Hofstadter, Obama and George Will

We have written about the Galbraithian approach of the current Administration. That influence is one of power and the use of the technique of one side playing off against the other with the Administration above the fray, albeit benefiting from it.

On the other side there is a world view perspective which we believe flows from the Columbia University bloodstream of which Obama took part of as an undergraduate, It is the heritage of the Hofstadter view of the world.

A year ago George Will wrote an article in the Washington Post entitled "Candidate on a High Horse". In that article he states:

"The iconic public intellectual of liberal condescension was Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, who died in 1970 but whose spirit still permeated that school when Obama matriculated there in 1981. Hofstadter pioneered the rhetorical tactic that Obama has revived with his diagnosis of working-class Democrats as victims -- the indispensable category in liberal theory. The tactic is to dismiss rather than refute those with whom you disagree.

Obama's dismissal is: Americans, especially working-class conservatives, are unable, because of their false consciousness, to deconstruct their social context and embrace the liberal program. Today that program is to elect Obama, thereby making his wife at long last proud of America.


Hofstadter dismissed conservatives as victims of character flaws and psychological disorders -- a "paranoid style" of politics rooted in "status anxiety," etc. Conservatism rose on a tide of votes cast by people irritated by the liberalism of condescension."

To best understand the Columbia culture one need go no further than looking at Richard Hofstadter, the late Professor of History, a person who had significant influence of the cultural underpinnings of Columbia University in the 1950s and 1960s. Hofstadter was also a self proclaimed intellectual. To him and the clique he was associated with, the intellectuals were a chosen group who circled around academe, and Columbia was considered a major focal point at the time, and they saw what truth was and from them truth would be disseminated. Their intellectual work was considered by them and their followers to be without peer.

Hofstadter wrote several books, amongst them The Age of Reform and American Political Tradition. His writings were not of the type which included any original research but were more targeted at a broader non‐academic audience. Though not a general press type writer, he did achieve success in his wider audience of liberal devotees.

In an article in The Nation; America, Through a Glass Darkly, by Jon Wiener in the October 23, 2006 issue, Wiener while reviewing the Brown biography of Hofstadter states:

"The American Political Tradition, published in 1948 and widely regarded as Hofstadter's best book, is still selling briskly almost sixty years later: Recently it had an Amazon ranking of 4,400, which would be envied by most historians with books on the market today. (Brown's, for example, was at 22,000 on the same day.) Knopf's 1948 publicity marketed the book as a work of consensus history: "In this age of political extremism, this young and brilliant Columbia historian searches out the common ground among all American parties and factions." In fact the book was more subtle, and much more interesting, than that.

Hofstadter wrote the book from a vantage point on the left. While others, like Daniel Boorstin, celebrated consensus, Hofstadter was openly critical. It opens with a description of an "increasingly passive and spectatorial" state of mind in postwar America, a country dominated by "corporate monopoly," its citizens "bereft of a coherent and plausible body of belief" and adrift in a "rudderless and demoralized state." "

This shows that Hofstadter is still held in high esteem by the left, since this was so well received in The Nation.

But let us look at Hofstadter a bit more closely. Hofstadter makes the following comments in 1963, the year Kennedy was killed in office:

“In these pages I have been mainly concerned with the relationship between Protestant evangelicism and American anti‐intellectualism, simply because America has been a Protestant country, molded by Protestant institutions. It would be a mistake, however, to fail to note the distinctive ethos of American Catholicism, which has contributed in a forceful and decisive way to our anti‐intellectualism. Catholicism in this country over the past two or three generations has waxed strong in numbers, in political power, and in acceptance. At the middle the nineteenth century it was, though a minority faith, the largest single church in the country and was steadily gaining ground despite anti‐Catholic sentiment.

Today the Church claims almost a fourth of the population, and has achieved an acceptance which would have seemed surprising even thirty years ago. One might have expected Catholicism to add a distinctive leaven to the intellectual dialogue in America, bringing as it did a different sense of the past and of the world, a different awareness of the human condition and of the imperatives of institutions.

In fact, it has done nothing of the kind, for it has failed to develop an intellectual tradition in America or to produce its own class of intellectuals capable either of exercising authority among Catholics or of mediating between the Catholic mind and the secular or Protestant mind. Instead, American Catholicism has devoted itself alternately to denouncing the aspects of American life it could not approve and imitating more acceptable aspects in order to surmount its minority complex and "Americanize" itself. ..

