"May None but Honest and Wise Men Ever Rule Under This Roof"

"Mr. Jefferson, though too revolutionary in his notions, is yet a lover of liberty and will be desirous of something like orderly Government—Mr. Burr loves nothing but himself—thinks of nothing but his own aggrandizement—and will be content with nothing short of permanent power. . . in his own hands."

At The Bulwark, Mona Charen compares Donald Trump to Aaron Burr.

And Gabriel Schoenfeld describes Trump as "the single largest and most effective purveyor of fake news in the country."

"As Refreshing as a Half-Full Glass of Water"

"Though historians—of all people—should know better, we sometimes still talk, and write, as if there is a single national audience for popular history. There wasn't and isn't, at least not any more than there is for a novel or a play. By illustrating the strategies and the successes of these five historians, Witham takes down the heated if not hysterical tone of both historians and pundits about presentism and the politicization of history."

At Boston Review, David Waldstreicher reviews Nick Witham's Popularizing the Past: Historians, Publishers, and Readers in Postwar America.

"Still Pack a Bold Punch"

"Both volumes urge recognition of illiberalism for what it is: a clear and present danger to constitutional democracy—not a loyal opposition with which one breaks bread and compromises. Both take a realistic view of American conservatism's peculiar susceptibility to conspiracy theories and toxic identity politics. Both implicitly reject the idea that the fever will break if only the forces of liberal democracy extend their hand in a show of good will. People are sometimes rational. Often, they are not."

At Politico, Joshua Zeitz returns to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s The Vital Center and Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics.

But Michael Brenes and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins at Dissent call for "a break with the anxieties that drove Cold War liberalism."

The End of Historiography?

"Thus, in the same way that the New Left historians contested the interpretations of the consensus and Progressive historians before them, so have subsequent generations of American historians elaborated, synthesized, and revised the work of Kolko, Weinstein, Gutman, and others. This recent work is more sophisticated both from the top down and the bottom up. Today's liberal-left historians have come much closer to achieving what the great British historian Eric Hobsbawm called 'the history of society' rather than concentrating exclusively on the agency of the powerful, or on white working class and African-American resistance to the powerful. As Eric Foner wrote in the preface to his magisterial (the word is here, for once, used with its full weight) Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, he wished to '[transcend] the present compartmentalization of historical study into "social" and "political" components' and to 'view the period as a whole, integrating the social, political, and economic aspects of Reconstruction into a coherent, analytical narrative.'"

In a 2015 Democracy article, Rich Yeselson explores New Left and post-New Left historiography.

"It Is Baked into Every Apple Pie, and It Lurks Beneath Purple Mountains' Majesty"

"The line between cooperation and conspiracy, between politicking and plotting, is necessarily subjective. But episodically throughout American history, in every century from the 17th to the 21st, some considerable share of Americans has fallen under the spell of a fantastical, fevered vision of conspiracy, usually with occult and Satanic elements. Most often, these conspiracy theories are politically oriented, but sometimes they pop up outside of politics, as in the Salem witch trials of the 1690s, the Satanic-day-care-abuse panic of the 1990s, and the Satanism panic touching rock music and role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons that immediately preceded that fiasco, echoes of which can still be heard in dark whisperings that the Harry Potter franchise is a Luciferian propaganda project. Richard Hofstadter famously called the associated political tendency 'the paranoid style in American politics,' tracing its history back to the Illuminati panic that gripped the New England clergy in the 18th century. Hofstadter makes an important and often underappreciated point: Conspiracy theories attract lunatics, but their relevance extends far beyond the bughouse."

Kevin D. Williamson at National Review explains "Why Americans Adore Conspiracy Theories."

And Greg Miller at Knowable Magazine writes about "a new type of 'conspiracy without theory' that relies on sheer assertion and repetition rather than evidence and reason."

"He Was by Temperament More of a Private Intellectual"

"Coming as it did, after the University had let the campus revolt that spring get violently out of hand, that speech got quickly pigeonholed as some sort of 'conservative' defense of the status quo. Read it again; I expect to include it in a subsequent volume. It is, in many ways, a fitting coda to Anti-Intellectualism and The Paranoid Style: 'The possibility of modern democracy rests upon the willingness of governments to accept the existence of a loyal opposition, organized to reverse some of their policies and to replace them in office. Similarly, the possibility of the modern free university rests upon the willingness of society to support and sustain institutions part of whose business it is to examine, critically and without stint, the assumptions that prevail in that society.'"

