If anyone is thinking of preparing a time capsule capable of surviving a catastrophic end to the United States as we know it, they’d do well to find a place in it for Paul Starr’s American Contradiction: Revolution and Revenge from the 1950s to Now. In a few hundred richly detailed pages, Starr seeks to explain how the United States evolved from a relatively unified people and nation at the end of World War II to a country today wracked by divisions so grave as to threaten its very future as a democracy. “How did the country that twice elected Barack Obama then go on to elect Donald Trump?” Starr asks, as he sets out to explore the many contradictions he sees in the present and recent past.

Tapping into an old, and in recent times governing, theme in American historiography, Starr looks back to a fundamental paradox present at the republic’s founding—namely, that a nation conceived in liberty countenanced slavery. “That contradiction,” Starr observes, “has had its lineal descendants down to the present.” It is manifest today, he writes, in the “contradiction between a changing people and a resisting nation, a nation with entrenched institutions that have empowered those who fear the changes and look to restore an old America of their imagining.” The American people, Starr argues, have changed markedly since the mid-twentieth century, in no small part because of a cascade of transformations precipitated by the civil rights movement, which sought to “fulfill the promise of the Constitution.” As the rights of African Americans, women, new immigrants, and other minorities have expanded and their place in society has grown stronger, a “new America” has emerged. Yet for all these strides, the nation remains “moored” through its Constitution and institutions to its eighteenth-century genesis. The tensions in the country today, Starr suggests, are best illuminated by a “rewriting of the American story” that traces the underlying fault lines from their modern roots in the post-World War II era.

This Starr does in a study that revisits familiar themes and chapters in more recent U.S. history, even as it turns the kaleidoscope, rearranging pivotal events and moments to better illuminate today’s divided nation. American Contradiction is most effective in making its case in the book’s second half, where Starr identifies the 1990s as the critical turning point that made of national politics “an unrelenting, partisan struggle” and traces the price the nation is now paying for this state of affairs. During that decade, a rough postwar consensus on values, culture, and politics fractured so profoundly that it redrew the political landscape, creating red states and blue states, a “fifty-fifty country,” and eventually the perils American democracy faces today. Starr’s thorough reconstruction of this descent makes for painful and at times depressing reading, even as it illuminates.

Starr begins his story in the 1950s—when, he asserts, an era of “peak consensus” in the United States was underway. In the context of the Cold War, amid unparalleled power on the world stage and widespread, though not universal, economic abundance at home, Starr asserts that “[E]thnic, class, and political differences among whites narrowed, and the idea of shared national values and an American national character became plausible.” Despite glaring racial inequality and the near exclusion or marginalization of large swaths of citizens—including women, African Americans, and many other minority groups—the “gravitational pull” was toward the center in politics and toward moderation and conformity in social and cultural life. High levels of religious participation, modest national disparities in wealth, low levels of immigration, and the controlling influence that the Cold War imposed on partisanship supported a sense of common purpose among Americans that overshadowed their differences.

Ironically, given the fractiousness with which its proponents have advanced their claims, this is the national moment valorized today by those who seek to return the country to what they see as “normal America.” It’s a sepia-toned memory when one considers, as Starr observes, that the period was “so exceptionally normal that it was unlike any time before or since.” The consensus Starr details was first described, of course, by intellectuals and commentators in the period of its birth, who were seeking to explain, after the defeat of fascism, the United States’s unique successes as a democratic nation. As Starr acknowledges, that consensus, in theory and in fact, inspired and coexisted during its heyday with active challenges to the reigning political, social, and economic premises by dissenting historians, the Beats, and political radicals, among many other critics and activists. And while Starr suggests that today’s right wing is driven in part by genuine nostalgia for this era, his analysis is complicated by the fact that whatever the appeal of that supposed consensus today, fewer and fewer Americans of our time have any firsthand memory whatsoever of those purportedly halcyon days. The past they hope to go back to was not ever part of their lived experience and doesn’t explain how Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign attracted so many younger voters.

