I had the great good fortune to grow up in an era of consensus. The vast majority of Americans--including those who lacked equal rights, or faced discrimination in the workplace--believed that on the whole the United States was moving in the right direction and that most citizens had similar concerns. Faced with a huge new generation (my own) the country was spending a lot of money investing in the future, vastly expanding the educational system. It was also investing in infrastructure (interstate highways) and national enterprises such as national defense and the space program. Entertainment was largely monochrome, literally and metaphorically. Crime was low and families were stable. My own life was somewhat chaotic because of frequent moves--I went to 7 different schools, K-12--but the wider world was headed in the right direction, and our political system was functioning very effectively. Both parties had genuine liberal and conservative wings and all the major legislative steps forward of that era drew on bipartisan majorities.
Developments in the late 1960s changed all that. First, the Vietnam war destroyed much of my generation's confidence in the federal government, and by extension, in authority of almost all kinds. Vietnam and Watergate gave the press a new mission: not simply to report what political authorities were saying and doing, but to assume that they were lying and doing evil, and that the press's main function was to expose them. The New Deal order had easily survived the Goldwater challenge in 1964, but it was helpless before Reagan 16 years later and has never recovered. The end of the military draft in 1973 severed a key link between the government and the citizenry.
By the 1990s, two different, parallel attacks on authority were underway. Led by Boomer Newt Gingrich, the Republican Party was waging all-out war on the powers of the federal government on behalf of corporations and wealthy taxpayers. Inside our universities, coalitions of feminists and nonwhite academics were attacking intellectual authority as simply a tool of white male dominance. Over the last thirty years that idea has spread to millions of educated Americans who share it without necessarily realizing where it came from. Male and female Americans, white and black Americans, often live in different mental universes. We cannot agree on basic sociological facts or even on critical scientific facts about the human body and human diseases.
I decided to write this post when I realized that, paradoxically, a relatively high degree of consensus seems to encourage genuine intellectual inquiry. This is especially true in history. When Americans genuinely agree that the present is going well, they are open to different interpretations of the past. When history has become a weapon in a battle to reshape the present, however, people lose interest in what actually happen. Again and again, to cite one example, we hear that in Tulsa in 1921, "as many as 300" black people were killed in a massacre. I looked into this in detail two years ago and found that there is definite evidence of only 39 deaths--13 of them white--and very inconclusive evidence that the total might be as many as twice that. Within the academy, the distrust against the liberal order of the mid-20th century--something that first burst forth in the late 1960s--has gone so far that I just heard a young historian argue that any hope of real progress died in 1914 when the German Social Democrats failed to stop the First World War. The same historian, Daniel Bessner, also argued that the US is supporting Ukraine mainly to benefit the military-industrial complex, and dismissed the idea that Putin would pose a further danger if Russia won. I would not mention him if I didn't think that he spoke for many of today's academics.
Over the last thirty years or so many academics have argued, in effect, that there's no harm in letting everyone think what they want to think. Postmodernist theory essentially argues that that is all anyone ever does, anyway. I am convinced that in a complex modern society, agreement on basic intellectual principles is a necessity, not a luxury, in order for society to agree on solutions to very real problems. It's a small step from that to suggest that it's the job of the educational system to teach those principles. Instead it is now teaching everyone to value themselves--especially the most unique parts of themselves, not the parts we all have in common.
Our educational establishment, our foreign policy establishment, our corporate establishment and our entertainment industry, it seems to me, now operate according to their own particular views and outlook, and draw society in very different directions. That also makes it impossible, really, for the United States to represent a clear set of values to the rest of the world, as it did for its first two centuries. I cannot rule out the possibility that we might be heading for a collapse of political authority comparable to the end of the Roman empire.
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Bob Dylan began performing the song "With God on Our Side" in 1963. Dylan, of course, wrote scores of songs that reflected the social and cultural ferment of the 1960s as it evolved, but the timing of and sentiments expressed within that song make it among his more interesting compositions in that respect. It's basically one long assailing of American history as a succession of wars and conquests, all cynically waged in the name of God's will / manifest destiny.
So many of the "culture wars" battle lines that have existed in America since the Sixties have echoes in "With God on Our Side": secularists versus the religious; conscientious objection vs patriotism; war is by definition immoral versus war is sometimes necessary; America as inherently hypocritical versus America as inherently good. Bottom line: one song that was written even before the March on Washington and the JFK assassination, showed the seeds of heated arguments and confrontations to come.
I'm surprised that as a proponent of the Strauss-Howe theory, you've lamented the move away from the "post-war consensus" as a great loss recently. The way I see it, that "consensus" was never as diffuse, robust, or non-partisan as it's typically presented. The reason it seems like a "consensus" in retrospect, is because Highs by their inherent nature have the most stable domestic political environments of any of the four turnings. But it's still stability in a relative sense, and that condition in the last High was enhanced by the fact that the generation which assumed leadership of the country had the fewest values gaps within it (as is customarily the case with Hero generations). Moreover, the culture and values gaps that became chasms in later decades existed in the post-war period too, so the Sixties should be in understood not in terms of why "the consensus ended", but in terms of how and why the cultural and values gaps that already existed became much worse.
The real issue I see with assuming consensus as a kind of default state that existed in the past, is that it makes the "fall of Rome" fears going on today (which I share) seem totally disconnected from the America of prior to 1964 or 65. "With God on Our Side" was a canary in the coal mine for the louder, much more heated disagreements that came later. But the disagreements were always there.
As an aside, I'm a huge Dylan fan, but that's one of my least favorite songs of his. A sophomore in high school could have written it.
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