At a symposium marking the two hundredth anniversary of Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, the philosopher Richard Rorty delivered an address titled “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy.” Rorty began by quoting Jefferson on toleration: “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty Gods or no God” (Notes on the State of Virginia). Rorty went on to argue that democratic citizens, following this example, should be willing to reconsider “matters of ultimate importance” that give “sense and point to their lives” when their “opinions entail public actions that cannot be justified to most of their fellow citizens.”11xRichard Rorty, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, vol. I (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 175.
There is much to ponder here now that we are living through a time when “hanging together” as Americans is proving to be a huge challenge.22xJohn Higham, Hanging Together: Unity and Diversity in American Culture, ed. Carl Guarneri (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). Elements of paralyzing discord surround us, and the journalistic conceit of a divided “red” and “blue” America has become a widely acknowledged reality. I want here to draw a contrast between these days of intense discord and division and another time—roughly the twenty years following World War II—when Americans of different political persuasions, who had fought together against totalitarianism, raised “consensus” to the pantheon of national values. It was in this period that Americans talked most about consensus as both a desirable and practicable ideal, and they continued to do so well into the 1960s, when confidence in that ideal (or what might even be described as consensus about the value of consensus) began to unravel until its complete disappearance now. I am not suggesting we should revive this consensus, if only because it was masking too many inequities. But the postwar years stand in such sharp contrast with our current deep dividedness that it is important to understand a distinctive feature of a world we have lost before turning to some of our challenges.