Chapter 1: The Populist Moment

“American exceptionalism” is a sturdy if contested trope of cultural analysis. But large shifts in U.S. politics since the end of World War II have been anything but exceptional. Rather, the United States has moved in tandem with other Western democracies. In the three decades after 1945, democracies on both sides of the Atlantic built systems of social provision and protection, which Europeans call social democracy and Americans the welfare state. A broad consensus across party lines supported this policy. In the United States, Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953–61) ended his party’s effort to roll back the New Deal, while later Republican president Richard M. Nixon (1969–74) expanded the federal government’s activities in virtually every domain of social policy. As inflation surged, Nixon outraged devotees of the free market by imposing wage and price controls.