Nonetheless, the years of consensus begin to unravel, in Starr’s historical account, with the arrival of the civil rights movement in the mid-1950s. Starr minimizes—though doesn’t ignore—the steady drumbeat of resistance to racial inequality and segregation that long preceded this decisive period and that shaped the strategies civil rights activists later employed. He argues that it was the ever growing movement of nonviolent direct action by Black Americans and white allies, starting with the Montgomery Bus Boycott in December 1955, that “signaled a new political moment in America.” By means of freedom rides, boycotts, marches, and similar tactics, the civil rights movement touched off a series of public confrontations that exposed the appalling realities of racial bigotry and segregation. These events dramatized the cause, attracted widespread media attention, and created a climate that national political leaders could no longer ignore.

Such was the movement’s success that by 1964, polls indicated that Americans considered civil rights the most salient issue in the country. That atmosphere, Starr writes, helped speed the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the two most transformative civil rights bills of the post-Reconstruction era. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act forbade employment discrimination on the basis of “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin” and empowered a new federal agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, to receive and investigate complaints of violations. The EEOC opened the door, Starr notes, to a flood of private and class-action suits in federal courts charging employers with discrimination. The Voting Rights Act proved decisive in removing long-standing constraints on Black political participation, restoring rights conferred to African Americans during Reconstruction that had been perniciously obstructed or denied under Jim Crow. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and War on Poverty initiatives likewise helped to advance the civil rights movement’s conjoined goals of “ jobs and justice” by improving the life chances of low-income Americans of all racial backgrounds. The Black Power movement that emerged in the mid-1960s sharpened the focus on institutionalized racism outside the South. It also introduced, Starr argues, a new “political and cultural prototype” emphasizing Black nationalism, consciousness, pride, and identity that would soon redraw the political landscape.

Starr maintains that the Black political struggle created a model for other minority groups who would enter the public arena in the later 1960s and ’70s, including women, people with disabilities, the LGBTQ community, and other racial and ethnic groups. Indeed, Starr contends that “Black Americans became a true model minority” by demonstrating the leverage that “collective action, legal redress, group economic advance, and cultural transformation” could bring to bear on “hierarchies of power and worth.” It should take nothing away from the great achievements of African Americans and the civil rights movement to suggest that this characterization seems somewhat ill-suited to a group that has endured and continues to endure persistent discrimination and inequality in American society, as well as in some of the liberation movements it inspired. Indeed, the designation appears particularly unfitting given the upsurge in explicit racism all too evident today.

Starr lays bare in abundant detail how transformations in the American economy forestalled the broader economic gains for African Americans that one might have expected after the strides made in the 1960s. “Black people ran into forces in the 1970s and later,” he writes, “that did almost as much to undermine their economic position as the civil rights revolution and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society did to improve it.” For this very reason, the “model minority” category seems not entirely apt for the complexities Starr himself excels in explaining. By the late 1970s, macroeconomic changes—including the loss of high-wage jobs in the postindustrial economy, the offshoring of production and fading of domestic manufacturing, the waning power of unions, deregulation, and rising income inequality, all in the context of an emerging global economy—left millions of Americans of all races vulnerable to market forces over which they had little control.

Still, there can be no doubt, as Starr explains, that the women’s and gay rights movements were deeply influenced by the language, strategies, and achievements of the Black struggle. He portrays these movements as more derivative than they deserve to be seen as, given that women’s and gay rights activism had a much longer history that well predated the 1970s. But he is correct that all three movements moved ahead with notable success on two tracks—one that sought to achieve equal rights through legal reform and another that challenged long-standing institutions and assumptions in politics, society, and culture. The new anti-discrimination laws, policies, and practices that emerged would, Starr notes, inspire others to seek inclusion as protected groups.

Thus did the “progressive project” produce important and seemingly lasting “changes in law, consciousness, and social relations.” These transformations did not, however, look like progress to many Americans at the time. Starr notes that “the ‘liberation’ side of the women’s and gay movements” proved especially “unsettling” to many because it touched so intimately on private life and traditions governing marriage and the family. Some who revered those traditions bristled at the criticism and challenges women’s and gay rights posed. Many were drawn to the Christian right, whose rising power and influence within the Republican Party by the late 1970s offered to white voters especially what Starr describes as another form of “identity politics”—one rooted in a vigorous defense of “God, family,  nation” against their fellow citizens, whom many conservatives now described as enemies.

