THE RIGHT BOOKS

Partly because of its indelibly progressive history and partly because it has simply not been around long enough to experience many of history’s broadest vicissitudes, the United States is unused to thinking of its salient characteristics as being reversible. The doctrine of democratic positivism has traditionally known no middle ground: History is either the glorious ascension toward the best of all possible worlds or the mindless slide back into the Age of Darkness. Only very, very recently has America been forced to grapple with a central and inescapable paradox: namely, the incompatibility between its materialistic aspirations and the spurious intellectual superstructure that has for generations supported them.

Against the arguments of the current crop of conservatives and neoconservatives, the defenders of the (formerly) mainstream tradition—what Richard Hofstadter in a much-outdated but still academically respected book called “the American political tradition”—have resorted to two basic responses: the first being simply to yell “ Wrong!” at the top of their lungs, the second to dismiss the entire controversy by remarking, with uncharacteristic docility, that, after all, we cannot turn back the clock; that history is irreversible; and so forth. For a time indeed it seemed that their mystical determinism was in fact unanswerable—politically, if not intellectually. For the past six or seven years, however, a steady stream of books and articles (their theses strangely endorsed by voting returns) have challenged not just decades of faulty assumptions but the frequently dishonest, and nearly always ingenuous, fatalism that served for so long to preserve them from serious attack.

CW

About the Author

Chilton Williamson Jr.

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Partly because of its indelibly progressive history and partly because it has simply not been around long enough to experience many of history’s broadest vicissitudes, the United States is unused to thinking of its salient characteristics as being reversible. The doctrine of democratic positivism has traditionally known no middle ground: History is either the glorious ascension toward the best of all possible worlds or the mindless slide back into the Age of Darkness. Only very, very recently has America been forced to grapple with a central and inescapable paradox: namely, the incompatibility between its materialistic aspirations and the spurious intellectual superstructure that has for generations supported them.

Against the arguments of the current crop of conservatives and neoconservatives, the defenders of the (formerly) mainstream tradition—what Richard Hofstadter in a much-outdated but still academically respected book called “the American political tradition”—have resorted to two basic responses: the first being simply to yell “ Wrong!” at the top of their lungs, the second to dismiss the entire controversy by remarking, with uncharacteristic docility, that, after all, we cannot turn back the clock; that history is irreversible; and so forth. For a time indeed it seemed that their mystical determinism was in fact unanswerable—politically, if not intellectually. For the past six or seven years, however, a steady stream of books and articles (their theses strangely endorsed by voting returns) have challenged not just decades of faulty assumptions but the frequently dishonest, and nearly always ingenuous, fatalism that served for so long to preserve them from serious attack.