Enduring Liberalism, American Political Thought Since the 1960s, by Robert Booth Fowler, Univ. Press of Kansas, 336 pp., $ 35
There's a consensus these days among the historians who ponder America's past and the pundits who ponder America's present. The trouble, claims Robert Booth Fowler in Enduring Liberalism, is that it's the wrong consensus -- for what our intellectual classes agree upon is that there is no agreement in America. Our history and our current situation alike, it now seems universally held, are best interpreted not as examples of Americans' ability to forge a consensus, but as examples of Americans' inability to avoid conflict.
Gone are the days when the prominent historian Daniel Boorstin could claim that "the genius of American politics" rests in the ability of the people to reject ideology. Intellectuals have given up on the ideal of consensus, held in high esteem by such 1950s critics as Lionel Trilling and Louis Hartz. Conflict rather than consensus, Fowler argues, is now routinely declared the great determining factor.
To a certain degree, American historiography has always cycled between interpreting history as consensus and interpreting it as conflict. The early progressive historians Vernon Parrington, Charles Beard, and Frederick Jackson Turner saw conflict emanating from the new industrial order in their own time, and they read that conflict back on the past -- viewing the American Revolution, the Civil War, and western expansion as teeming with class conflicts that replicated their own progressive concerns.
By the 1920s, however, much of this conflict was muted politically, and even during the Great Depression radicals had a difficult time promoting their views of conflict. As the historian Richard Pells argued, the Depression signified a time of surprising consensus on cultural and social questions -- and the way historians in the 1930s interpreted America's past tended to find in history further examples of American consensus. This was the cultural and intellectual hegemony that governed -- with growing shakiness -- American thought from the 1940s through the 1950s. By the 1960s, however, racial issues, the Vietnam War, the conservative challenge, and identity politics ripped asunder the liberal consensus. The American story was reinterpreted as a tale of never-ending conflict.
But, Fowler goes on to suggest, even while American intellectuals have continued since the 1960s to reject the ideal of consensus, the American people have continued to embody that ideal. The general public remains committed to the pragmatic values of the liberal tradition of the 1950s and has adapted, perhaps too well, to the cultural changes of the 1960s. The task Fowler sets himself in Enduring Liberalism is thus to examine the gap between the beliefs of the intellectuals and the beliefs of the populace by focusing on the efforts of public intellectuals to find some new consensus.
Fowler argues that the hunt for this new consensus -- a new formulation that will both capture the interest of the intellectual classes and explain the enduring features of American history -- is being undertaken by such figures as Michael Walzer, Michael Sandel, Robert Bellah, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and William Bennett, to name just a few of those who appear in his pages. Diverse as they may seem, they actually form only three distinct camps or "redirections," Fowler claims: communitarianism, environmentalism, and the attempt to restore a civil society.
In the course of constructing this argument in Enduring Liberalism, Fowler, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, proves himself well read and well able to delineate the major intellectual forces at work in American political thought. In the end, however, his work leaves the reader with no good understanding of why so many intellectuals are confused -- and that's because, in the end, Fowler himself remains confused.
The very idea of there being multiple candidates for consensus seems to imply the inescapable fact of conflict, and though no historical interpretation has ever persuasively eliminated the power of American consensus, no interpretation has ever eliminated the reality of American conflict, either. When Fowler labels himself "part Enlightenment liberal, part Burkean conservative, part Emersonian anarchist, and part religious existentialist," he has claimed a uniquely American mantle for himself. But coherent it's not, and it leaves the reader little hope that he can recommend some path out of our intellectual and cultural impasse.
Fowler's personal beliefs lie with the communitarian "redirection," as he showed in his 1991 The Dance With Community. Unfortunately, as he explores communitarianism in Enduring Liberalism, it is the Hillary Clinton definition of community-through-the-state to which he falls prey. The American promise has been lost, Fowler argues, partly because of the identification of individualism with the free-market tradition that Alexis de Tocqueville saw as a weakness even in the early nineteenth century, and partly because of the liberationist ethos of the 1960s. But though he develops his attack on economic individualism, Fowler is far less critical than he should be of the 1960s liberationist ethos -- which produced the identity politics that have gone a long way towards destroying the shared values for which he longs. It was exactly those identity politics that destroyed the Democrats' New Deal political coalition, which made the pluralist consensus of Boorstin and others possible.
And even that old consensus was never quite as absolute as Enduring Liberalism makes it seem. Fowler understands the major divisions among conservatives well enough, but he claims that conservative thought "provides scant ground for arguing against the existence of a broad ideological consensus" of liberalism in America. Noticeably absent from Fowler's discussion is the strongly anti-modern line of conservatism that was present even back in the 1920s with the "New Humanism" of Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More -- to say nothing of Richard Weaver's seminal Ideas Have Consequences or the Southern Agrarian line of communitarianism based on regionalism, advanced by the likes of Donald Davidson.
What Fowler really means by his conservatism-as-a-minor-form-of-liberalism is libertarianism, which, admittedly, has been a dominant political and economic thread among liberals and conservatives alike since the 1960s. Culturally, however, this libertarianism has had dire social costs -- not the least of which is its weakening of the American consensus Fowler wants to rediscover. Whether the issue is abortion, separation of church and state, gender, or race, the atomization of the individual continues, and the lack of response among political leaders and intellectuals -- their continuing effort to widen the gaps between us, best shown in identity politics, and the cynical triangulation of Bill Clinton -- brings despair to a people who may share the same basic values but who lack the glue to hold together.
How wedded are the American people in fact to the consensus of liberal-individualism? Fowler argues that the mass of people accept most of what the intellectuals reject. But is liberal-individualism, cut off from community restraint, such a positive development? If not, how can individualism be restrained so it is virtuous, as the Founding Fathers desired, and not radically libertine?
Enduring Liberalism leaves us with few answers. But the author's desire to restore a community of "shared spiritual values" is not completely empty, and it may actually be a hopeful sign. Fowler, at least, is one intellectual who sees that spiritual values, not continued promulgation of an uncontainable liberal individualism, offer the best chance of addressing the problems confronting us -- and turning our intellectuals from their current consensus about American conflict to a new consensus about American consensus.
Gregory L. Schneider is an assistant professor of history at Emporia State University and author of Cadres for Conservatism: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of the Contemporary Right.