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Rage Against the Administrative State

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 April 2018

Abstract

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Type
Forum: Fear and Loathing
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Cambridge University Press 

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References

1 Hofstadter, Richard, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York, 1965), 34Google Scholar, 23–9; quote 3.

2 This is from Hofstadter's closely related work of the same period, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York, 1963), 41–2.

3 Heale, M. J., McCarthy's Americans: Red Scare Politics in State and Nation, 1935–1965 (Athens, GA, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For historiographical discussion, see Storrs, Landon R. Y., The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (Princeton, NJ, 2012)Google Scholar, and Storrs, , “McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia in American History (Oxford, 2016)Google Scholar, http://americanhistory.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore-9780199329175-e-6?rskey=zd7q6q&result=11 (accessed Sept. 28, 2017).

4 Landon R. Y. Storrs, “The Ugly History Behind Trump's Attacks on Civil Servants,” Politico, Mar. 26, 2017, http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/history-trump-attacks-civil-service-federal-workers-mccarthy-214951 (accessed Sept. 28, 2017); Aron, Cindy, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Civil Service: Middle-Class Workers in Victorian America (New York, 1987)Google Scholar; Rung, Margaret C., Servants of the State: Managing Diversity and Democracy in the Federal Workforce, 1933–1953 (Athens, GA, 2002)Google Scholar; Johnston, David K., The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago, 2004)Google Scholar.

5 Nielsen, Kim E., Un-American Womanhood: Antiradicalism, Antifeminism, and the First Red Scare (Columbus, OH, 2001)Google Scholar; Ryan, Erica J., Red War on the Family: Sex, Gender, and Americanism in the First Red Scare (Philadelphia, 2014)Google Scholar; Cott, Nancy F., Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT, 1987)Google Scholar. On the state as a constraint on the power of male heads of household, see also Gordon, Linda, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence: Boston, 1880–1960 (New York, 1988)Google Scholar; and Fraser, Nancy and Gordon, Linda, “A Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State,” Signs 19, no. 2 (Winter 1994): 309–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Storrs, Second Red Scare.

7 The Hiss case made the State Department an obvious target, but the attacks on State also reflected a clash of rival masculinities. See Dean, Robert, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst, MA, 2001)Google Scholar. See also Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism; Johnson, Lavender Scare.

8 Storrs, Second Red Scare, 86–95.

9 Ibid., 92–5.

10 Ibid., 95–6.

11 This was the former Chief Justice Earl Warren quoting President Eisenhower, but Ike did not invent the image. Warren, Earl, The Memoirs of Earl Warren (New York, 1977), 291Google Scholar. The phrase “forced integration,” which President Nixon later put to good use during anti-busing protests, had a sexual connotation.

12 Gilmore, Glenda, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996)Google Scholar; Feimster, Crystal, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, MA, 2011)Google Scholar; Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching (New York, 1979)Google Scholar; Nielsen, Un-American Womanhood; MacLean, Nancy K., Behind the Mask of Chivalry: Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; McGuire, Danielle L., At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York, 2010)Google Scholar.

13 Worse yet, from the white patriarchal nationalist perspective, Clinton was an international feminist, who had taken her feminism abroad as First Lady (see her 1995 address, “Women's Rights Are Human Rights,” UN 4th World Congress on Women, Beijing) and as Secretary of State. The gender equality programs she promoted at the State Department were among President Trump's first targets.

14 This is from a linguistic analysis of Reddit's The_Donald community, whose 450,000 followers are reportedly Trump's “most rabid online following.” Other favorite epithets are “SJW,” for social justice warrior (usually a feminist or antiracist), “snowflake” (a female or insufficiently masculine type who insists on “political correctness”), and “pearl clutcher” (an expert who warns of potentially disastrous policy outcomes). See Tim Squirrell, “Linguistic Data Analysis of 3 Billion Reddit Comments shows the Alt-Right is Getting Stronger,” Quartz, Aug. 18, 2017, https://qz.com/1056319/what-is-the-alt-right-a-linguistic-data-analysis-of-3-billion-reddit-comments-shows-a-disparate-group-that-is-quickly-uniting/?utm_source=parVOX (accessed Oct. 25, 2017). Scholarship on right-wing women includes Blee, Kathleen M., Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (Berkeley, CA, 1991)Google Scholar; Gordon, Linda, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (New York, 2017)Google Scholar; Brennan, Mary, Wives, Mothers, and the Red Menace: Conservative Women and the Crusade Against Communism (Boulder, CO, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nickerson, Michelle M., Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton, NJ, 2012)Google Scholar. More recent examples include Ann Coulter and Lana Lokteff; see Seyward Darby, “The Rise of the Valkyries,” Harper's, Sept. 2017, 25–33.

15 It appears that voting for Trump corresponded more closely with educational level than with income, and only about one-third of Trump voters earned less than the national median; Nicholas Carnes and Noam Lupu, “It's Time to Bust the Myth: Most Trump Voters Were Not Working Class,” News and Observer (Raleigh, NC), June 10, 2017, (accessed Oct. 25, 2017). Studies of the alt-right suggest that racial and gendered views have been more central to that movement's appeal than economic resentment. See Angela Nagle, “The Lost Boys,” Atlantic, December 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/12/brotherhood-of-losers/544158/ (accessed Jan. 12, 2018). Back in the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was powered less by poor whites than by middling white men who feared downward mobility as well as the loss of control over their daughters; MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry.

16 On distrust of government experts, see Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism; and, for the more recent period, Beverly Gage, “Free Agents,” New York Times Magazine, May 28, 2017, 13. It also seems that reduced investment in public education (a conservative policy objective) may be producing more “low-information voters”; the United States recently ranked twenty-first of twenty-three OECD countries on literacy levels of teenagers; see Emma Luxton, “Which Countries Have the Best Literacy and Numeracy Rates?” World Economic Forum, Feb. 3, 2016, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/02/which-countries-have-the-best-literacy-and-numeracy-rates/ (accessed Sept. 28, 2017).

17 Elizabeth Wickenden, “Social Welfare and the Radical Right,” outline for unidentified presentation, Jan 26, 1962, quoted in Storrs, Second Red Scare, 249.