Lyonel Feininger Emeute
One way to look at the New Left ascendancy in the media and throughout educational institutions is to note that while separatist ethnic or women’s studies affirmed very old mindsets of victimology, thus promoting an antidote to, and insurgency against, “the Man” or against “white male supremacy”, history and other humanities professors and political scientists promoted anti-imperialism, depicting the U.S. as a hateful sham democracy. Some of the leading professors admired by New Leftists were Walter La Feber (Cornell), and William Appleman Williams (U. of Wisconsin-Madison), but these were preceded by such progressives as Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles Beard, and Richard Hofstadter.
It was Turner (1893, 1921) who warned that the closing of the frontier and its free lands would force the issue of socialism onto the stage of history; while Charles Beard attacked the money-mad founders (Hamilton), and Hofstadter suggested that the moderate men needed to tone down the conflict between labor and capital through co-option of movements from below; i.e., selective concessions. (See especially https://clarespark.com/2010/07/04/pacifica-radio-and-the-progressive-movement/ and https://clarespark.com/2010/07/18/white-elite-enabling-of-black-power/ Some may dispute my characterization of Hofstadter, who did criticize populism and antisemitism in The Age of Reform and The Paranoid Style but his first book on Social Darwinism would support progressivism as remedy for laissez-faire capitalism, understood as nature red in tooth and claw. That stereotype persists today in pro-Democratic Party propaganda.)
Thus we find ourselves in a situation where mass media and the humanities are heavily weighted against the “vile” Republican Party, which is not only evil in itself, but which could force a communist revolution in reaction to its supposed repression of working class and middle class aspirations that progressives have so far successfully prevented.
Not one of the academic programs or anti-imperialist historians mentioned above lobbied for the study of antisemitism, not even after WW2. “The International Jew”, a.k.a. “the money power” occupies all of their imaginations, however hidden by monikers such as “Wall Street” or “Corporate greed”. We ignore the power of their pervasive and largely undetected propaganda at our peril.
https://clarespark.com/2009/09/18/bad-sex-in-the-new-york-times/
https://clarespark.com/2011/02/02/the-legitimate-aspirations-of-the-___-people/ (the original Populist movement in the US with comment on Michael Kazin’s book)
https://clarespark.com/2011/03/28/index-to-multiculturalism-blogs/
https://clarespark.com/2011/10/10/populist-catharsis-on-wall-street/.
https://clarespark.com/2012/01/25/the-state-of-the-union-stinks/
https://clarespark.com/2011/12/10/before-saul-alinsky-rules-for-democratic-politicians/
https://clarespark.com/2012/08/05/hating-finance-capital/
https://clarespark.com/2012/07/19/communist-ideas-go-mainstream/
https://clarespark.com/2012/09/03/eros-and-the-problem-of-solidarity/
https://clarespark.com/2012/09/05/proto-fascism-and-the-democrat-peoples-community/
https://clarespark.com/2012/09/07/charisma-and-symbolic-politics/
https://clarespark.com/2012/09/14/ron-paul-anarchist-in-chief/ (Phillip Smyth’s guest blog on right-wing populism)
https://clarespark.com/2012/12/01/petit-bourgeois-radicalism-and-obama/ (on James H. Cone and other black supremacists)
https://clarespark.com/2013/02/02/totalitarianism-polarization-and-single-issue-politics/
https://clarespark.com/2015/05/02/multiculturalism-and-the-persistence-of-feudalism/ (inspired by Mosby and the Baltimore events)
The Clare Spark Blog 