We often fail to recognize how deeply the traumas of the early twentieth century shaped American political culture. During the Great Depression, capitalism seemed to have failed. The system sputtered and broke down. After his election in 1932, Franklin Roosevelt embarked on measures to take charge of the economy. When global war came in the 1940s, government control and coordination were supercharged. An upsurge in solidarity ran in parallel with the tight integration of economic life. The shared suffering of the years of economic depression had bonded people together, and that sense of unity was intensified by the war, which required the total mobilization of society.
The experiences of depression and war marked the generations that endured them. As American culture entered the 1950s, it was characterized by an intense desire for ongoing consolidation, as if to indemnify society against the perils it had so recently experienced. As a consequence, in the fifties, the United States enjoyed what might be called peak solidarity. It was a time of historically low income inequality, driven in part by extremely high tax rates for the wealthy. It was also a time of unprecedented social unity. The encompassing term “Judeo-Christian” gained currency, and an ecumenical middle-class consensus prevailed. Social institutions were strong. Churches of all sorts experienced an increase in attendance and influence. Rotary Clubs and other mediating associations were powerful. Marriage anchored domestic life.
Twentieth-century history is best understood in terms of movements and counter-movements. The society-wide reaction to economic disintegration and the existential threat of war emphasized consolidation, economic and cultural. But as this tide of solidification and homogeneity surged forward, an opposite current was called into existence, one opposed to the putatively clotted, immobile, and conformist realities of a society characterized by a high degree of solidarity.
In the popular imagination, postwar dissent was led by radicals and progressives on the left. That’s a half-truth, at best. Rebellion against the postwar settlement had a rightwing manifestation. William F. Buckley Jr. was influenced by Alfred Jay Nock, a self-declared “philosophical anarchist” and critic of the spiritual mediocrity of mass democracy. In 1960, Buckley facilitated the founding of Young Americans for Freedom, a rightwing student organization designed to challenge the postwar status quo. In the same year, Students for a Democratic Society was established, a leftwing student organization dedicated to the same cause, albeit with a different political tendency.
Our historical accounts of this period of American history are fundamentally flawed, not only because they ignore the rightwing radicalism of the postwar decades, but also because they fix on the clash of Buckley’s emerging rightwing consensus, with its free-market principles, against the rising student radicalism, which protested against the Vietnam War, raged against middle-class conformity, and urged free-love principles. The standard histories fail to recognize the deeper impulse shared by both movements: deconsolidation.
The civil rights movement was a movement of deconsolidation. It aimed to break down the strong social consensus in favor of segregation, which was legally enforced in the South and socially enforced in the North. Second-wave feminism sought to undermine the social consensus that required the segregation of men and women into distinct roles. It is important to recognize that the Goldwater takeover of the Republican Party in 1964 had the same character. It was driven by rightwing activists who wanted to smash the political consensus in favor of the New Deal. Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was likewise motivated by the desire for deconsolidation. His support of “states’ rights” (or, to use the less loaded term, “federalism”) grew out of his concerns about the concentration of power in the federal government during the FDR era.
These movements, different in substance but similar in method, aimed to break down concentrations of power and rigid controls. The goal of each was to foster greater fluidity and freedom. The rightwing version of deconsolidation emphasized the harmful effects of economic control. Central planning and regulation not only lead to economic stagnation; they also, and more importantly, stunt human freedom. Conservative authors often spoke of the dangers of the “monster state,” which extends its tendrils of control. The leftwing version fixed on the dehumanizing consequences of social control. Segregation subordinated blacks. Traditional sex roles did the same to women. Middle-class morality encouraged soul-crushing conformity, and it stood in the way of sexual freedom.
There were parallel movements in Christianity. As Matthew Rose has detailed in our pages (“Death of God Fifty Years On,” August/September 2015), in the early 1960s, radical theologians were depicting the disintegration of the metaphysical conception of God as the triumph of the spirit of Christianity. In the 1970s, Catholic radicals sought to make the Church less authoritative, less “rigid,” less “judgmental”—another project of boundary blurring and deconsolidation, which has parallels in “seeker-sensitive” evangelicalism.
This is not the place for a full summation of American politics and culture after 1950. But I hope the main pattern is evident. Yes, there was resistance to the deconsolidating project over the decades. George Wallace did not run just on a racial platform, although that was certainly a central element of his insurgent campaign in 1964. He won 34 percent of the Democratic primary vote in Wisconsin that year because he tapped into a working-class suspicion that the deconsolidation of the old consensus—not only on matters of race—was a raw deal for them.
Within a decade, the Republican Party would recognize the advantages to be gained by playing upon those suspicions as it recast itself as America’s socially conservative party, promising to protect its base against too-rapid cultural deconsolidation, while promoting a more dynamic, more mobile, and more open economy. A similar pattern characterized the Democratic Party, although in mirror image. The Democratic Party promised to defend the economic solidarity that flourished during the New Deal era, while recasting itself as the party of the cultural vanguard, seeking ever-greater social deconsolidation, which is to say more cultural openness, inclusion, and diversity.
By the 1990s, the imperative of deconsolidation became dominant in both parties. The American right and left merged. In July 1990, the U.S. Senate passed the Americans with Disabilities Act on a 91–6 vote. Republican president George H. W. Bush signed the bill with enthusiasm. That legislation was seen as a natural extension of the civil rights revolution, the next step in breaking down old prejudices and opening up American society. Three years later, Missouri congressman and Democratic majority leader Richard Gephardt opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement. But his resistance to a crucial element in the deconsolidation of the American economy was doomed. One hundred of his fellow Democrats in the House voted for the bill. Democratic president Bill Clinton signed it and declared it a victory for America’s long-term interests.