At the Journal of the History of Idea's blog, Daniel Wortel-London talks to Sean Wilentz about Richard Hofstadter.

And Jeet Heer at The Nation reviews Wilentz's collection of Hofstadter's writings for the Library of America.

"Let's Find Out Why"

"The English language provides a great many solid choices for someone wishing to describe a leader who plays on mob psychology or racial intolerance. 'Demagogue' is an obvious one, but there are others—'nationalist,' 'nativist,' 'racist,' or 'fascist,' to name a few. They are serviceable words, all of them. In the feverish climate of the Democracy Scare, however, none of those will work: 'populist' is the word we are instructed to use. 'Populists' are the ones we must suppress."

Thomas Frank at Harper's Magazine looks at the original Populists compared to how the description is used today.

"What Was True in Hofstadter's Time Is All the More Urgently True for Ours"

"Vigilante violence, unfortunately, is a movie we've seen before. In the introduction to American Violence: A Documentary History, Richard Hofstadter wrote, 'What is most exceptional about the Americans is not the voluminous record of their violence, but their extraordinary ability, in the face of that record, to persuade themselves that they are among the best-behaved and best-regulated of peoples.' This historic violence, Hofstadter noted, was not initiated with a desire to subvert the state, and therefore didn't usually result in the undermining of authority. It was violence by and for the establishment and its preservation, unleashed at different times 'against abolitionists, Catholics, radicals, workers and labor organizers, Negroes, Orientals, and other ethnic or racial or ideological minorities, and has been used ostensibly to protect the American, the Southern, the white Protestant, or simply the established middle-class way of life and morals.'"

Alexander Hurst at The New Republic warns against pro-Trump violence in 2020.

"A Little Less Disruptive Innovation Is Called For"

"Disruption has a totally different history. It's a way to avoid the word 'progress,' which, even when it's secularized, still implies some kind of moral progress. Disruption emerges in the 1990s as progress without any obligation to notions of goodness. And so 'disruptive innovation,' which became the buzzword of change in every realm in the first years of the 21st century, including higher education, is basically destroying things because we can and because there can be money made doing so. Before the 1990s, something that was disruptive was like the kid in the class throwing chalk. And that's what disruptive innovation turned out to really mean."

Evan Goldstein at The Chronicle of Higher Education talks with Jill Lepore about her new book, These Truths.

President Crass

"Growing up in a blue-collar family that had supported FDR and Truman, I remember well that my family and our blue-collar friends shared the broader disdain that many Americans felt for 'the egghead Stevenson, as opposed to the Republican candidate, the more down-to-earth Dwight Eisenhower. One of the favorite refrains in our blue-collar milieu about men like Stevenson and other 'eggheads' was that they never got their hands dirty.
"In 2016 Trump benefitted from a deep strain in the American character. It was influenced by our frontier experience and contempt for the 'tenderfoot,' by the spread of Jacksonian democracy and populism, by the free-wheeling capitalism of the Gilded Age, by our respect for practical men like Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Charles Lindberg, for common sense and 'the school of hard knocks' as opposed to book-learning and being 'overly educated.'"

Walter G. Moss at History News Network argues that "[u]nfortunately, the crassness and anti-intellectualism of President Trump are not aberrations in our culture, but a reflection of our darker side."

"How Far Must Things Go?"

"In one respect this was an understatement: Western or otherwise, the United States is the only modern industrial urban nation that persists in maintaining a gun culture. It is the only industrial nation in which the possession of rifles, shotguns, and handguns is lawfully prevalent among large numbers of its population. It is the only such nation that has been impelled in recent years to agonize at length about its own disposition toward violence and to set up a commission to examine it, the only nation so attached to the supposed 'right' to bear arms that its laws abet assassins, professional criminals, berserk murderers, and political terrorists at the expense of the orderly population—and yet it remains, and is apparently determined to remain, the most passive of all the major countries in the matter of gun control. Many otherwise intelligent Americans cling with pathetic stubbornness to the notion that the people's right to bear arms is the greatest protection of their individual rights and a firm safeguard of democracy—without being in the slightest perturbed by the fact that no other democracy in the world observes any such 'right' and that in some democracies in which citizens' rights are rather better protected than in ours, such as England and the Scandinavian countries, our arms control policies would be considered laughable."

