The Mering thesis and the roots of consensus history
At the University of Arizona in the mid-1970s, John V. Mering inculcated his disciples with a devotion to the consensus historiography whose bedrock was The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made It by Richard Hofstadter (1948). As a reaction against the economic interpretation of progressives Charles and Mary Beard, the consensus school minimized class conflict as a motive force in American history and found in its place a startling lack of any sort of conflict:
The fierceness of the political struggles has often been misleading: for the range of vision embraced by the primary contestants in the major parties has always been bounded by the horizons of property and enterprise. However much at odds on specific issues, the major political traditions have shared a belief in the rights of property, the philosophy of economic individualism, the value of competition; they have accepted the economic virtues of capitalist culture as necessary qualities of man (Hofstadter op. cit., pp. xxxvi-xxxvii).
Chapel of the Holy Cross, Sedona, Arizona
In a little over four months, the United States has turned into a Kafka novel. Amazingly, it was only on October 5 of last year that