Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

by Rick Perlstein

A history professor named John Higham had recently published an article in the liberal magazine Commentary called “The Cult of American Consensus: Homogenizing Our History.” In it, he complained that his colleagues were unaccountably bleaching out all the conflict in the American past—as if such conflicts weren’t important to the story at all. He watched, surprised, as those colleagues proudly claimed the epithet “consensus historians” for themselves. Conflict in America, in those rare moments it occurred, was an epiphenomenon, they argued—a footnote, in the past as much as the present. The political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset published a book called Political Man whose final chapter, “The End of Ideology,” reported that domestic politics were now “boring” because “the fundamental political problems of the industrial revolution have been solved.” It was a nice idea—and, since no one paid much attention to what politically active kids under the age of thirty were doing, it was catching.