Content area
Full Text
In 1967, amidst the political turmoil of the Vietnam War, the civil rights struggle, the New Left and the mobilization of movement conservatism, Richard Hofstadter wrote a new preface to accompany the 20th anniversary edition of his 1948 book, The American Political Tradition and The Men Who Made It. Somewhat sheepishly, Hofstadter reflected on the enterprise that had become known as Consensus History, an approach that current events and a decade of historical scholarship had seemed to undermine. Looking back at his younger self, Hofstadter explained that he had attempted to look at American politics from "outside the tradition itself." From that "external angle of vision the differences that seem very sharp and decisive to those who dwelt altogether within it had begun to lose their distinctness, and that men on different sides of a number of questions appeared as having more in common, in the end, than originally imagined" (p. xxvii). Put another way, the intense partisan rivalries and passionate ideological allegiances, the differences that seemed to separate Democrats from Republicans, liberals from conservatives, South from North, even whites and non-whites, masked an essential consensus—a set of shared assumptions, norms and structures that narrowed the range of policy outcomes and reinforced a particular set of power relations.
Although few contemporary scholars embrace the label, something like consensus history has made a comeback: "Neo-Consensus History" dominates the historiography of the United States since the late 1960s. Deploying a variety of methodologies and focusing on a wide range of historical actors, scholars of recent American history have attempted to "move beyond" red and blue, left and right, North and South, even in some cases black and white. In this historiography, an enterprise that spans intellectual history, political history, the history of political economy, urban history, and the history of race relations, the partisan competition and political conflict that attracts so much attention from pundits and defines conventional narratives of contemporary U.S. society is mostly noise. The editors of an anthology of new work in American political history assert that dominant paradigms, ideas such as the New Deal order, the conservative ascendancy, and red-blue polarization, "obscure deeper forms of consensus around global capitalism, white privilege, patriarchy, and notions of American exceptionalism. . ."1
Of...