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CHAPTER 8 Endings In this final chapter I wish to return to a consideration of the narratives themselves , but from a different, more speculative perspective. Do the narratives of justice have any implications for our understanding ofcontemporary American politics, and American political ideology and political beliefs? I believe that the narratives help to illuminate several related and contentious subjects of ongoing debate: the relative salience ofideology in our political system and the degree ofmonism in American political ideology and beliefs; the prospects for constructively addressing the problem of normative incommensurability; and the viability of the Left in American politics. Though these three subjects are indeed closely related, I shall discuss the implications ofthe narratives regarding each of them in tum. The Narratives and American Exceptionalism Reconsidered It seems clear that the collection of the three narratives supplies yet another powerful counterfactual to the notion that the United States is not heavily marked by ideology in its politics; that is, that competing commitments to normative frameworks are not as important as pragmatic approaches to problem solving, and that political differences in the United States are more about means than about ends. Such statements have usually been made with particular reference to the United States' peer nations in Western Europe. These observations, while popular in the 1950s and 1960s, have already been decisively discredited by the Reagan and post-Reagan years. My evidence further supports this rejection. The diversity of views found in the narratives, their level of normative commitment, and the real challenges they level at the status quo from both the Left and the Right drive another nail into the coffin of the "end of ideology" thesis. In fact, as I set forth in chapters 1 and 3, much of the received scholarly wisdom now agrees that the United States is indeed a strongly ideological nation, but that there is also a monistic quality to that ideology. The most distinctive feature of American political beliefs is widespread consensus, which is centered around the traditional liberal tenets of individualism, and 241 242 Narratives of Justice concomitantly, economic opportunity. The classic statement of this view is found in Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America (1955).1 There is thus, according to Samuel Huntington, one "American Creed," and political protest in the United States therefore assumes the form of a periodic radicalization of the center, mobilized against institutions that are perceived to violate that creed (1981).2 The narratives offer a commentary upon this notion as well. Although each narrative, including the critic's narrative, bears distinctively American markings, and although the narrative told by the largest number of senators is indeed a centrist one, as a group the narratives nonetheless contradict this characterization of American political beliefs. There is much that is different among the three narratives. They appear to differ significantly in their views of how persons at different levels of socioeconomic achievement should be treated; their notions ofwhich resources are social and which are individual, and how they in tum should be distributed; their approaches toward solving differently conceived social problems; their conceptions ofthe appropriate role ofthe state; and their ways ofdefining key political and economic terms. They appear to differ significantly in their visions of the good society, the extent ofour mutual obligations to one another, and the place of compassion versus competition in that society. They appear to choose different-even opposing-sets of heroes and villains. I am certainly not the first person to make such a counterclaim; see, for just one example, the large block of literature during the last twenty years that rediscovers the classical republican underpinnings of the founding period, as well as a newer set of literature rediscovering persistent ascriptive hierarchical strains in American political thought (Wildavsky 1990; Smith 1993). Furthermore , I do not claim, as others have, that Hartz is entirely wrong about political ideology in the United States. It is the ambivalents who are the dominant narrative type, after all, and they tell a story that is consistent with the Hartzian view. The American exceptionalism thesis, however, is not just a claim about the center of gravity in American political beliefs; it is also a claim about the range of discussion and the range ofviable alternatives. Bearing that in mind, I argue that there are significant variations within the existing liberal theme that threaten to break it apart; therefore, as J. David Greenstone (1986) also argues, these variations are of primary rather than secondary importance. The very nature and...

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