Posted by on February 17, 2019 4:47 pm
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Categories: News µ Newsjones

Photo Illustration by Lyne Lucien/The Daily Beast

The late historian and public intellectual Richard Hofstadter, who died in 1970, anticipated today’s age of anxiety. Looking to the developing body of psychology, he saw that there has always been an uniquely American anxiety.

The role of anxiety in American politics is a central theme of 1955’s The Age of Reform, which covered the tumultuous political period from the Populist Movement of the 1890s through the New Deal of the 1930s. The middle class, typically staid and not eager for tumultuous political activism. Hofstadter saw that it was status anxiety that spurred the resting middle class to action. The rise of the new class of wealth —- the so-called robber barons of Rockefellers, Carnegies and Mellons —  and their power and political influence, coupled with the revolt from below and the rise of workers’ organizations and unions, pushed the educated middle class to embrace political reform as more than a tool, but a way of life. This reform, while benefiting many through widespread reforms, also locked the middle class into the political driver’s seat for decades—a development that had an enormous impact on American politics.

In 1964, in an age where the anxieties that Hofstadter had looked back on had returned to the center of the American conversation, he published The Paranoid Style in American Politics, a seminal look at how demagogues could channel those middle-class anxieties. It was a warning about the damaged unchecked forces could do, that’s more than a warning now: We are living in the world he warned us about, in which technology-aided anxiety and paranoia are woven into our political landscape. Instead of capitalizing on the anxieties that are already there, new entrepreneurs of fear are more able than ever to actually create new ones to sell against as conspiracy theories abound.

Read more at The Daily Beast.