I don't do that very often, but this time I need to. After all, Dionne puts forward a thesis that explains why liberalism became the effete, elite, irrelevancy that it is today.

And it all traces back to an idea propounded by Richard Hofstadter.

But reading Brown is also a reminder of where Hofstadter may have misled the very liberal movement to which he was devoted. There was, first, his emphasis on American populists as embodying a "deeply ingrained provincialism" (Brown's term) whose revolt was as much a reaction to the rise of the cosmopolitan big city as to economic injustices.

Many progressives and reformers, he argued, represented an old Anglo-Saxon middle class who suffered from "status anxiety" in reaction to the rise of a vulgar new business elite. Hofstadter analyzed the right wing of the 1950s and early 1960s in similar terms. Psychological disorientation and social displacement became more important than ideas or interests.

Now, Hofstadter was exciting precisely because he brilliantly revised accepted and sometimes pious views of what the populists and progressives were about. But there was something dismissive about Hofstadter's analysis that blinded liberals to the legitimate grievances of the populists, the progressives and, yes, the right wing.

The late Christopher Lasch, one of Hofstadter's students and an admiring critic, noted that by conducting "political criticism in psychiatric categories," Hofstadter and his intellectual allies excused themselves "from the difficult work of judgment and argumentation."

Lasch added archly: "Instead of arguing with opponents, they simply dismissed them on psychiatric grounds."

But that is still precisely the problem today.

Disagree with a liberal on race? One is a racist, afflicted with a deep psychological disease that renders one's opinions irrelevant. And we won't even get into the Stalinist diagnosis of "homophobia" that gets trotted out when someone dares to question the concept of homosexual marriage or the morality of homosexual activity.And rather than deal with the policies they oppose, liberals went after Reagan and the current President Bush based upon questions of intelligence and supposed psychological defests.

Posted by: Greg at 10:10 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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