Hofstadter

"It was, indeed, Hofstadter’s rejection of sentimentality that made him, and other 50’s intellectuals like him, outsiders in their own political community. If 50’s liberalism prided itself on its sense of irony, theirs was an irony within an irony, too fragile by far to contend with the newly radicalized forces that were pushing liberalism leftward and for whom both irony and moderation constituted forms of betrayal".