The Burial of Richard Hofstadter's Status Politics

The disinterest today in Richard Hofstadter's concept of "status politics" is partly a matter of the fact that our commentariat just doesn't read much, and partly a matter of ways in which his thinking seems out of date (Hofstadter having clearly misread what he dismissed as "pseudo-conservatives" in important ways) or simply unfashionable (as with his thoroughly mid-century propensity for psychological explanations for people's politics). However, it is also because of the aspects of his thought that sit poorly with that commentariat's prejudices--and indeed aspects of the past that they would prefer not to deal with. Certainly among these is the fact that Hofstadter's conception of status politics--by which he refers to the contest among groups over standing within America's social hierarchy, and which he analyzes as, in contrast with other aspects of the country's political life, founded on bad memories, bitterness, paranoia and vindictiveness--is awkward for the proponents of identity politics and culture war, who all but dominate the mainstream political discussion. Also awkward is what he had in mind when he discussed the status politics of the 1950s, not the African-American civil rights movement (as Hofstadter pointed out, the level of discrimination and oppression at the time meant that the comparative "luxury" of status politics was not yet an issue), but among Americans of European descent, with the conflict ongoing particularly between old-stock White Anglo-Saxon Protestants and what today would be referred to as "White ethnics," the later arrivals who were not Anglo-Saxon, not Protestant, and whose "Whiteness" was accordingly something that only came to be recognized in time, as was the case with the descendants of the Germans, and the Irish, and certainly those who immigrated from the South or East of the European continent, particularly where they also happened to be Catholic or Jewish.

Where contemporary discourse is concerned that division can seem to have long since been buried--even though one sees evidences that it never wholly went away, as (reflecting the extent to which class is a reality and social mobility has tended to decline in the era after "Anglo-America" became "Euro-America," though not just that) one sees examining the names of those who stand at the apex of wealth, status, power in the United States, Anglo-Saxon names tending to predominate. Thus is one unsurprised to see people with names like "Buffett" and "Gates" at the top of the business world, while if anything this goes even more for those holding the highest of political offices, that of the Presidency. Even in the post-civil rights movement era the names of United States Presidents have tended to be along the lines of Johnson, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, with all that implies about the ancestry of those involved, as, anything more exotic apart, even German heritage is apt to be obscured in those who make it to the White House. (Thus did Richard Nixon, conveniently for his political career, end up with his father's passably English name and his mother's Protestant religion rather than the Catholic-and-German reverse, while the German Drumpfs became the American Trumps, whose son Frederick married a Scottish immigrant who named their second son Donald and raised him in the Presbyterian church. Only Dwight Eisenhower stands as a real exception to this pattern among chief executives, testimony to what having been Supreme Allied Commander in a world war does for one's career.)

What to make of the absence of comment about that? Two factors seem relevant. One is that the practitioners of identity-status-culture politics have tended to treat gender as the first and most fundamental line in American life, ethnicity as the second, with the latter making it a matter of the White on one side and everyone else on the other, with the former always oppressors and the latter always victims (according to the characteristically postmodernist illogic racism is something Whites subject others to but never suffer from), while taking scant interest in how the line between the two groups, who is thought to be on which side of it, has shifted historically, with all this undeniably having its politics. After all, identity politics is not a matter of universalist opposition to prejudice that takes a serious interest in the phenomenon as such and puts up an uncompromising opposition to it as such in the manner one may expect of those for whom, like a Frederick Douglass even in an era in which millions of African-Americans were still enduring the chattel slavery into which he personally had been born, looking at the lot of Irish under British rule, "the cause of humanity is one the world over," but rather a nationalistic struggle in the narrowest--and meanest—sense of the term. From this standpoint the history of racism against groups now considered White is not part of the story that one must know for the sake of a fuller understanding of the situation, and bearing both obligations of solidarity toward others in their struggles and opportunities to elicit solidarity from others for one's own, but rather a distraction from and even a rival to them as they pursue a narrower, frankly more selfish concern (the more in as, of course, such politics so often see the elites of marginalized groups mobilize sentiment over not only imagined but entirely real grievances for the sake of personal self-advancement in that way they speak of as "representation").

A formidable obstacle in itself to attention to such issues, both because of the way this identity politics and culture war have set the agenda and dominated perceptions (it can seem relevant that the country had an African-American president with a conspicuously non-Anglo name before it ever had an American with, for instance, an Italian or Slavic or even Scandinavian name), there is also the plain and simple fact that it would be a matter of dredging up a painful past without prospect of gaining any advantage from doing so--of having much more to lose than to gain from stirring up that particular hornet's nest. Who among such groups cares to remember a time when in spite of being as fair (or even fairer) in complexion than the country's staatsvolk they were in their eyes less than White, their religion unassimilable, the refuse of their despised home countries--the "shithole countries" in the view of the Nativists of their day--and even a fifth column for foreign powers, with all the hostility attached to that, which went so far as pogrom-like violence? The murderous riots of the 1840s and 1850s by Know-Nothing nativists against Irish-Americans and other Catholic immigrants, exemplified by Louisville's Bloody Monday? The lynching of Italian-Americans that was the backdrop to the word "Mafia" entering the nation's lexicon with all the charge that once made its utterance itself a racist provocation? The merger of ethnic and religious bigotry and Anti-Communism in the hysterics of the Red Scare after the Great War, just the first of many? The anxieties and resentments that endured in the descendants of those immigrants in cases generations after their ancestors came to the country that, for example, a Philip Roth so strikingly laid bare via a creation like Alexander Portnoy? No, better to forget the time when they were weak, and victimized, and afraid, and ashamed, and bore the baggage of all that, as they instead wax romantic over the Establishment version of "the immigrant experience," with its sepia-toned images of Ellis Island in politically safe educational documentaries eliding the uglier facts, and even take "pride" in their "heritage" because rather than the millstone around their neck it once was (the more in as cultural marginality was bound up with socioeconomic marginality, and the pressures and prohibitions of elders insistent on forcing what naturally had no meaning or appeal for their children upon them) that heritage is now so innocuous in mainstream America that foolish romanticism about the irrelevancy that is one's ancestors is something they can safely indulge in public without compromising the perception of others that they belong in this country--all as they take satisfaction, and self-satisfaction, in the thought that "We came, we struggled, we made it," and look uncharitably on those whom they can feel haven't, as comfortably aligned with the status quo and the established order of things, they exempt themselves from the burdens of solidarity with the downtrodden as they punch down at them instead ("We came, we struggled, we made it. Why haven't they?") in that way so many find easier, more comfortable. And so the matter stands, the facts there in the books, but going ignored in a culture where what passes for collective memory reflects the conveniences of the moment's agenda-setter, ever-prepared to drop what does not suit said convenience down the Memory Hole where this subject is concerned, just as they are with all the others.