Post-War Consensus and the End of Ideology

Commenting on the post-WWII consensus thinkers (Hartz, Boorstin, Bell), Dolbeare and Cummings (American Political Thought, 5ed, p. 424-25) state that "[t]here have not been many times in American history when such an authoritatively voiced and widely accepted interpretation of the social experience has been so completely wrong. Today, the question might better be: How could that impression have gained such widespread credibility in the first place?"

Is this really a question? The postwar consensus theory posited the realization of liberal ideals (all of them, more or less--freedom, equality, and so on), an end to fractious ideological conflict, and, more importantly, that problems of scarcity had been largely overcome. What's not to like about that?

That's what counts as a deep thought in my American Political Thought class, at least at the end of the semester.

The main subject today, however, is the New Left, especially The Port Huron Statement, Students for a Democratic Society (1962). The idea that strikes me, today, in this reading, is the importance of Utopia as a concept for SDS. For the SDS, the question was "[W]hat is the perimeter of human possibility in this epoch?" (D & C, p. 447). That is a question that we no longer ask "in this epoch." Not that I sympathize with the SDS. They describe me (in their own terms) when they point to "a defeatism that is labelled realistic" (p. 443). But it is interesting, just for a moment, to consider what non-defeatist (and therefore non-realistic, and therefore utopian) thought about the present epoch would lead to.

That should do for a first post.