In consequence, the American Church, which contains more communicants than that of any country except Brazil and Italy, and is the richest and perhaps the best, organized of the national divisions of the Church, lacks an intellectual culture. "In no Western society," .Q. W. Brogan has remarked, "is the intellectual prestige of Catholicism lower than in the country where, in such respects as wealth, numbers, and strength of organization, it is so powerful." In the last two decades, which have seen a notable growth of the Catholic middle class and the cultivated Catholic public, Catholic leaders have become aware of this failure; a few years ago, Monsignor John Tracy Ellis's penetrating brief survey of American Catholic intellectual impoverishment had an overwhelmingly favorable reception in the Catholic press. .."

Hofstadter keeps seeing the Church and its members as one and the same. Although he states that the growth of a Catholic middle class has presented a challenge to the Catholic Church, he lumps the Catholic middle class in with the Church hierarchy as dolts. One must also remember that this is also the Period of Vatican II with dramatic openings in the Catholic Church, for better or worse. Hofstadter then continues:

"Two formative circumstances in the development 'Of early American Catholicism made for indifference to intellectual life. First in importance was the fiercely prejudiced Know‐Nothing psychology against which it had to make its way in the nineteenth century. Regarded as a foreign body that ought to be expelled from the national organism, and as the agent of an alien power, the Church had to fight to establish its Americanism. Catholic laymen who took pride in their religious identity responded to the American milieu with militant self‐assertion whether they could and Church spokesmen seemed to feel that it was not scholarship but vigorous polemicism which was needed….

The Church thus took on a militant stance that ill accorded with reflection; and in our time, when the initial prejudice against it has been largely surmounted, its members persist in what Monsignor Ellis calls a "self‐imposed ghetto mentality."

A second determining factor was that for a long time the limited resources of the American Church were pre‐empted by the exigent task of creating the institutions necessary to absorb a vast influx of immigrants‐almost ten million between 1820 and 1920‐and to provide them with the rudiments of religious instruction. So much was taken up by this pressing practical need that little was left over for the higher culture, in so far as there were members of the Church who were concerned with Catholic culture, exceptionally unproductive in all areas of scholarship, achieve their best record in the sciences."

At the time of this book by Hofstadter, Catholics were educated in secondary and College levels at Catholic institutions, but there was also a clear breakout into the secular world. Even in New York, CCNY became equally populated with Catholics and Jews, not all Catholics went to Fordham or St. Johns, many, like the Jewish immigrants, could only afford a CCNY education. The Catholic Church frankly performed a great social function in New York by setting up schools, hospitals, and orphanages. The City could not handle the social issues presented by the influx of immigrants.

By having these institutions, the new working class could productively contribute without costing the tax payers the added amount that would have been necessary for health and education. The Catholic institutions also taught an ethic that reduced crime, it made what the Italian and Irish gangs did sinful and used its social pressure in a manner which we see little of in many of today's churches."

Hofstadter then continues:

"As one might have expected, the way of the Catholic intellectual in this country has been doubly hard. He has had to justify himself not only as a Catholic to the Protestant and secular intellectual community but also as an intellectual to fellow Catholics, for whom his vocation is even more questionable than it is to the American community at large. Catholic scholars and writers tend to be recognized belatedly by their.....co‐religionists, when they are recognized at all.

All of this concerns, of course, not so much the anti‐intellectualism of American Catholicism as its cultural impoverishment, its non‐intellectualism. But it will serve as background for a more central point: a great many Catholics have been as responsive as Protestant fundamentalists to that it is against modernity of which I have spoken, and they have done perhaps more than their share in developing the one‐hundred per cent mentality. In no small measure this has been true because their intellectual spokesmen‐who are now growing in numbers and influence‐have not yet, gained enough authority in the Catholic community to hold in check the most retrograde aspects of that revolt, including its general suspicion of mind and its hostility to intellectuals. "

American Catholicism for Hofstadter became a pervasive genetic disorder seemingly to infect any person who professes to be Catholic and moreover any person in any way related to the Catholic Church, such as a Catholic High School Graduate. Hofstadter states that the Catholic holds a hostility to the intellectual, namely Hofstadter and his ilk.

