AMERICAN CONTRADICTION

Thoughtful study of the push and pull from right to left and back again in the past 75 years.

Ronald Reagan liked the Puritan notion of America being a shining city on a hill. But, writes Princeton sociologist and Pulitzer Prize–winner Starr, more correctly, “the American republic has been like a city built on a geological fault, shaken often by tremors and periodically by earthquakes.” In this lucid account, the author opens in the era when, united by the Cold War, Republicans and Democrats were often indistinguishable, with conservatives, moderates, and liberals in both parties and, in that “midcentury normal,” sharing a commitment to a fair social contract, prosperity, education, science, and other public goods. (It helped, as Starr notes, that “the top marginal rate during the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s was 91 ­percent, inconceivable ­today.”) It’s worth considering, in that regard, that Richard Nixon proposed “a national guaranteed income,” a sharp break from conservative orthodoxy. That common front began to wobble under Reagan, cracked with Newt Gingrich, and is shattered today, likely irreparably. Starr points out that while rural white resentment has proved a powerful fuel for Trumpism, it was the loss of manufacturing jobs in cities and the subsequent decline of many urban areas that fed both the destructive impoverishment of minority communities and the sharp rise in incarceration rates. It’s ironic that corporations were the original champions of diversity programs, as the author notes, when in the 1980s “business leaders became convinced that they needed to prepare for a diverse workforce, diverse consumers, and diverse global markets.” It’s also ironic that both right and left hold that “Amer­i­ca broke its promises to working people,” though nothing much is being done about that in a time dominated by “political interests in keeping America’s social divisions at a high boil.”

A useful key to understanding how American politics and the American polity have become so intractably polarized.