After 1945, Hofstadter philosophically broke with Charles Beard and moved to the right in his leadership of the "consensus historians". In 1946, he joined the Columbia University faculty; in 1959, he became the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History.
In 1948, he published
The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, incisive interpretive studies of twelve major American political leaders from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Besides critical success, the book sold nearly a million copies at university campuses, where it was used as a history textbook; critics found it "skeptical, fresh, revisionary, occasionally ironical, without being harsh or merely destructive". Although, as Bruce Kuklik notes, it still "owed much to Hofstadter's leftist background", it was ironic and paradoxical in dealing with political leaders from the Revolution to the present. Each chapter title illustrated a paradox: Thomas Jefferson is "The Aristocrat as Democrat"; John C. Calhoun is the "Marx of the Master Class"; and Franklin Roosevelt is "The Patrician as Opportunist".
As a consensus historian, Hofstadter rejected Beard's interpretation of history as a succession of socio-economic group conflicts. He thought that all historical periods could be understood as an implicit consensus, shared by antagonists, explaining that the generation of Beard and Vernon Louis Parrington had:
...put such an excessive emphasis on conflict, that an antidote was needed.... It seems to me to be clear that a political society cannot hang together, at all, unless there is some kind of consensus running through it, and yet that no society has such a total consensus as to be devoid of significant conflict. It is all a matter of proportion and emphasis, which is terribly important in history. Of course, obviously, we have had one total failure of consensus, which led to the Civil War. One could use that as the extreme case in which consensus breaks down.
Later works
As an historian, Hofstadter’s ground-breaking work came in using social psychology concepts to explain political history. He explored subconscious motives such as social status anxiety, anti-intellectualism, irrational fear, and paranoia...as they propel political discourse and action in politics.
The rural ethos
The Age of Reform (1955) analyzes the yeoman ideal in America’s sentimental attachment to agrarianism and the moral superiority of the farm over the city. Hofstadter...himself very much a big-city person...noted the agrarian ethos was "a kind of homage that Americans have paid to the fancied innocence of their origins, however, to call it a myth does not imply falsity, because it effectively embodies the rural values of the American people, profoundly influencing their perception of the correct values, hence their political behavior." In this matter, the stress is upon the importance of Jefferson's writings, and of his followers, in the development of agrarianism in the US, as establishing the agrarian myth, and its importance, in American life and politics...despite the rural and urban industrialization that rendered the myth moot.
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) and
The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965) describe the provincialism in American society, warning it contains much anti-intellectual fear of the cosmopolitan city, presented as wicked by the xenophobic and anti-Semitic Populists of the 1890s. They trace the direct political and ideological lineage between the Populists and anti-communist Senator Joseph McCarthy and McCarthyism, the political paranoia manifest in his contemporary time. His dissertation director Merle Curti noted about Hofstadter that: "His position is as biased, by his urban background . . . as the work of older historians was biased by their rural background and traditional agrarian sympathies".
Irrational fear
The Idea of a Party System (1969) describes the origins of the First Party System as reflecting fears that the other political party threatened to destroy the republic.
The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (1968) systematically analyzes and criticizes the intellectual foundations and historical validity of Charles Beard's historiography; the book "signalled a growing support for neoconservatism". In the event, Turner said that, as an historian, Richard Hofstadter no longer was a useful guide, because his ideas were too isolationist, and too often had "a pound of falsehood for every few ounces of truth".