The hostility is that the Catholic thinker may disagree with them, and this disagreement to Hofstadter is prima facie evidence of dollardism. Hofstadter, and the Columbia clique, somehow view that they are prophetic and without fault or error in their intellectualism, that they solely have seen truth, and that it is their word ex‐cathedra from Morningside Heights which contains the truth and the light. The arrogance of these men, and they were all men at the time, is appalling. It fundamentally rejects any other thought process.

"A great deal of the energy of the priesthood in our time has been directed toward censorship, divorce, birth control, and other issues which have brought the Church into conflict with the secular and the Protestant mind time and again; some of it has also gone into ultra‐conservative political movements, which are implacable enemies of the intellectual community.

Catholic intellectuals on the whole have opposed the extreme and (from the point of view of the faith) gratuitous aspects of this enmity, but they have been unable to restrain it. Indeed, one of the most striking developments of our time has been the emergence of a kind of union, or at least a capacity for cooperation, between Protestant and Catholic fundamentalists, who share a common puritanism and a common mindless militancy ....."

He then goes on:

"For evidence that Catholic clergy and laymen alike are unusually hostile to freedom of thought and criticism, even on subjects remote from dogma see Gerhardt Lenski: The Religious Factor (New York, 1960)."

This is a broadly damning statement. Hostile to freedom of thought and criticism, even on subjects remote from dogma. Catholics at that time were becoming lawyers, scientists, mathematicians, engineers, physicians, and they were certainly not hostile to criticism in these fields. Perhaps they took positions orthogonal to Hofstadter's but that it acceptable in and discourse amongst thinkers. Yet disagreement with an intellectual is anathema.
In Hofstadter's Age of Reform he further states:

"At the so‐called grass roots of American politics there is a wide and pervasive tendency to believe ‐ I hasten to add that the majority of Americans do not habitually succumb to this tendency ‐ that there is some great but essentially very simple struggle going on, at the heart of which there lies some single conspiratorial force, whether it be the force represented by the "gold bugs", the Catholic Church, big business, corrupt politicians, the liquor interests and the saloons, or the Communist Party…"

In The New York Times review of the biography of Hofstadter by Sam Tanenhaus states:

"These were Hofstadter’s subjects in his most productive years, the 1950’s and 60’s, when he nested among a nucleus of thinkers at Columbia that included the social theorists Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset and Robert K. Merton and the literary critic Lionel Trilling. Together they formed a loose federation of like minds and temperaments. All were secular Jews (or in Hofstadter’s case, half Jewish). Many had weathered chastening experiences on the left. Most were influenced by European social science, in particular by psychoanalysis and depth psychology, which offered more fruitful diagnostic methods than the tired formulas of Marxism and the class struggle.

The Columbia group did much to create the vocabulary of mid-century liberal thought in America as it sought to move beyond ideology and toward a kind of broad public doctrine or “orthodoxy,” as Brown puts it.

"In Hofstadter’s case this meant exploring in a systematic way “the sociological penumbra of political life” — the murky substratum of desires and impulses that underlay the surface pageantry of American politics. He was much impressed by “The Authoritarian Personality” (1950), a survey of contemporary American political attitudes compiled by a team of researchers under the direction of the German émigré Theodore Adorno. Hofstadter adapted Adorno’s “social‐psychological categories” in his essay “The Pseudo‐Conservative Revolt,” an attempt to uncover the hidden sources of McCarthyism. "

Tanenhaus continues:

"In the boom years of the 1920’s, for instance, millions of small‐town and rural “native stock” Americans, alarmed by the ascendancy of the country’s pluralistic urban culture, had embraced the organized bigotry of the Ku Klux Klan and flocked to the punitive crusades of anti‐evolutionism and Prohibition.

The pattern was being repeated in the 1950’s, also a boom period, only now it was a curious alliance of upwardly mobile white ethnics (many of them Catholics) and downwardly sinking displaced WASPs, who looked to secure their status as authentic Americans by converging upon “liberals, critics and nonconformists of various sorts, as well as Communists and suspected Communists.…. And if, as Hofstadter maintained, political issues now reflected a wider cultural debate over “the capacity of various groups and occupations to command personal deference in society,” then the largely Jewish inhabitants of what Brown calls the “Claremont Avenue ghetto” were, for all their seeming detachment, as deeply embroiled in the struggle as Midwestern rubes or urban Catholics."

