Age of Fracture

by Daniel T. Rodgers

"There were phrases: Personnel is policy and ideas have consequences and ideas drive politics and it's a war of ideas."

"It's a war of ideas"

Novel forms of intellectual production and dissemination-more politically oriented think tanks, new journals of scholarly debate and opinion, more argumentatively structured media-now began to move ideas more aggressively into circulation.

understandings of identity, society, economy, nation, and time were argued out in the last decades of the century, and how those struggles of books and mind changed the ways in which social reality itself would be imagined.

The axis of that regrouping in the last quarter of the century was a reformulation, in idea and imagination, of concepts of "society."

End of consensus

who made the "culture of narcissism" phrase famous, insisted that he had been misread to suggest that the nation had turned in on the self; what worried him, to the contrary, was that the intrusive therapeutic operations of late-capitalist society had made selves all but empty.

But extensive foundation funding for Richard Herrnstein's and Charles Murray's Bell Curve could not make its neo-eugenicism respectable or turn the New Criterion into a major scholarly journal.

Dinesh D'Souza

Sort of

A third family of explanations stresses not mood nor politics nor institutions of intellectual production but the deep structures of the late-capitalist economy.

flexible accumulation, with its much shorter time horizons, much shallower institutional investments, and global extension.

economy from production to finance, and from national to global scale, helped make just-in-time delivery of everything from computer chips to ideas part of the fabric of social life.

What matters are the processes by which the flux and tensions of experience are shaped into mental frames and pictures that, in the end, come to seem themselves natural and inevitable: ingrained in the very logic of things.

a contagion of metaphors.

That contest, its key players, and its unexpected outcomes are the subject of Chapter 2.

Reconceptualizations of power are the subject of Chapter 3. By

Chapters 4 and 5 turn to debates over identity.

Chapters 6 and 7 turn to conceptualizations of society and time.

The "grammar of the presidency," as Noonan called it, was the work of the speechwriters' continuous, creative recycling of the words and gestures of their predecessors.4

This was the axis on which presidential oratory recapitulated the forms of a Protestant sermon and on which the president

assumed the preacher's part.

From the start he brought to the presidency a markedly different language shaped not only by his outside-Washington experience but, still more, by his immersion in Protestant evangelical culture.

"Self-indulgence and consumption" had sapped the nation's will.

He was virtually the last American president of the Cold War and the one whose career had been most shaped by its massive impress on politics and culture.

politics-their displacement of the totalitarian nightmare from the world scene to the stealthy, creeping, insidious growth of government at home.

Friedrich von Hayek's strictures against creeping, liberty-destroying statism.

Nowhere had the line between the rituals of church and state been more blurred in the post-1945 years than in the way in which presidential speech making capitalized on the forms of Protestant preaching.

The distinctive point about Reagan was not his popularity per se but the way his popularity was produced.

Leave Mondale in a position where an attack on Reagan is tantamount to an attack on America's idealized image of itself-where

To insist on the concrete reality of "the people" was, for Reagan and conservative Republicans, an essential precondition to the act of wedging the government and the people apart into sharply antagonistic political fields.

They needed words and representation.

Reagan was fond of saying that his political opponents saw people only as members of groups; his party, to the contrary, saw the people of America as individuals.52

a "conviction"

politician.

Reagan cared passionately about his commitments, just as he cared passionately about t...

greater aura of enchantment than "market."

Self-equilibrating, instantaneous in its sensitivities and global in its reach, gathering the wants of myriad individuals into its system of price signals in a perpetual plebiscite of desires, the ideal market marked off the sphere of exchange as a separate world, perfectionist in its possibilities.

It was the marginalists of the late nineteenth century who brought something much closer to the modern idea of the market into the center of economic analysis.

advised generations of undergraduates, did the supply-and-demand equilibria work in their textbook simplicity.

The shift began with strains in the old system of ideas, though not where observers at the time anticipated them.

In the face of these anomalies, there was an extraordinary flailing about for measures of macroeconomic control. Richard Nixon, turning his back on a century of Republican party policy, instituted emergency across-the-board wage and price controls in the summer of 1971, adopting a course outsiders and public opinion pollsters had been urging for months.

The checking of hyperinflation in Chile by a cadre of University of Chicago-trained economists in the late 1970s provided a second, highly publicized coup for monetarism.

A noxious factory did no harm without neighbors; the law's traditional narratives of responsibility only confused that kernel of reciprocity. If it cost the polluters more in total to abate a nuisance than it would have cost society to buy out the objecting neighbors so that they could move elsewhere, then the socially efficient answer was that the neighbors should leave and the stink should stay, just as they would if the parties had been left to themselves to bargain their way to an economically optimal resolution.

reimagined not as questions of harm and restitution but as questions of market efficiency.

They were a small group of publicists and autodidacts with their center at the Wall Street Journal, who in the turmoil of the paradigms, the yearning for

The achievement of the supply-side amateurs was to recapture the ground of optimism:

The supply-siders spoke to a widespread public weariness with being hectored with hard choices and uncertain forecasts.

Laffer prediction that the income tax cuts would pay for themselves in a spurt of economic growth, did not materialize.

Yet we keep doing this

Most novel about the new market metaphors was their detachment from history and institutions and from questions of power.

The publishers advertised the "leitmotif" of the new edition as the "rediscovery of the market."71