1. If you don't mind, I have a few things I really have to get off my chest about Richard Hofstadter, the historian.
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2. Hofstadter died in 1970, but he remains perhaps the most influential 20th century USA historian among pundits, often cited, as by
@BretStephensNYT this morninghttps://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/26/opinion/republicans-paranoia-mueller-trump.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Fbret-stephens&action=click&contentCollection=opinion®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection …2 replies 10 retweets 65 likesShow this thread -
3. Nearly 50 years after his death, Hofstadter continues to shape how educated Americans understand things like social darwinism, populism, conspiracy theories, and anti-intellectualism. Alas, he was wrong about almost everything.
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4. Hofstadter's influence is easily explained: he was a very fine prose stylist (especially for an academic historian) & his centrist politics appeals to elite journalists & politicians.
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5. As a Cold War liberal who flourished in the 1940-1960s, Hofstadter was the leading "consensus historian," emphasizing the durability & pervasiveness of small-l liberal though (defined broadly to include centrist Republicans)
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Replying to @HeerJeet
One dissent here is that both Hofstadter and Hartz--at least in Am Pol Tradition and Lib Trad in America--were not celebrating the liberal consensus but lamenting it (unlike, say, Daniel Boorstin who found in it America's "genius")
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Am Political Tradition was Hofstadter's best book because he was still informed enough by radicalism to critique the consensus -- that changed in later books.
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