American Heritage hosts Richard Hofstadter's 1970 article "America as a Gun Culture."

And Patrick Blanchfield at Foreign Policy follows up forty-six years later.

"They Are Footnoted as if They Were Twenty or More Years Younger"

"In disciplinary terms, the secret to these books' success is their position at the hinge of the history profession's adjustment to the new social history. Both Foner and Howe deftly wove together elements of the emerging paradigm with the strongest aspects of the old. More concretely, their books emulated the sweep and liveliness of the mid-century classics of American Studies, with its confidence in the representativeness of 'typical' or 'leading' men—even if neither book sought to circumscribe as large a subject as 'the American Mind,' both books burned with the same ambition to capture the 'Republican Mind' or the 'Whig Mind' in the round: as a political, intellectual, religious, and social phenomenon. This unspecialized or holistic approach was the most valuable legacy that Howe and Foner took from the old paradigm's leading practitioners (Hofstadter, Commager, Welter, et al.), because it set them apart from the more focused monographs of the intellectual historians, political historians, or social historians to come."

Andy Seal at U.S. Intellectual History Blog praises Eric Foner's Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War and Daniel Walker Howe's The Political Culture of the American Whigs.

Anti-Intellectualism on the American Right

"The conservative portrait of higher education, if true, is devastating. However, it has a number of serious flaws. The first is that it is empirically inaccurate. America’s universities are not monolithically left-wing. Rather, a battery of recent evidence on higher education show that although the professoriate tends to lean left, conservative students and faculty continue to flourish in significant numbers. Moreover, as the philosopher Charles Taylor argued at length in his 1992 book The Ethics of Authenticity, 'nihilism' has never been an accurate or fair account of the American counterculture. Rather, Bloom mistook a disagreement over morals as a rejection of them."

Jason Blakely at The Atlantic discusses "the rise in sharply hostile ways of talking about the universities among conservatives in the last fifty years."

"History Is What the Present Chooses to Remember About the Past"

"There's a couple of things that I often repeat to my students. Oscar Wilde, I believe, said, 'The only obligation we have to history is to rewrite it,' which I think is a good one. Ernest Renan, the 19th century French historian, said something to the effect of—this is a rough translation—'the historian is the enemy of the nation.' I often ask students, what does he mean by that? 'The enemy of the nation.' Does that mean we’re traitors? No, what he's saying is nations are built on myths, historical myths, and then the historian comes along and if he's doing his job, shatters those myths, and often that makes the historian very unpopular. People like their myths but 'myth' is not a good way of understanding how the society developed to where it is today."

Erik Moshe at History News Network interviews Eric Foner.

"Unions Provide a Mediating Function"

"Pondering the working-class grievances that helped elevate Donald Trump to the Oval Office in 2016, I often ask myself: How different might the political climate have been if 25 percent of the private sector were unionized, as was the case in the early 1970s? If more working-class Americans felt listened to and represented? If modernized unions could buffer economic shocks and improve productivity? The decline of the business model of old-style industrial unions may have been economically inevitable, but the lack of any new model to replace it has been socially calamitous. Unions will not be easy to fix, but allowing them to innovate would be a first step, and possibly also a last chance."

Jonathan Rauch at The Atlantic makes the "Conservative Case for Unions."

And Stacy Mitchell pushes for a revival of interest in antimonopoly.

While Peter Beinart and Franklin Foer explore problems for Democrats regarding immigration and populism.

"The Truly Paranoid Style in American Politics"

"Conspiracists are by nature anti-heroic—they believe that faceless networks must be far more powerful than ordinary individuals. A marginal figure like Ross could never have built his cocaine empire alone; Oswald could not have killed a president; a few dozen men in Afghan caves could not have brought down the Twin Towers. The romance of the conspiracy hunt lies in the way it transfers vitality from the assassin to the buff, at home alone, searching for the plot’s true source. In this, it matches perfectly the romance of the Internet, which perhaps explains why conspiracy has found such a resolute home there. If Ross, Oswald, and Hani Hanjour are merely pawns, then the story needs a hero, and the ­puzzle-solver himself raises his hand."