The characterization of Midwestern rubes and urban Catholics and their antithesis which he calls the Claremont Avenue Jews7 are somehow in a massive cultural struggle, with these bone headed rubes and Papists pitted against the small enclave of intellectuals who have singular knowledge of the truth.

The small group of left wing intellectuals, according to Hofstadter, has taken the place of blacks, evolutionists and anti‐prohibitionists, and the rubes and Papists are unjustly and in total ignorance attacking them as a result of their social status! The irony is that the Irish Catholics and Italian Catholics in New York at that time were still Police and Garbage Collectors and had just returned from the War.

Neither Hofstadter nor Bell had done the country the honor of such service and kept their comforts on the hill at Morningside Heights while the Irish Catholics, Italian Catholics and Protestant rubes from the mid West lost their lives defending their rights to call them dolts! Yet their attitude was and, in many ways, remains pervasive at Columbia.

In Hofstadter's writing, The Pseudo‐Conservative Revolt, in the book edited by Daniel Bell, The Radical Right in 1955, and updated in 1963, Hofstadter writes:

"Paradoxically the intense concerns of present day politics are shared by two types of persons who arrive at them, in a sense, from opposite directions. The first are found among types of old‐family Anglo Saxon Protestants and the second are found among many types of the immigrant families, most notably the Germans and the Irish, who are frequently Catholic."

He then goes on to describe the Irish Catholics as just slightly above Neanderthals and acting like sheep in their movement to what he has termed Pseudo‐Conservatives. What is amazing is that Kennedy had been in office for two years at this point and one would assume that Hofstadter were aligned with the Kennedy wing, if one reads what Brown writes in his biography. Yet the continually telling diatribes against Catholics are never ending.

In Brown's biography of Hofstadter (p. 122) he further reinforces the anti‐Catholic and moreover anti‐Irish Catholic views held by Hofstadter as well as Daniel Bell9. In fact Brown states:
"Much of Bell's scholarship during this period focused on the cultural origins of McCarthyism. Like Hofstadter, with whom he worked closely on The New American Right project. Bell observed in the defensive posture of isolationists, anti‐communist Irish and German Catholics, and other recent immigrants an eagerness to support a messianic approach to foreign policy as a show of loyalty."

Bell graduated from CCNY in 1939 and avoided all military service during World War II. He spent the time as a reporter for The New Leader magazine which was a front for the Socialist Party of America. The magazine was a hotbed of socialists and left leaning followers like Arthur Schlesinger. Bell completed his PhD at Columbia in 1960 and then went on to Harvard.

But it appears that Bell was just another of the many faculty including Hofstadter who looked at Irish Catholics as the enemy, as ignorant and superstitious religious zealots who had nothing to contribute to the Academy. The irony was, and still is, that there is no true in‐bred Irish in New York, New York is the ultimate melting pot, intermarriage between nationalities, religions, races, and whatever. Bell became putatively a Harvard and made a name for him with the publication of several books.

George Will continues in his piece regarding Obama, and in so doing brings the Hofstadter mindset into the current time10. He states:

"The emblematic book of the new liberalism was "The Affluent Society" by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. He argued that the power of advertising to manipulate the bovine public is so powerful that the law of supply and demand has been vitiated. Manufacturers can manufacture in the American herd whatever demand the manufacturers want to supply. Because the manipulable masses are easily given a "false consciousness" (another category, like religion as the "opiate" of the suffering masses, that liberalism appropriated from Marxism), four things follow:

First, the consent of the governed, when their behavior is governed by their false consciousnesses, is unimportant.

Second, the public requires the supervision of a progressive elite which, somehow emancipated from false consciousness, can engineer true consciousness.

Third, because consciousness is a reflection of social conditions, true consciousness is engineered by progressive social reforms.

Fourth, because people in the grip of false consciousness cannot be expected to demand or even consent to such reforms, those reforms usually must be imposed, for example, by judicial fiats."

The Will article was written a year ago. It holds more meaning now given the events of the past few months. To understand the current Administration, one must, as we have argued, understand Hofstadter and Galbraith and the culture of Columbia University from the 1950s. It was a culture that rejected the common mass at that time, the "uneducated Catholics", the blue collar masses, since the Columbia educated elite knew what was best.