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

[David Green]

>From Wiener's review (thanks Carl):
   
  Michael Kazin recently warned against viewing Hofstadter as "an elegant ruin from a benighted age." Brown agrees, arguing that we need Hofstadter to understand the tormented politics of our time. In this view, Hofstadter may have been wrong about yesterday's Populists, but he was right about today's Republicans. The rise of George Bush is said to 
mark the return of status politics, because Republican majorities depend on the Evangelical Protestant "values voters" of the Midwest and South--former Populist areas! Facing economic decline, they blame their problems on the "liberal elite" and vote for prayer in schools and guns everywhere else....(Wiener's view:) That seems like a thin lesson to draw from a thick body of work.
   
  Indeed, it seems like no lesson at all to draw from Hofstadter's work, both because Hofstadter himself appears to have had serious doubts about it, and because it's wrong. Because the Democrats repress class and economic issues, "red state" voters either vote for Bush or stay home. They're absolutely right in their mistrust of a liberal elite, and right to associate that elite with the horrible Clintons and his erstwhile Democrat successors, including of course his wife. Talk of "status anxiety" and "status politics" among the middle and working classes is intellectual sloganeering and reactionary sociology from both liberals and conservatives who are threatened by "extremes" who want to rethink the notion of "progress" in an egalitarian manner that debunks the measure of Gross Domestic Product.
   
  DG
  
 
   
  

 

       
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