Comment on Whither The First New Nation?

Abstract

The period between 1963 and the present had been profoundly-troubling to the nation and to the centrist portion of its intellectual class; the “dismal story” of those fifteen years caught them off guard. As Michael Rogin has observed, by the early 1950’s it seemed apparent that FDR, the New Deal, and World War II has stabilized American capitalism; certainly, the war had solidified America’s preeminent position on the world political stage; and the Cold War and McCarthyism had successfully throttled the last vestiges of leftist agitation. Aided by the GI Bill and the promise of an ever-expanding national income pie, the nation had settled down to the serious business of building a suburban middle class life, and with it a conservative and consensus-minded national ideology. Such residual traces of political rancor as survived the war were laid to rest (or so it seemed) by the Eisenhower victory of 1952, and there was, at the time, serious scholarly speculation about the possibility (perhaps inevitability) of a permanent Republican majority. The intellectual catchphrases of the era are instructive: it was the “Age of Affluence” and the “End of Ideology.”