In subsequent years, both parties found ways to avoid addressing the problem of illegal immigration. Leaders of both parties repeated the slogan, “Diversity is our strength.” Both parties clamored to accommodate the wishes of Silicon Valley. Debates over taxation and economic regulation took place within a narrow band. In a word, by 2010, Republican elites had largely reconciled themselves to the agenda of the Human Rights Campaign, while Democrats had grudgingly accepted the background assumptions of the Club for Growth. Deconsolidation was king.
I do not wish to gainsay the imperative of deconsolidation. It has its time and place. Had I been a black man in 1960, I would have wished for a great deal of that strong medicine. Perhaps the same was true for many women. And in the 1970s, it was certainly true that the New Deal economy was sputtering and needed to be deregulated and deconsolidated. A more open society and a freer economy can be good things. But Scripture reminds us that for everything there is a season. There is a time to sow and a time to reap. There’s a time to deconsolidate and a time to reconsolidate.
The time to reconsolidate has come. Over the last decade, economists, journalists, and politicians have pivoted away from singing the praises of the free flow of labor, goods, and capital to bemoaning its consequences. In 2013, MIT economist David Autor published a paper documenting the devastating effects of the “China shock.” Numerous papers have been written about the steep rise in income inequality. More recently, political leaders of both parties have focused on the ways in which America’s deindustrialization harms the middle class and compromises national security.
The elite response has been to take steps to reconsolidate the American economy. In his first term, Donald Trump imposed tariffs on China. They were sustained by the Biden administration, which added export controls of technology deemed important for national security. In 2023, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, gave a speech at the Brookings Institution that itemized the dangers posed by economic globalization and outlined the pressing need for economic solidarity. Republican senators Marco Rubio (now secretary of state) and Josh Hawley have sounded similar notes in recent years.
A consensus is building: The American economy is too open, too fluid, too deconsolidated. The imperatives, now, are reindustrialization, repatriation of core economic functions, and the restoration of middle-class prosperity. In a word, reconsolidation.
Our polarized politics masks this consensus. The Trump administration recently sought to establish a comprehensive tariff regime, targeting China in particular. Think what you wish about the cogency of that effort, it has clearly established the Republican Party as the vehicle for economic reconsolidation. Because the Democratic Party is engaged in an all-out effort to shore up its status as the country’s establishment party, its leaders have refused to cooperate in this project, hoping that the Trump administration will fail catastrophically. This political turbulence will abate. Over the long term, I expect bipartisan cooperation to prevail as the underlying consensus in favor of economic reconsolidation asserts itself. Put simply, we’re almost certain to deglobalize and restructure the American economy to reunite the interests of labor and capital, elites and working stiffs.
I’m less sanguine about bipartisan cooperation in matters of culture and society. For a long time, “diversity” has been a praise word. It taps into the old imperative of deconsolidation, signaling what many still believe is the welcome prospect of breaking down an allegedly overconsolidated, homogeneous, complacent, and perhaps even racist mainstream consensus. The American left remains deeply committed to this project of cultural deconsolidation. That commitment is a major source of today’s polarized political environment.
But we are not living in the 1950s. Voters are increasingly hostile to ongoing deconsolidation. In 2012, Charles Murray published Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. Murray documents the almost complete collapse of the old mainstream consensus among those at the bottom of American society.
And not just at the bottom. Today, outside of wealthy enclaves, the stabilizing institution of marriage is in decline. Clubs, associations, and other mediating institutions have decayed or disappeared. Religion plays a more remote role than it once did. To a striking degree, the foundations of middle-class life, derided by critics for decades as engines of “exclusion” and enemies of individual freedom, have eroded to the point of disappearing. Today, if you are born to a woman with a high school diploma, odds are strong that you will grow up without knowing a father at home—or a Father in heaven.
Some years ago, in these pages I argued that we are living in an era characterized by a crisis of solidarity (“Crisis of Solidarity,” November 2015). I’ve made this point several times in different terms. The causes are many—economic, cultural, technological—and we can debate them. But the reality is evident. The male-female dance is broken. Even the children of the rich feel economically vulnerable, when they’re not overwhelmed by mental health problems. Every major institution in our society is mistrusted—media, universities, government, even the churches. The public is disgruntled and angry at its leaders, who often respond in kind (“takers,” “deplorables”).
Just as economic deconsolidation has reached a dead end, even more so has its cultural twin. Another word for deconsolidation is disintegration. The most powerful force in the politics of the contemporary West, including the United States, is the fear of living in a disintegrated society. This fear has become a concrete political issue in the domains of immigration and patriotism.
You do not need a PhD in political science to recognize that rising hostility toward mass migration and calls for the restoration of strong borders amount to a demand for reconsolidation. The same holds when voters thrill to broad affirmations of national greatness and other patriotic themes. Or, for that matter, when they are reassured by the affirmation that men are men and women are women. Here as well, the reestablishment of “borders” works against disintegration—meaning, in this case, the dissolution of any coherent sense of what it means to be human.
At present, the Democratic Party seems unable to formulate a version of cultural and national reconsolidation. On the contrary, it denounces such measures as “fascist.” The Democrats still sing from the hymnal of the church of multiculturalism. For this reason, I predict that the American left is doomed to become a minority faction for the foreseeable future. The fear of disintegration is powerful and growing. The geopolitical threats facing America will intensify that fear, making the party of cultural reconsolidation increasingly attractive to voters, and thus more electorally dominant.
We are living in a time of fundamental reorientation. Major elements of our political culture are turning against the postwar imperative of deconsolidation. The pathways to this much-needed reconsolidation—economic and cultural, indeed, moral and spiritual—are many. Some methods are wise; others are foolish. Some are noble; others are debasing. Some are effective; others do more harm than good. Our job will be to nurture what is wise, champion what is noble, and promote what is effective.
