The Age of Reform

"Hofstadter is the quintessential Cold War liberal. He clearly doesn’t have a special place in his heart for the early era of American liberalism. Hofstadter’s goal in this book is to dissociate progressives from New Deal liberals. He famously portrays progressives as members of a status-anxious middle class, whose anxieties shaped and limited their moralistic policies. He’s not a big fan of Woodrow Wilson either. I love this book but I also don’t especially agree with Hofstadter. I think that he fails to see all the continuities between the Wilson years and the New Deal years. Although there are many histories of the progressive era, there’s no clear consensus on why a profusion of reform occurred at a moment in history when the country was relatively prosperous. I think Will doesn’t like him because he coined the phrase “the Paranoid Style” to refer to extreme right-wing politics. Hofstadter’s style is a little more polemical than we’re used to in academic historians. Maybe that’s great. He interwove his histories with cultural criticism. I think that helps explains why his work survives on reading lists even as his historical theories fall out of fashion."