Richard Hofstadter and the Demonology of the Cold War Right

This chapter explores how Richard Hofstadter’s scholarly work on populism in American history – and his broader theory of populism as a “paranoid style” – was received by his historical contemporaries and how it continues to shape popular and academic perceptions of populism and the American radical right. Hofstadter argued that disparate movements in American history, from the nineteenth-century Populist Party to McCarthyism during the 1950s, were driven by “status anxiety” and a conspiratorial mindset characteristic of populism. In so doing, Hofstadter introduced concepts such as “status anxiety,” “paranoid style,” and “populism” into the popular lexicon, popularizing a Cold War liberal critique of radical political movements as irrational and misguided. While contemporaries such as Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset supported his views, historians such as C. Vann Woodward and Lawrence Goodwyn criticized Hofstadter’s account of U.S. populism. By the late 1960s, Hofstadter himself moderated his stance, acknowledging the limitations of his psychosocial theory of populism. The chapter concludes by arguing that Hofstadter’s work, while offering valuable insights, has led to analytical blind spots in understanding the structural and ideological dynamics of the American radical right.