If We Can Keep It - Chapters 3 and 4

Chapter three discusses the Age of Consensus which according to Tomasky's timeline lasted from 1933 - 1980. That's not to say everyone always agreed throughout the decades, but intentional social factors contributed to a long period of relative American unity. Obviously that unity had major caveats, the most obvious of which is racial discrimination. But by broad strokes, America came together and the result was often positive (though not perfect) change.

The New Deal was a divisive approach to healing the Great Depression, and indeed lines were being drawn by class in terms of who to blame for the Depression. But because it was a time of divisive repair, many social leaders started to promote "the American Way" to combat the division. Political, religious, labor, and civic leaders were seeing dictators rise to power in Europe and realized by example that revolution was possible. The American Way was a concept that arose in an attempt to usher in change in an orderly manner. It meant different things depending on who used it, but overall it was a national campaign for patriotism which often also inspired nationalism. In 1939 the Committee for National Morale was established by anthropologists, sociologists, and journalists to use social science to intentionally curate unity in the US. It was pretty effective in creating a national narrative for Americans to stick together on. Meanwhile, the political divisions in Congress weren't along party lines. Conservative Democrats didn't like the New Deal, while liberal Republicans did (though the latter was less common than the former).

When America joined WWII, New Deal divisions remained but American Way propaganda continued, and most Americans saw it as coming together to win the war. Part of it was a natural response to seeing how fascism abroad could endanger democratic values and ways of life. But Black Americans, even while facing discrimination and hatred at home, were about as supportive of the war as their white counterparts. It wasn't all about defeating fascism; much of it was the result of the long-established and continuing American Way campaign. The war required great sacrifice including rationing of food and other goods as well as drastic increases in taxes. The American Way campaign ensured these sacrifices were taken gladly, or at least without too much complaint. It centered American life around the defeat of a common enemy in fascism. Nearly everyone was all-in, even American Communists. Tomasky contends that we'll never again see this level of unity in the US, but it seems to me that if we want to save our democracy, we're going to need to figure out a way to come close.

Efforts to keep America unified stretched into the Cold War, with the common enemy changing from fascism to communism. There were clear limits to the unity; Jim Crow was still raging in the South and in the North Black people saw more rights than in the South but still faced massive discrimination. It holds its place in the Age of Consensus not because America wasn't divided, but because we didn't much discuss division. Things that might undermine national unity were swept under the rug. Conformity was the norm. It was the picket fence era with manicured lawns and women doing chores in high heels. For being such a conservative time, it did have very liberal commitments to unions and the social responsibilities of corporations. People running corporations understood that unions and laborer rights were a part of the American Way consensus and didn't push back much.

Polarization narrowed during and after WWII because cross-party coalitions were the norm. More men from poor or working-class backgrounds were able to go to college and thus class diversity in Congress expanded. Many of the politicians had been brothers in arms, which made it easier to see those on the other side as friends rather than enemies. The parties were still diverse, including conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans, and this combined with class diversity and mutual respect among military-men, allowed for broad coalition building.

The Age of Consensus wasn't a time when politicians didn't have anything to fight about, but a time when it was possible to work through those fights for the common good. It wasn't perfect, no utopia of equity arose, but it was a time of progress despite moral and political disagreements.

Chapter four goes over how the Age of Consensus fell apart on race, gender, immigration, and wages and then how Republicans managed to get a leg up with conservative infrastructure. The parties began to split, growing further and further apart, and inter-party coalitions became impossible. 

Part of why the Civil Rights Act, prohibition of discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, was able to pass was because it wasn't a partisan issue at the time. Conservative Democrats opposed it while liberal Republicans supported it. It did, however, inspire a shift in the parties afterwards. Democrats became the pro civil-rights party and Republicans became the anti civil-rights party. It wasn't immediate; moderate Republicans won some governorships in the following years, but when Nixon ran for president in 1968 on the Southern Strategy to appeal to Southern white views on race, the party followed suit. Democrats, meanwhile, made an effort to include more minorities and women in the party but some Democrats felt others were moving too quickly and stalled the progression. 

In 1963 women writers began to publish works about women aspiring to more than the life of a housewife, and in '64 the Supreme Court decided that married couples could use birth control which led to widespread use of the pill, allowing women to have sex without biological repercussions. Tomasky asserts, and I agree, that this doesn't get the attention it deserves in terms of feminist history. The Equal Rights Amendment, which would have made discrimination based on sex unconstitutional, passed Congress in 1972 but failed to get enough states to ratify it, falling just 3 states short at the time of the extended deadline in 1982. Phyllis Schlafly, a staunch conservative, set across the country with a small group of supporters to convince states to reject or reverse ratification. To this day, it is not an approved constitutional amendment. This along with abortion rights mobilized the religious right into politics (after it had already been mobilized by Brown v Board of Education) and deepened the divide between Democratic support of feminism and Republican opposition to it. 

The partisan divide on immigration was a slow-burn. Immigration had fluctuated in the United States throughout the 20th century. We encouraged immigration in some eras and restricted it in others, but it was not a partisan issue. In the 1980's Congress passed a law that provided all immigrants who entered the country illegally before 1982 legal status if they paid a fine and back taxes. The law also included an increase to sanctions for employers of undocumented workers, but to this day those sanctions are poorly enforced. Liberals didn't like the sanctions, and conservatives didn't like the amnesty. Senate Republicans supported the bill while House Republicans opposed it. It was the dawn of the culture war in the 1990's that really drew a line in the sand between the parties on immigration. 

In 1973 wages began to stagnate while productivity continued to rise and union membership began to decline around the same time. Steel mills, a prior beacon of US production, began to close or move to non-union states (a precursor to moving abroad). Political divides continued to widen as Democrats slowly took the position of the pro-labor party and Republicans took up the conservative right-to-work mantle (I've always hated that name; it's deceptive. Right to work means anti-union.)

The chapter ends by discussing the growth of conservative political infrastructure, consisting of nonprofit groups such as think-tanks. In the 1970's we saw a boom in right-wing political media and organized non-profits. It wasn't until the early 2000's when Democrats realized they were being outspent by conservative "idea groups" six to one. It's fascinating to think of this in contrast to the cries in right-wing media today about the liberal media. Conservatives essentially had a 30-year head start where they built legal and political apparatuses and propaganda machines to lobby and fight for conservative ideals, but when liberals realize they're behind and start working in similar fashion, suddenly it's woefully unfair. 

So now we've described the Age of Consensus and its downfall. Beginning in the 1980's up to today, we're seeing what Tomasky has labeled The Age of Fracture. Our two political parties no longer enjoy  broad coalition-building power. Instead of robust ideological diversity in the parties, we have controlling ideologies driving the parties while the ideological outliers sit along for the ride, unable to command much influence. Nearly all of the issues today are partisan and split cleanly down the middle, which is what makes this era so different from any era of polarization in our nation's history.