A New Consensus?

When people ask me what I do, I sometimes say that I have spent my career looking for America. It is a silly answer, of course. Silly, because America is all around me, inescapably and insistently. But silly, also, because "it" is never to be found. America is an argument: a big, multitudinous, often contradictory amalgam of persons, experiences, aspirations, and dissents.

The age of fracture was as full of argument and contradiction as any other era in American history. The power that drained out of the works of social philosophers could be found dramatically reconcentrated in the movies, as Melani McAlister reminds us. The conservative intellectuals who wrote of their deep distrust of the nation-state sat in the same party as the heralds of a new national greatness, as Michael Kimmage writes. Federal Reserve heads paid honor to Milton Friedman, as Donald Critchlow notes, though after Paul Volcker's experiment with the money-growth rule that Friedman had championed all through the 1970s, none of them actually tried it again. Public opinion polls throughout the period show both striking patterns of convergence and striking patterns of division, the difference often triggered by modest shifts in wording. If consensus history means a historical account that homogenizes its subject or bleaches out the constant, deeply serious push and pull of arguments, interests, and conflicts, I hope Age of Fracture will not be taken as heralding a consensus history revival.

But even intense arguments operate within frames. Certain parts of reality come into focus and rivet attention; others are edged to the side; some fall out of debate altogether. What I have tried to show in Age of Fracture are the ways in which those frames shifted—not for everyone, of course, but for many and particularly for those who thought of themselves as shaping the national debate. It is not an argument about the homogenization of Left and Right, but about the quickness with which assumptions could move across partisan boundaries and the unexpected commonalities among them.

What I have tried to highlight, then, is not the fracturing of society, or a breakdown of consensus, or a growing confusion on either the intellectual Right or Left, but a fracturing of social language and imaginations into smaller and more individualistic units of analysis. There was plenty of nationalism in the air, but a nationalism with no new taxes was hardly what Theodore Roosevelt meant by national greatness. There were structures in the movies, but far less structuralist talk in the social sciences. Libertarian sentiments flourished. Talk of fluid markets and fluid identities filtered into new places. I did not mean Age of Fracture as a lament for the passing of Cold War social thought and culture. Much of that is gone and with good riddance. But neither did Richard Hofstadter mean The American Political Tradition, the most brilliantly written of his "consensus" histories, to be a lament for the past. If stepping back from the noise and furor that is everyday politics and trying to take seriously the shifting frames of argument puts Age of Fracture in the company of 1950s social critics without buying into their assumption of a bleached and homogenized American people, there is, as Bruce Schulman writes, a certain honor in that.

In the intellectual history blogs and again in this exchange, questions of the causal assumptions behind Age of Fracture have been pressed forward. Which foot moved first? Did the economic transformations of late capitalism set loose these new debates? Or did ideas move first? My response is neither and both. Ideas shape the very frames by which reality is perceived; and they are, in turn, constantly pushed and molded by the realities they try to grasp. Without the era's massive shifts in the global economy, the intellectual history of our times would have come out differently. Without the work of ideas—the aspirational labor of persons trapped in identities that now seemed too tight, the contagious spread of models and metaphors, the arguments of politics, and the mobilization of issues and beliefs—it would have come out profoundly differently as well.

I set out in Age of Fracture in...