This is very interesting on Hofstadter. I've always thought that the "consensus school" was basically correct, in that while we Americans disagree quite a bit, the ideological difference between American political parties has never been that great. The west coast Straussians (and many many other people, e.g. Martin Sklar, or Herbert Croly at the time) are right to see a decisive break in our history with the establishment of a modern state in the Progressive Era, a change prophesied by Hegel and Alexander Hamilton and many others. But there has never been coherent conservative opposition to what Sklar called "the corporate reconstruction of American capitalism," certainly not from Taft, Hoover or Eisenhower (who perhaps favored a more oligarchic version of "big government" but never the pipe-dream of its abolition) and not from the Cold Warriors of the Regan/Buckley tradition either. (You can construe Coolidge as an opponent of the "administrative state" and that's why he's a cult figure for some.) In this respect the dismissal of "pseudo-conservatism" as a matter of what Trilling called "irritable mental gestures" is imo correct, although one finds plenty of these gestures in Truman, JFK, LBJ, Carter.... We do have an ongoing fight about the size of government and the relative power of corporations in the direction of it (one in which labor was for a while a contender for influence before it was crushed in the 70s), but it has never been a clear-cut ideological contest.
On the other hand there has been a poisonous and truly ideological struggle over race for our entire history, one about which Hofstadter like most midcentury liberals seems to have been pretty myopic, to be polite. From today's perspective, the central fact of late nineteenth century US history seems clearly to have been not the fight of populism or progressivism against a half-imaginary "conservatism" (as if a Burkean white supremacist like Woodrow Wilson weren't conservative), but the failure of the reconstruction. Had Lincoln lived, we would judge his post-war record primarily, almost exclusively, on the basis of his handling of the reconstruction. The idea that the paradoxes of laissez-faire would have been more important reflects, IMO, a determined effort to avoid thinking about the grubby compromises with white supremacy that made first Wilsonian and then New Deal politics possible.
I mostly agree with you about the consensus historians and the struggle over race as the central facet of American history. With Jaffa it's funny because he understood that better than many historians of that era, and was for equality, but it seemed to be less important in his actual politics than bellicosity and his various moralizing crusades, and that aspect of his thought seemingly didn't make it to any of his students.
The myopia is a major point imo-my political upbringing was very much in the new deal/great society tradition and I went through a period in the 2010s of being really invested in "RETVRN but leftishly" in that direction, only to become increasingly aware of how much the (very real) successes of that era were predicated on agreeing to disagree about people's civil rights! As you can imagine this has dampened my enthusiasm for that sort of thing a bit/made me a bit more uneasy about what it would take to rebuild a real consensus in this country.
Yeah Jaffa is interesting in some ways but completely eccentric. I just don't see any connection between opposition to "the administrative state" and support for civil rights, either in Jaffa's lifetime or afterwards. And I don't see much to admire in Jaffa's practical politics. But Jaffa did have a clearer sense of the moral stakes of the Civil War than midcentury liberal intellectuals, this is a historical issue but it isn't a small one and you have to give credit where due.
Do you know Ira Katznelson's "Fear Itself"? It is an interesting effort to revive the Hofstadter tradition while without sweeping race questions under the rug.
"His heart was with the reformers to be sure-the figure in the book most sympathetically considered is the orator and reformer Wendell Berry"
I'm confused. Wendell Berry was born in 1934, and in 1948 he would have been 14 years old, so presumably he couldn't have been in *The American Political Tradition*. Berry started publishing only in the early 1960s, and these were novels. What am I missing here?
Thanks for pointing that out, that was a failure to correct a mistake in the proofreading process. It was Wendell Phillips Hofstadter sympathized with, a rather different character born more than a century or so earlier.
This is very interesting on Hofstadter. I've always thought that the "consensus school" was basically correct, in that while we Americans disagree quite a bit, the ideological difference between American political parties has never been that great. The west coast Straussians (and many many other people, e.g. Martin Sklar, or Herbert Croly at the time) are right to see a decisive break in our history with the establishment of a modern state in the Progressive Era, a change prophesied by Hegel and Alexander Hamilton and many others. But there has never been coherent conservative opposition to what Sklar called "the corporate reconstruction of American capitalism," certainly not from Taft, Hoover or Eisenhower (who perhaps favored a more oligarchic version of "big government" but never the pipe-dream of its abolition) and not from the Cold Warriors of the Regan/Buckley tradition either. (You can construe Coolidge as an opponent of the "administrative state" and that's why he's a cult figure for some.) In this respect the dismissal of "pseudo-conservatism" as a matter of what Trilling called "irritable mental gestures" is imo correct, although one finds plenty of these gestures in Truman, JFK, LBJ, Carter.... We do have an ongoing fight about the size of government and the relative power of corporations in the direction of it (one in which labor was for a while a contender for influence before it was crushed in the 70s), but it has never been a clear-cut ideological contest.
On the other hand there has been a poisonous and truly ideological struggle over race for our entire history, one about which Hofstadter like most midcentury liberals seems to have been pretty myopic, to be polite. From today's perspective, the central fact of late nineteenth century US history seems clearly to have been not the fight of populism or progressivism against a half-imaginary "conservatism" (as if a Burkean white supremacist like Woodrow Wilson weren't conservative), but the failure of the reconstruction. Had Lincoln lived, we would judge his post-war record primarily, almost exclusively, on the basis of his handling of the reconstruction. The idea that the paradoxes of laissez-faire would have been more important reflects, IMO, a determined effort to avoid thinking about the grubby compromises with white supremacy that made first Wilsonian and then New Deal politics possible.
I mostly agree with you about the consensus historians and the struggle over race as the central facet of American history. With Jaffa it's funny because he understood that better than many historians of that era, and was for equality, but it seemed to be less important in his actual politics than bellicosity and his various moralizing crusades, and that aspect of his thought seemingly didn't make it to any of his students.
The myopia is a major point imo-my political upbringing was very much in the new deal/great society tradition and I went through a period in the 2010s of being really invested in "RETVRN but leftishly" in that direction, only to become increasingly aware of how much the (very real) successes of that era were predicated on agreeing to disagree about people's civil rights! As you can imagine this has dampened my enthusiasm for that sort of thing a bit/made me a bit more uneasy about what it would take to rebuild a real consensus in this country.
Yeah Jaffa is interesting in some ways but completely eccentric. I just don't see any connection between opposition to "the administrative state" and support for civil rights, either in Jaffa's lifetime or afterwards. And I don't see much to admire in Jaffa's practical politics. But Jaffa did have a clearer sense of the moral stakes of the Civil War than midcentury liberal intellectuals, this is a historical issue but it isn't a small one and you have to give credit where due.
Do you know Ira Katznelson's "Fear Itself"? It is an interesting effort to revive the Hofstadter tradition while without sweeping race questions under the rug.
(Sorry for the mortifyingly late response) No, I'm afraid I don't know that book, but it's certainly going on my list!
"His heart was with the reformers to be sure-the figure in the book most sympathetically considered is the orator and reformer Wendell Berry"
I'm confused. Wendell Berry was born in 1934, and in 1948 he would have been 14 years old, so presumably he couldn't have been in *The American Political Tradition*. Berry started publishing only in the early 1960s, and these were novels. What am I missing here?
Thanks for pointing that out, that was a failure to correct a mistake in the proofreading process. It was Wendell Phillips Hofstadter sympathized with, a rather different character born more than a century or so earlier.