - and eventually
violence - against vulnerable minorities. Just as the vast majority of the six
million Jews murdered in the Holocaust had nothing to do with the Rosthschilds,
the millions of Latino immigrants living in America have nothing to do with El
Chapo and the drug cartels.
I am glad that I went
ahead and splurged on a copy of this book. I bought a hardbound Library of America edition which
also contains Anti-Intellectualism in American Life - which I really
look forward to reading - and his uncollected essays from 1956 to 1965. This
one was seriously enlightening and did a lot to explain the subculture I grew
up in, and why it seems incapable of acting in the public good.
