Ignoring Status Politics

As I have remarked in the past, the "consensus historians" remain important to American political discourse today. Not the least of the reasons for that is that consensus historians such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Louis Hartz, and Daniel Boorstin, were the theoreticians of what we today call "centrism."

One of these, Richard Hofstadter, comes in for mention from time to time because of his interest in the ever topical subject of right-wing populism. As with all the historians of that group his work had significant shortcomings that only seem the more glaring with time.* Still, for all those shortcomings, much of their output did have its interesting aspects, which predictably get overlooked. One is Hofstadter's discussion of what he called "status politics"--a politics that, having to do with perceptions of a group's standing in American society, trafficks in the bitterness, paranoia and vindictiveness of groups toward each other. Hofstadter's discussion, arguably, underestimates just how preponderant such politics can become. (Hofstadter thought it a luxury of good times. Today we see how prominent it can be even in bad.) It also seems that he was inattentive to how such politics can be cultivated and exploited for the sake of other agendas--for instance, whipping up part of the public against this group or that to get it to sign on to an economic agenda unsalable in itself. All the same, he at least understood that what the country's culture wars really amount to is politicians telling the public "I can't make your life better, but I can make their life worse. Vote for me!"

In a political milieu of very limited choices it is possible that this works for at least some of the people, some of the time--or at least, that it is sufficiently hard to prove that it does not that they go on playing the game as a matter of course, all day long, all year long, bringing us to where we are today.

* Thus is it the case that Schlesinger Jr. in that early work so important to this current, his six hundred page epic The Age of Jackson, "makes only three passing references to Indians," completely eliding the 1830 Indian Removal Act and all that followed from it in its rather appalling attempt to paint Jackson as some hero of the common man.