My post about contradictions has elicited some interesting email. Perhaps I’ll columnize on it later. But there was one thing I wrote in haste that an old friend of mine who’s a real-live working historian called me on. He’s right. The New Deal didn’t break the consensus about a pluralistic society. It was simply the apotheosis of a trend which started with the Progressives. The salient bit from his email:

The Progressive Era was all about rationalizing society. This definitely
predates 1920 and is more than just a caveat. Just finished reading Walter
Lippmann’s Drift and Mastery (1914) with my class this week. Lippmann,
moving away from socialism, is all about rationalizing society along
scientific models. If you haven’t read it, you need to for your book (as if
you don’t have enough reading). It’s a model for the Big Business-Big
Labor-Big Government axis that develops beginning in the New Deal and
continues through the 1960s.
World War I was a model for the rationalizing and nationalizing of the New
Deal and WWII, especially with the War Industries Board.

As for Andrew’s point about rationality being in the eye of the beholder, I take his point. However, I’d argue that most of the really famous mass murders of the 20th century were not the result of faith in transcendent moral precepts, properly understood. Rather they were the result of men trying to replace transcendence with their own will to power. This was the point of Julien Benda’s Treason of the Intellectuals where he rightly decried the the new fashion among intellectuals to deify the particular (nation, race, class) while denouncing the divine. For the first time the intellectual class — which he defined broadly — had taken sides against Socrates. Hitler, Stalin and Mao did not murder for transcendent moral precepts, they murdered because they believed such concepts no longer applied.