The Age of Fracture

Daniel T. Rodgers. Age of Fracture. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.

Despite the partisan nature of Presidential politics, the Cold War era saw the rise of a over-arching style of Presidential rhetoric which was broadly shared by Democrats and Republicans alike. The era of what Rodgers seems to define (although never explicitly names) as the era of the Cold War Presidency came to a rhetorical end during the early years of Reagan's time in office. Reagan removed the agency of presidential action and the language of shared national sacrifice from his speeches; instead, he increasingly moved away from concrete considerations of domestic and international challenges towards vague, cinematic expressions of timeless aspiration and limitless projections of the nation's capacity for greatness (however defined).

After noting this shift in rhetoric, Rodgers states that Reagan was reflecting rather than driving broader social and cultural shifts. The rest of the book casts a wide net--regarding race, gender, power, and more--creating a portrait of a society fragmenting into ever-morphing and re-shifting segments and strata. The certainties of the Cold War and the foundations of post-New Deal liberalism all fell apart in the wake of the upheavals and intellectual ferment of the late 60's.

Much of this is framed in the context of the rise of market-based thinking; essentially, the language and values of free-market capitalism seeped into the discourse of sociopolitical thinking, either driving or at the least exacerbating the fragmentation of society in the final three decades of the 20th century. Rodgers teases out a dizzying array of intellectual trends and developments, but the triumph of "the market" over any consensual basis for what "society" might be is the unifying idea running through the seemingly disparate chapters.