Where Are We in History? Political Orders and Political Eras in the Postwar U.S.

Abstract

An effort to pump new life into the notions of political order and political era suggests that the Untied States has seen three different mixes of key structural elements, influential policy conflicts, and the dynamic following from their interaction since the Second World War. For a full generation after the end of World War II, American politics was really just an extension of what had gone before, in effect the Late New Deal Era. Yet this same effort suggests that larger social trends were undermining the stability of this era well before major anomalies began to break through in the late 1960s, ultimately producing a different mix of structure and substance, one that we now recognize as the Era of Divided Government. And it suggests, by 2000, that major anomalies were breaking through again, so that the next analytic challenge is to see which of these are harbingers of lasting shifts and which are just the ructions that inevitably accompany the death of an old order, without revealing anything about the new.

Recommended Citation

Shafer, Byron E. (2007) "Where Are We in History? Political Orders and Political Eras in the Postwar U.S.," The Forum: Vol. 5 : Iss. 3, Article 4.
Available at: http://www.bepress.com/forum/vol5/iss3/art4