Some old men continually praise the time of their youth. In fact, you would almost think that there were no fools in their days, but unluckily they themselves are left as an example.
— Alexander Pope
If you ask any number of scholars today who America’s most important living historian is, the answer will invariably come back as Eric Foner.
Had you asked that same question 60 or 70 years ago, the answer would likely have been Richard Hofstadter.
It’s probably more than coincidence that these two giants are forever linked in public life. Hofstadter was Foner’s mentor and doctoral supervisor at Columbia and it’s clear from Foner’s writing that Hofstadter was important to his development as a public intellectual.
Further, in a strange twist of personal history that further links the two men, Hofstadter’s first full-time teaching job opened up in 1941 because Foner’s father Jack was blacklisted as a communist and fired from City College of New York. Both occupied the DeWitt Clinton chair in history at Columbia, a position Foner continues to hold.
Now, in a new collection of brilliant essays culled from his columns for The Nation magazine and titled, Battles for Freedom: The Use and Abuse of American History, Foner and Hofstadter are together again. This time, it’s in the form of a 1992 essay by Foner titled, The Education of Richard Hofstadter. In it, Foner surveys his mentor’s influence on American thought and throws up more than a couple of signal flairs to those of us trying to make sense of these dusky times in American politics.
There is no shortage of reasons for you to take a close look at Foner’s collection and the Hofstadter column. One is for the brief, but nourishing summaries of American populism found in Hofstadter’s two Pulitzer winners, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and The Age of Reform.
The former is a thorough exploration of the narrowing of the collective American mind, if such a thing existed, at mid-century, the latter a bracing, detailed treatment of the ideal of agrarianism in the American ethos, an ideal that governed decades of political thought from the founding on.
Another reason to read Foner is to rediscover the simple joy that comes from realizing that the purpose of skilled and committed public intellectuals in the U.S. goes far beyond the ritual torture of undergrads in history and political science.
But, my chief reason for touting Foner’s essay and the book that contains it is the prescient treatment he gives to Hofstadter’s 1944 work, Social Darwinism in American Thought. In his Nation column, Foner wrote that it “has had an impact matched by few books of its generation.”
“Social Darwinism is a work of intellectual history, not an examination of how ideas reflect economic structures,” he writes. “And as such, it retains much of its vitality half a century after it was written.”
In his Nation column, after a quick sketch of the history of social Darwinism in Western thought, a belief system that relies on “survival of the fittest,” eugenics and “natural selection” to explain social behavior and was even expanded during the Gilded Age to justify “American exceptionalism,” Foner moves on to tackle Hofstadter’s deft and, at times, savage critique of social Darwinism’s adherents. He also notes how the once-discredited theory had made a comeback in the 1980s, once again as political justification for crushing hopes of social mobility by American dreamers from the lower classes.
And here we are in 2017, trying to make sense of a politics that resemble nothing we’ve seen before, led by a crude, vulgar know-nothing who somehow believes that he’s a superior being destined to rule.
How do we know that social Darwinism, first brought to the surface by a Victorian British philosopher named Herbert Spencer and seized upon in the U.S. by everyone from robber barons of the Industrial Age like Vanderbilt and Carnegie to the Reaganauts of the 1980s, is looming again?
We know it because Trump has made it clear that he believes it as well and, one suspects, so do his followers. If you’re wealthy, it’s because you deserve to be. If you’re not, you’re right where you’re supposed to be. Winners and losers. In or out. It’s a binary world in TrumpLand.
“Well I think I was born with the drive for success because I have a certain gene,” Trump has famously said. “I'm a gene believer ... Hey, when you connect two race horses, you usually end up with a fast horse. I had a good gene pool from the standpoint of that, so I was pretty much driven.”
It’s been my observation that Trump doesn’t believe in much, mostly because he’s an empty vessel that was never filled with ideas or spiritual values, only certitude, arrogance and dogma. But, I am utterly convinced that he believes in his “natural superiority.” If we understand that, we’re a long way toward understanding him.
If, like me, you’re still struggling to make sense of it all, buy Foner’s book. Read the essays. Find another way to understand the fool in the White House. It’s more than an academic exercise.
