Clash Consciousness
SCHNEIDER, GREGORY L.
Clash Consciousness Getting past the cliche that conflict is all that counts in American history. BY GREGORY L. SCHNEIDER There's a consensus these days among the historians who ponder America's...
...Enduring Liberalism leaves us with few answers...
...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...
...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...
...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 coherent it's not, and it leaves the reader little hope that he can recommend some path out of our intellectual and cultural impasse...
...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...
...How wedded are the American people in fact to the consensus of liberal-individualism...
...But is liberal-individualism, cut off from community restraint, such a positive development...
...It was exactly those identity politics that destroyed the Democrats' New Deal political coalition, which made the pluralist consensus of Boorstin and others possible...
...Diverse as they may seem, they actually form only three distinct camps or "redirections," Fowler claims: communitarianism, environ-mentalism, and the attempt to restore a civil society...
...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...
...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...
...To a certain degree, American historiography has always cycled between interpreting history as consensus and interpreting it as conflict...
...The American story was reinterpreted as a tale of never-ending 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...
...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...
...If not, how can individualism be restrained so it is virtuous, as the Founding Fathers desired, and not radically libertine...
...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...
...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...
...Intellectuals have given up on the ideal of consensus, held in high esteem by such 1950s critics as Lionel Trilling and Louis Hartz...
...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...
...The trouble, claims Robert Booth Fowler in En^-uring Liberalism, is that it's the wrong con-sensus—for what our intellectual classes agree upon is that there is no agreement in America...
...Conflict rather than 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...
...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...
...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 argues that the mass of people accept most of what the intellectuals reject...
...Unfortunately, as he explores communitarianism in Enduring Liberalism, it is the Hillary Clinton definition of community-through-the-state to which he falls prey...
...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...
...Fowler's personal beliefs lie with the communitarian "redirection," as he showed in his 1991 The Dance With Community...
...By the 1960s, however, racial issues, the Vietnam War, the conservative challenge, and identity politics ripped asunder the liberal consensus...
...And even that old consensus was never quite as absolute as Enduring Liberalism makes it seem...
...This was the cultural and intellectual hegemony that governed—with growing shakiness— American thought from the 1940s through the 1950s...
...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...
...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...
...Culturally, however, this liber-tarianism has had dire social costs— not the least of which is its weakening of the American consensus Fowler wants to rediscover...
...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...
...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...
...BY GREGORY L. SCHNEIDER There's a consensus these days among the historians who ponder America's past and the pundits who ponder America's present...
...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...
...Fowler argues, is now routinely declared the great determining factor...
...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...
...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...
Vol. 5 • February 2000 • No. 21
