Divisions

Barton Swaim’s review of two books on the collapse of the postwar American political consensus at the Wall Street Journal prompted a number of thoughts on my part. Rather than quoting the article in full, something I’d need to do to share it with you because it’s behind the WSJ’s paywall, I’ll quote a few select passages. First, the opening:

In general, the right has worried more about the demolition of America’s postwar cultural consensus than the left. Some of the most penetrating books by conservative authors in recent years explain and lament the origins of America’s unraveling common culture— Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart” (2012), James Piereson’s “Shattered Consensus” (2015), Yuval Levin’s “Fractured Republic” (2016). Until very recently, liberals placed far more value on individual expressions of belief and identity than conservatives did. The rise of Donald Trump, though, seems to have given liberals a new appreciation for the virtues of that old commonality.

Neither Sam Rosenfeld, a professor of politics at Colgate, nor Amy Chua, a law professor at Yale, write as partisan or doctrinaire liberals, but both can fairly be said to represent the elite liberal worldview of early-21st-century America.

Is it true that “the right” has been more concerned about the collapse in political and cultural consensus than “the left”? Or have they been taking turns? I seem to recall a number of books and articles from the 1960s and 1970s from liberals on precisely that subject, particularly those written by Pat Moynihan. Has he forgotten What’s the Matter With Kansas? Additionally, the theme is certainly one aspect of books like Stephen Birmingham’s “Our Crowd”.

Then in his discussion of Ms. Chua’s book:

An impressive number of behavioral studies suggests that very young children instinctively trust and sympathize with people who look and act as they do, she notes, and this tendency manifests itself long before they’ve been “conditioned” by society. “Humans aren’t just a little tribal,” Ms. Chua concludes. “We’re very tribal, and it distorts the way we think and feel.”

other loyalties may be formed later in life but the notion those innate predispositions can be completely sublimated is an error.

Finally, the review’s conclusion:

Ms. Chua is certainly correct that our political travails are culturally generated, not the work of partisan manipulators in the political arena. But her insights about tribal loyalties are also, as conservative readers will instantly note, not quite as original as she suggests. Edmund Burke famously held that man learns to love mankind by first loving the “little platoon” he belongs to, and conservatives have long faulted radicals of various kinds for fixating on universal values and spurning local and familial allegiances. Even so, Ms. Chua has written a brisk and readable polemic in defense of common sense and deserves credit for insisting, pace her friends and colleagues, that tribal loyalties are vastly more powerful and complicated than today’s elites profess to believe.

Now my observations. These are more or less disjointed.

What role did the military draft play in producing political and social consensus? From 1942 to the mid 1960s the military draft was practically universal for men. During the 60s the number of student and other deferments rose dramatically. The draft, consequently, was less egalitarian than it had been. The shared experience must have had some results. I think it affected politics, businesses, and society at large.

Since the founding of the Republic our political parties have been what is known in the political science literature as “catch-all parties”. For some time both the Democratic and Republican Parties have been struggling to become what is known as the literature as “programmatic parties”. Complaints about the “Blue Dog” Democrats or RINOs are parts of that struggle. To my eye the Republicans have had more success. The Democrats are impeded in their efforts by the nature of the Democratic coalition. Additionally, there is the problem that programmatic parties are not well-suited to our form of government.

The notion that there are consensus within the political parties is an illusion albeit one held closely by coastal progressives and Southern conservatives. I attribute the belief to some combination of insularity and wishful thinking. So, for example, the Democrats are presently less than 50% progressives, about a third moderates, and about 10% conservatives. The illusion is fostered by a political class among whom there is consensus to a great degree.

I think the historic consensus is somewhat overstated, an idea one arrives at by ignoring racial, religious, class, and geographic differences. We’re more aware of our underlying differences now.