In another journalistic life, I worked at an estimable Beltway publication covering the daily business of Congress. One of the early directives I encountered there concerned the use of the word “reform” in connection with any pending legislation. The notion of reform, I was soberly informed, was simply too charged and incendiary to pass as a description of any agenda item seeking approval from the people’s representatives; the less loaded term “overhaul” was always and everywhere to be preferred.



Never mind that overhauls are far more ambitious in scale than reforms, as any long-suffering sports fan or construction professional can tell you. And never mind that reforms and reformers have always claimed center stage in the drama of our national politics—one can scarcely imagine the civil rights revolution, women’s suffrage, and Social Security (or, on the other side of the ledger, Prohibition, jingoism, and rampant nativism) without them. No, the larger point here was that reform was too wild and indecorous an idea for a respectable Hill journal to grace with serious or sustained treatment.

RICHARD HOFSTADTER: ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN AMERICAN LIFE; THE PARANOID STYLE IN AMERICAN POLITICS; UNCOLLECTED ESSAYS 1956-1965 by Richard Hofstadter, edited by Sean Wilentz Library of America, 1,056 pp., $45.00

This point of style speaks volumes about discursive gatekeeping in Washington—but it also stands in no small measure as a legacy of the late historian of American politics Richard Hofstadter. Hofstadter was a deft, wide-ranging chronicler of American intellectual and political life, beginning with his landmark revisionist study, The American Political Tradition (1948). Across his too-short life and career, he produced indispensable monographs on American violence and the rise of social Darwinism, together with a pioneering body of analysis on the rise of the postwar American right. But it’s chiefly as a critic of the reformist impulse in American politics that Hofstadter lives on in today’s post-liberal order. Hofstadter argued that the reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—Populist agitators, Progressive social planners, temperance and suffrage advocates—were engaged in a panicked bid to reclaim their diminishing status in public life. As the Protestant guardians of small-town America saw the forces of capitalist modernity overtake the world they knew, they lashed out, reasserting their waning power and prestige as defenders of an embattled cultural order.

Amid the present academic boomlet in anti-populist jeremiads, Hofstadter’s reading of the American Populist movement as a bigoted, nativist, and anti-Semitic insurgency, steeped in “status anxiety,” is arguably more influential than ever, half a century after his death in 1970. But as is the case with many intellectual legacies, a great deal has been lost in translation: Hofstadter envisioned reform as a prolonged revolt against modernity—not a particularly useful framework for understanding today’s demagogues, who, instead of trafficking in grievances about the world they have lost, augur a bold new turn in plutocratic governance. Meanwhile, Hofstadter’s crudest simplifications have endured: His latter-day anti-populist apostles tend to fall back on his caricatured accounts of the backward masses and their motivations, pointedly ignoring the social-democratic cast of American Populism of the Gilded Age.

Hofstadter debuted his argument in his Pulitzer Prize–winning 1955 study The Age of Reform, and as the Cold War drove American politics, on the right especially, into operatic new registers of derangement, Hofstadter updated and expanded this general theory of cultural lag into a diagnosis of the distempers of the reactionary anti-modern mind. The two works now anthologized by the Library of America, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) and The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964), showcase Hofstadter’s most ambitious efforts to supply a unified theory of the American romance with cultural reaction.