Politics & Power Quote by Richard Hofstadter

America loves the myth of the brainy Founding Father while quietly distrusting the living, breathing version. Hofstadter’s line is a neat scalpel: it slices through patriotic pageantry to expose a recurring national tension between ideas and power. The irony isn’t just that Jefferson read books. It’s that a republic intellectually engineered has repeatedly treated intellectuals as suspect employees of the state, ornamental advisors, or convenient villains when things go wrong.

The triad “outsider, servant or scapegoat” is doing heavy lifting. Outsider: the intellectual is framed as un-American, too cosmopolitan, too abstract, insufficiently “real.” Servant: when welcomed, it’s on the condition of usefulness, as technocrat or policy mechanic, valued for expertise but not granted authority or trust. Scapegoat: in moments of crisis, the same expertise becomes evidence of betrayal; the egghead becomes a symbol of elitism, moral decadence, or subversion. Hofstadter is mapping a cycle of conditional acceptance.

Context matters. Writing in the postwar period and shadowed by McCarthyism, Hofstadter watched the culture learn to equate education with disloyalty and complexity with weakness. His broader work on anti-intellectualism argues that suspicion of elites, evangelical moral certainty, and mass politics can fuse into a politics that prizes instinct over analysis.

What makes the sentence work is its quiet accusation. It doesn’t rant; it frames a historical pattern as a national self-contradiction. The subtext is hard: a democracy can be founded on Enlightenment premises and still punish those who insist on Enlightenment habits.