Measuring the American Mood: The Relevancy of Richard Hofstadter

In the wake of this year’s electoral season, we are left to again ponder the impact of public mood on American politics. More than three years into a bloody occupation of Iraq, the social scientists and Sunday morning news pundits consult their polls, question their armchair experts, and sift through the proverbial tea leaves in an effort to discern just how much longer “the people” will support the global interventionism of the current administration. Theirs is a busy kind of interpretive art. The bread and circus side of our public life, after all, yields to agitations both large and small. From the very real and painful trials of the Near East to the recent evangelical sex scandal involving New Life Church Pastor Ted Haggard, and the resignation of Congressman Mark Foley amidst allegations of improper sexual communications with underage congressional pages, the 2006 campaign yielded a combination of violence, dramatis, and titillation that provoked the party faithful of all stripes.

Perhaps as much as any moment in our nation’s history, today the politics of fear, anger, confusion, and uncertainty torment the country’s two party system. Nukes in North Korea, gay marriage, “inconvenient” environmental truths dog the electorate, exposing the distance between an American pastoral and American reality. This perception gap is currently one of the primary impulses behind our democratic governing system, and to appreciate its strange hold on us we must understand the needs and nuances of the popular mind. The template to do so was given to us about a half-century ago by the Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter.

Hofstadter came of age in the dictator-dominated 1930s. Even in democratic America, an alert observer could not help but notice that a certain demagoguery underlined the politics of the day. From Huey Long to Charles Coughlin and the four-term phenomenon Franklin Roosevelt, the public mood displayed an unmistakable interest in would-be state saving messiahs. Grass roots activism was not new in Hofstadter’s America – one thinks of the Jacksonian and Populist/Progressive eras as notably wide-spread assaults on privilege – yet the kind of reform fever that emerged from the urban/immigrant tempered Depression era and continues to shape our own civic debates, is one that Hofstadter provocatively claimed transcended economic needs and responded to the social and psychological grievances of voters. As the first nation in the history of the world founded on the twin pillars of Protestantism and property-rights liberalism, America, Hofstadter argued, had a difficult, even traumatic time reconciling its earliest traditions with the realities of a complex, multi-ethnic nationhood. By introducing public passions and public psychology into the arena of influences that shaped American political culture, Hofstadter made an original and lasting contribution to explaining how democracy works (and sometimes careens) in our still young republic.

Like his favorite wordsmith, H. L. Mencken, Hofstadter demonstrated a remarkable talent for honing in on the bathos that pushed democracy forward. This came from a generous response to pointed satire and an acute sensitivity to the absurd circumstances and personalities that routinely energized election cycles. Hofstadter revealed a sure knack for finding just the right phrase to encapsulate the earnest provincialism of William Jennings Bryan (“intellectually Bryan was a boy who never left home”), the priggish impulses of Woodrow Wilson (“capable himself of intense feelings of guilt, he projected his demand for unmitigated righteousness into public affairs”), or the will-to-power reflexes that propelled Theodore Roosevelt (“what Roosevelt stood for, as a counterpoise to the fat materialism of the wealthy and the lurking menace of the masses, were the aggressive, masterful, fighting virtues of the soldier”). In the current age of CNN celebrity, one longs for Hofstadter’s beyond-the-grave revised edition of The American Political Tradition. We might, after all, discover such choice chapters as “Ronald Reagan: The Hollywood New Dealer as Conservative Icon” and “Bill Clinton: The Arkansas Nabob as Beltway Liberal.” And what insightful commentary would Hofstadter have made of the “paranoid style” of Richard Nixon, the “status anxiety” of right wing rants against the country’s cultural elite, or the “anti-intellectualism” of Bush II?

These social-psychological categories freshened a postwar historical profession locked in a stale debate between proponents of a conflict approach to history and those who countered that the nation’s past revealed an essentially consensual style. Today, political scientists and journalists regularly employ a range of methodologies designed to uncover mysteries of voter behavior first popularized by Hofstadter. Following the Republican victories of 2004, calls by some Democrats to impeach the President were laughed off in the press as a malady of partisan frustrations edging toward paranoia. One might wonder if, in the age of the Therapeutic State, the “mental” and “mood” parameters of public behavior that so fascinated Hofstadter will become increasingly popular areas of study.

Certainly the direction of American politics points to a need for greater attention to public temperament. The topics that tickled Hofstadter’s historical imagination – evangelicalism, the far right, the fate of liberalism – remain relevant. One might pick and prune with great profit those parts of Hofstadter’s oeuvre that are particularly vital to sustaining a plural and robust national politics. Republicans would be well served to consider Hofstadter’s refusal to regard cultural tensions in our country as a moral struggle between good and evil. Democrats, on the other hand, might revitalize their ranks by dropping the liberal elitism that crept into some of Hofstadter’s work and alienated the Party’s once firm populist base. And finally, we might all discover a critical and timely meaning from re-reading Hofstadter’s 1968 essay addressing the nation’s problematic global ambitions. “To absorb the sense of guilt and failure that Americans will take away from Vietnam is unquestionably a tax on our maturity. But the experience may be turned to some use if we can define more articulately than we ever have done the realistic limits of our national aspirations. It is essential for us to do so precisely because we are by far the world’s strongest power. For the rest of the world it would be reassuring to know that our aspirations are, after all, really limited. It might even be reassuring for ourselves.”