I thought it odd the other week when Frank Rich attempted to explain a purported "resurgence" of racial-anxiety-based "radicalism" by quoting from a sociological essay from 1962. Well, along comes my former colleague Gregory Rodriguez in the L.A. Times, locating the decoder ring in a Richard Hofstadter essay from 1954:
Hofstadter points to the fundamental rootlessness and heterogeneity of U.S. society, and the "peculiar scramble for status and [the] peculiar search for secure identity" that those qualities inspire. Without, say, a traditional class system -- a "recognizable system of status," in Hofstadter's words -- Americans suffer from "status anxiety." During times of great social flux, these fears play out in politics as people seek out enemies (which helps them reaffirm their own standing) and, at the same time, damn a social order they feel they can't dominate.
It's not a stretch to say that the election of the first black president, as well as the deep economic recession, have challenged Americans' sense of self. That a resulting status anxiety would play itself out on the right more than the left may have to do with the right's general discomfort with the kind of collective identities -- unions, ethnics, gender -- that the left tends to embrace. Instead of finding affiliations to secure their status, the right's "rugged individualists" get mired in the type of anomie that in turn increases the need to reaffirm one's place in a topsy-turvy world.
The personal, deeply vituperative tone of the debate over healthcare reform seems to suggest that Americans' anger is not just about whether a "public option" is part of a reform package. The fear is less about encroaching socialism than it is about getting lost and forgotten in a rapidly changing society. Change isn't slowing down, and the bad news is that these feelings of losing control are not likely to go away any time soon.
Rodriguez is no Rich (I mean that in a good way), and I agree that scapegoating the Other is a predictable byproduct of any national trauma, but the questions are how much, and where is the evidence? As I wrote last week, 9/11 was a helluva lot more self-soiling and scapegoat-creating than the vague and apparently perennial sense "getting lost and forgotten in a rapidly changing society," and yet the promised wave of anti-Muslim violence never materialized. If townhall protesters were motivated by race, wouldn't they be focusing on the black attorney general's drastic expansion of civil rights litigation?
We are, thank God, an almost unrecognizably different country than in 1954, particularly on questions of racial tolerance, conformity, and the pace of change. The "collective identities" Rodriguez points to are hardly the exclusive provinces of the political left, as evangelical Christians and Dallas Cowboys fans can attest. If the dislocated-whitey thesis was as convincing as mainstream newspaper pundits are claiming, surely there is more concrete evidence than essays from a half-century ago, and some raised voices at the first real opportunity for citizens to interact with their elected representatives after a 10-month binge of federal intervention.
UPDATE: Read Damon Root's great piece from a year ago on Hofstadter's reputation-making pile of slanders against the classical liberal thinker Herbert Spencer.
