The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite

by Michael Lind

THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY theory was first weaponized in American partisan politics in the 1950s. In The New American Right (1955), Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Peter Viereck, and others explained McCarthyism as an anti-intellectual revolt of working-class Americans afflicted by status anxiety.32 One of the contributors to The New American Right was the historian Richard Hofstadter, who adopted the term “pseudo-conservative” from the Adorno school.33 In several influential books and essays, Hofstadter tried to rewrite the history of the New Deal by downplaying the importance of organized farmers and organized industrial workers in order to make college-educated professional reformers the heroes of twentieth-century American history.