Despite obvious continuities, Starr stresses, importantly, that conservatism in the era stretching from Goldwater to Reagan differed markedly from its current incarnation. The former, he maintains, represented “only an intermediate step toward the truly right-wing reactionary movement that has emerged in recent years and taken over the Republican Party.” During the 1964 Goldwater campaign, he writes, Republicans had seen a rising opportunity to “turn themselves into the nation’s majority party by appealing to racial and cultural backlash, though they had to use carefully modulated and coded language to avoid alienating more centrist voters.” In 1968, that strategy helped peel off enough Southern Democrats to send Richard Nixon to the White House. But if Republicans hoped to foment a counterrevolution, they only partially succeeded when it came to governing. During the Nixon-Reagan-Bush era, Starr asserts, “[M]ajor elements of the liberal rights revolution and the progressive project remained in place, and some even advanced,” including federal laws, policies, and programs conservatives had long opposed and hoped to gut, such as Medicare and, under Nixon, environmental protection.

It is, indeed, depressing to revisit the Nixon Administration with Starr and to be reminded of how moderate and even liberal several of its initiatives appear to us today, given the all-out assault on the regulatory state that has followed. The Reagan-Bush years, Starr argues, did not involve a wholesale attack on the federal government, though unions were badly weakened and tax “reform” rewarded the richest Americans, whose share of the national income increased enormously. The rise and growing influence of the religious right within the Republican Party injected abortion and so-called “family values” into partisan politics. Nonetheless, Starr observes that even as Republican Presidents appointed ten successive Supreme Court justices between 1969 and 1991, they did not succeed in rolling back cultural change or dismantling the laws and policies that had advanced gender and racial equality.

The ground shifted dramatically in the 1990s, Starr contends, when an era of fierce partisanship got underway and Democrats and Republicans became locked in a struggle in which neither could keep the upper hand for long. Republicans, led by Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and like-minded conservatives, spearheaded an effort to demonize liberals and even moderates who rejected their agenda. The harshness of these attacks, which characterized those who disagreed as “anti-American” and immoral, violated long-standing political norms and deepened the discord ever more apparent among a closely divided and often dispirited electorate. New right-wing radio and television outlets, including Fox News, provided a platform that not only enabled but encouraged, exploited, and, it must be added, profited from extremism. No longer did Americans get their news from the three major television networks that broadly observed shared reportorial standards designed to convey some degree of objectivity. Partisanship began to rule the airways.

Starr painstakingly takes the reader through the Clinton, Obama, and Biden Administrations to demonstrate that despite successes in national elections, the Democratic Party could not advance its policy agenda when it lost control of Congress. Moderate Democrats, Starr argues, were “sleepwalking” through history as they failed to anticipate the impact deregulation, free-trade policies, and changes in immigration would have on their party as well as their constituents. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which ended the national origins quota system, made room for newcomers from Latin America, Asia, and other parts of the world and increased the diversity of the country. Although the law had passed with bipartisan support, it became, as did immigration itself, a target of conservatives, who continue to claim it was designed to fatten the rolls of Democratic voters with racial minorities and even, in the argument’s most extreme iteration, “replace” the nation’s white majority altogether. Center-right Republicans would also be blindsided when they were “thrown into the political wilderness by forces within their own party.” Voters who chafed at what they saw as “the Republican establishment’s betrayal of America’s workers and middle class” were among those who proved receptive in 2016 to Trump, who captured the Republican nomination and then “decapitated” the party’s leadership.

The enormous sweep and dense level of detail in American Contradiction are not easy to convey, nor do they make for light reading. But this book will surely sober those who follow Starr along its dismaying and often agonizing journey. The right, Starr concludes, has gained control over both the Republican Party and the Supreme Court of the United States. Trump’s reelection in 2024 raises the prospect that the Supreme Court and executive branch “will become fully aligned in favor of regime change, entrenching an anti-liberal, reactionary state.” To survive the current crisis, Starr concludes, Americans “will have to create new popular movements and new institutions capable of repairing the damage from Trumpism and from the shocks that lie ahead. It is not too early to start thinking about what form those movements and institutions should take.” American Contradiction shows that citizens can mobilize and right the course of the nation’s history. It’s been done before, but one cannot help but wonder what it is going to take this time.