The Relevance of Richard Hofstadter's Keen Insights into American Conservatism

Gary Silverman, in the London Financial Times (Nov. 20, 2004):

... Richard Hofstadter, a US historian whose works are required reading for anyone trying to understand the election, called it the "paranoid style in American politics". Hofstadter's insight was that US conservatives have little interest in conserving. They are people who feel they have been cheated out of what was rightly theirs, or what they imagined to have been theirs.

" America had been largely taken away from them and their kind," he wrote four decades ago of the people he described as pseudo-conservatives. "The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals."

This sensibility requires enemies, and there has been plenty in US history - Masons, Mormons, Catholics, blacks, Jews, bankers, communists. What was remarkable about the Republican campaign was its choice of enemy.

The US has real enemies - the people who knocked down the World Trade Center come to mind. But the Republicans went looking for the enemy within. And for my money, this foe was best described by Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, in a speech that rocked the Republican convention.

He called them "girlie-men".

It was sort of a joke, because the term girlie-man was popularised by two US comedians who used it on the Saturday Night Live TV show to poke fun at Schwarzenegger. By using the phrase, Schwarzenegger was being self-deprecating and sending a message to his half of the political divide at the same time. This is the paranoid style in its postmodern phase.

Mr Schwarzenegger's choice of language was also subtle in the sense that the phrase could mean different things to different people. For many Bush voters, it translates into homosexual, as the vote for state proposals to ban gay marriage showed. But for others, girlie-man can work on a metaphorical level, as a term for the people they fear will let the country down - people who think too much (column writers, for example).

This view has deep roots in US history. Since the early days of the republic, Hofstadter wrote, there has been the idea that "the curiosity of the active mind" is "too trivial and ridiculous for important affairs". Two centuries before John Kerry was portrayed as a flip-flopper with a soft spot for the French, Thomas Jefferson got the same treatment. One foe said Jefferson's principles "are seasoned with such a profusion of French garlic that he offends the whole nation".

Fundamentalist Americanism eventually combined with fundamentalist religion to create a new breed Hofstadter called the "one-hundred percenters".

They "tolerate no ambiguities, no equivocations, no reservations and no criticisms" and they consider this "kind of committedness as evidence of toughness and masculinity". Schwarzenegger is this kind of tough guy. "To those critics who are so pessimistic about our economy," he told the convention, "I say: don't be economic girlie-men."

It was all straight out of the Hofstadter that I read at school - until the cameras cut away to show the governor's wife, the television personality, Maria Shriver. That was the hard part, for me.

She is Bobby Kennedy's niece and seeing her sitting there with the crowd laughing at the girlie-men stirred something in me. That's not fair to her - love is blind and all that - but that's the way it was....