Richard Hofstadter og teorien om status-politik

The Age of Reform 1955 , which introduced his idea of "status politics" --
the notion that people act less from pure economic self-interest than from
a desire to preserve their social standing -- and controversially portrayed
the late-nineteenth-century Populists as moved by fears of modernity, nostalgia
for an agrarian past, and no small amount of bigotry.

Revisionists have since poked fatal holes in this portrait (for example, Hofstadter overstated the Populists' nativism and gave short shrift to their legitimate and well-developed critique of Gilded Age capitalism), yet the book still serves for historians of populism (and progressivism) as the point of departure for their work.

citat fra http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98nov/hofstadt.htm