[Peace-discuss] The Kennedys' fake liberalism... [reformatted]

[David Green]

[4] "People like Lippmann and Hofstadter would be viewed as pinkos in today's 
media right-wing discourse."

I agree with Carl about Lippmann, and the biography written of him by liberal journalist Ronald Steele is a great insight (although unintended) into the cage of liberal doctrine which confined Lippmann and made his later life rather pathetic. But it should be noted, and is very instructive, that this great liberal shaper of American propaganda and public opinion was marginalized for his relatively early opposition (on realist grounds) to the Vietnam war, as was George Kennan, proving that even the most venerated elder statesmen are casually and coldly dispensed with even when they differ only on the tactics that the U.S. should use to rule the world, on who we should kill and when.
   
  I'd like to revisit Hofstader in order to feel that any of the following is more than speculation. His Social Darwinism in American Life and The American Political Tradition remain classics, the latter particularly remarkable. I believe some have speculated that Hofstadter, who died in 1970, was in the process of becoming a neocon. At the risk of offering an analogy to Kennedyesque wishfulness, I would like to think not. His essay on the "paranoid style" is a classic in its own right, but also misdirected (or perhaps opportunistically directed) liberals into a facile equation between populism and anti-Semitism (also done in The Age of Reform), and over-simplifed the whole problem of "right-wing populism," William Jennings Bryan, etc. This could be seen as going down the slippery slope into neocon land, and was probably exploited by Kristol senior, Podhoretz, et al. in their response to the New Left, criticism of Israel (however tepid in the late 60s), etc. 
   
  In spite of my admiration for Hofstadter, and my wish not to think of him as becoming a neocon, I can't imagine him ever being anything more or less than a version of Cold War liberal, although one with a lot more integrity than, say, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. It would be intresting to know where Hofstatder stood on Vietnam, and when.
   
  DG

       
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