Sure. And that was a misreading born of its time. Hofstadter has been blown up by almost every major scholar of Populism since The Age of Reform—Nugent (you mentioned), Pollack,McMath, Hahn, Goodwyn, Kazin, Postel. Mistake is seeing *anti-racism* as a bigger deal than it was.
He clearly used those theories (sometimes in very haphazard ways: Adorno had a critique of capitalism that RH junked) but only because he was predisposed by prior history towards them.
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Sure—I mean, we’re all predisposed, one way or another, by prior history! (Assume you read Rogin too re busing his Populist argument.) Basically, Hof had a flinty contempt for American politics writ large and he didn’t see many spaces for resistance.
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One other thing re the pejorative usage of “populism.:” *Stuart Hall*, one of the two or three most admired modern social theorists in the Marxist tradition,” effectively used it as a pejorative about mass based Thatcherism. His “authoritarian populism” remains a useful concept.
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