In a 2013 New York article, Benjamin Wallace-Wells looks at "50 years of conspiracy theory."

"Conflict and Consensus"

"Perhaps they're right to be cautious. In framing a narrative about a nation, there's always the danger of letting description shade into prescription—as Hartz saw when he wrote about the 'compulsive power' of consensus. Stories about the past are bound to leave things out, and any narrative will eventually come to grief as neglected groups disrupt settled assumptions to make themselves known. Yet we can acknowledge those dangers and still recognize that Woodward was also right. The task for the next generation of American historians will be to draw a new roadmap of our country’s history—simple but not simplistic, rigorous but not rigid, inclusive but not incoherent. As our most recent history has shown, we refuse this task at our peril: if Americans are not offered realistic stories about their country's past, they may well choose mythological ones."

Scott Spillman at The Point asserts that "historians no longer know how to tell a narrative history of the United States because they no longer know what to think about the United States."

"A Difficult Subject"

"For good or ill, violence has been a common agent of historical change almost everywhere; it occurs at decisive moments even in the history of those nations that have otherwise enjoyed long periods of gradual and relatively peaceful change. While we may find violence undesirable, we can hardly find it unnatural. The United States, even with its considerable record of violence, appears not as some mutant monster among the peoples of the world but rather as a full-fledged and somewhat boisterous member of the fellowship of human frailty. What is most exceptional about the Americans is not the voluminous record of their violence, but their extraordinary ability, in the face of that record, to persuade themselves that they are among the best-behaved and best-regulated of peoples."

The Baffler publishes Richard Hofstadter's 1970 essay "Reflections on Violence in the United States."

"Expressive, Not Persuasive"

"Some years ago I was invited to a union convention in Florida to speak on a panel about Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous Four Freedoms speech of 1941. The hall was full of representatives from local chapters—men, women, blacks, whites, Latinos. We began by singing the national anthem, and then sat down to listen to a recording of Roosevelt's speech. As I looked out into the crowd, and saw the array of different faces, I was struck by how focused they were on what they shared. And listening to Roosevelt’s stirring voice as he invoked the freedom of speech, the freedom of worship, the freedom from want and the freedom from fear—freedoms that Roosevelt demanded for 'everyone in the world'—I was reminded of what the real foundations of modern American liberalism are."

Mark Lilla in The New York Times argues that "the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end." (Ross Douthat reacts, as does Lovia Gyarkye at The New Republic.)

Emmett Rensin at Vox, back in April, criticizes the "smug style" of liberalism.

And Kyle Scott Clauss at Boston reports on remarks by Bernie Sanders in which Sanders argues that to stop Donald Trump, Democrats "have to do it in a way that we have never done it before, and it's essentially reaching out to people who do not or may not agree with us on every single issue." (Graham Vyse at The New Republic reacts, and Max B. Sawicky at The Baffler defends Sanders.)

Michelle Goldberg in Slate joins the debate as well. (And she refers to Ellen Willis's essay "Identity Crisis" from 1992, republished by n+1 magazine.). Jamelle Bouie calls for a "renewed Rainbow Coalition."

Eric Levtiz at New York tries to bring everything together.

"The Death-Struggle Atmosphere They Brought to Politics"

"This is the tone of fanaticism—or, perhaps, 'the fanatical style,' a variation on what Richard Hofstadter called 'the paranoid style.' Hofstadter was careful to say he was describing not a clinical condition, but a constructed outlook. Its conspiratorial themes grew out of a particular 'way of seeing the world and of expressing oneself.' So, too, with the current style of conservative discourse. It assumes the presence of concealed enemies, but also stresses, even more than the 'paranoiacs' did, the bad faith of liberals who are unwilling and possibly unable to acknowledge how dire things really are—or to call evil by its true name."

Sam Tanenhaus in The Atlantic reviews Daniel Oppenheimer's Exit Right: The People Who Left and Left and Reshaped the American Century.