Richard Hofstadter and the Missteps of Liberalism?

Over at the Washington Post E.J. Dionne tries to explain where liberalism may have gone awry. His answer may surprise you: The wrong turn may have begun with Richard Hofstadter. Dionne works from his recent reading of David S. Brown's Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography:

But reading Brown is also a reminder of where Hofstadter may have misled the very liberal movement to which he was devoted. There was, first, his emphasis on American populists as embodying a "deeply ingrained provincialism" (Brown's term) whose revolt was as much a reaction to the rise of the cosmopolitan big city as to economic injustices.

Many progressives and reformers, he argued, represented an old Anglo-Saxon middle class who suffered from "status anxiety" in reaction to the rise of a vulgar new business elite. Hofstadter analyzed the right wing of the 1950s and early 1960s in similar terms. Psychological disorientation and social displacement became more important than ideas or interests.

Now, Hofstadter was exciting precisely because he brilliantly revised accepted and sometimes pious views of what the populists and progressives were about. But there was something dismissive about Hofstadter's analysis that blinded liberals to the legitimate grievances of the populists, the progressives and, yes, the right wing.

I think Dionne's argument makes some sense, at least to a degree. But it also seems to me that demonizing liberalism really has little to do with liberalism per se (has liberalism gone wrong?) and more to do with a political culture of ad hominems and misrepresentation and winning at all cost. Rather than show where the enemy is wrong, it has become easier simply to depict them as evil and dangerous and preferably as stooges for some uber-enemy. A journalistic culture in which the sound-bite reigns victorious over a supine deep analysis certainly does not help. Most of the lies that conservatives like to spread about liberals are untrue, which does not for a minute stop the proliferators of lies from dospersing them. (The same, by the way, can be said about lies that liberals like to spread about conservatives.)