1The election in 2016 of Donald Trump as President sent American liberals into a state of shock. How could such an uninformed and crass person lacking any moral compass have ascended to the country’s highest political office? Throughout its history, the United States had weathered eruptions of dissension and authoritarianism—a civil war, the suppression of civil liberties during World War I, the Red Scare of the 1950s—and apparently returned to tolerance and democracy. Although bouts of oppression and incivility were frequent, liberalism was resilient. Trump’s failure to be re-elected in 2020 confirmed this comforting thought. When Trump won again in 2024 and the Far Right ascended into the White House, the liberal interpretation was crushed. Trump was not the aberration, and the United States was not the country, that liberals had envisioned.

2Paul Starr, professor of sociology at Princeton University, an astute observer of American society, and author of two previous books—Freedom’s Power: The True Force of Liberalism (2007) and Entrenchment: Wealth, Power, and the Constitution of Democratic Societies (2019)—on American politics sets out to explain where liberals went wrong. His goal: to seriously consider “both sides of the country’s inconsistent history and contradictory forces. Both sins and virtues” (19). His diagnosis: those on the Left failed in how they thought about American society. When they evoked the country’s history, they perceived a nation always striving to re-position itself on a liberal trajectory. What they did not imagine was a nation deeply infected by a contradiction between liberalism and illiberalism—democracy and equality fatally pitted against authoritarianism and hierarchy. In the nation’s early years, this contradiction took the form of the clash between freedom and slavery. By the late-20th century, it had metastasized as an unbridgeable chasm between liberal change and conservative resistance.

3Starr tells this story chronologically, beginning in the mid-twentieth century when a political consensus regarding the nation’s character and core institutions was widespread. (The American Studies Association was established during this period—in 1951 to be more specific.) Despite threats to civil liberties posed by anti-Communism, the provocative presence of a Black-led civil rights movement, and sharp disagreements around federal employment and public housing policy, “the idea of a deep contradiction in American society, of recurring lines of conflict, was foreign” (47). Disagreements were manageable and both political parties, Democrats and Republicans, were ideologically diverse. This consensus unraveled in the 1970s as the economy faltered, immigration spiked, and numerous groups protested the injustices experienced by women, Native Americans, Latinos, and homosexuals. The liberal values of identity, equal rights, and dignity these groups espoused were also pivotal for social movements centered on the environment, the Vietnam war, youth culture, and free speech. Liberalism was bringing different people into the political process and dismantling the hierarchical restraints imposed by a white, male-dominated society.

4When the US manufacturing sector declined in the 1970s due to foreign competition and corporate outsourcing to low-wage countries, the economy slumped and working-class lives became more precarious. Pro-consumer and pro-labor governmental regulations had eroded corporate profits. Challenges to masculinity, the family, and European cultural heritage along with rising non-white immigration and labor’s waning political influence stoked aggrievement among the white working class. The weakening of “the culture Americans had in common” (19) was underway. Yet, according to Starr, liberals did little to address the concerns of people increasingly subject to the precarities of global capitalism and the federal government seemed more attentive to the Black poor than those suffering from factory closings and unemployment.

5The backlash of rage and revenge began in earnest in the late 1970s with property tax revolts in the suburbs, opposition to school desegregation in the cities, and national resistance to affirmative action. With the election of Ronald Reagan as President in 1980, conservatives were emboldened. Reagan’s railing against big government resonated with business opposition to unions and governmental regulations. Reagan also pandered to the white working class by maligning welfare recipients. Crime and the need for punitive incarceration became ideological flashpoints and a culture war erupted as the Right ramped up its attacks on intellectuals, artists, musicians, and novelists and conservative groups formed to protest gays teaching in public schools. The Republican Party had tapped into “a deep well of alienated, downscale, and rural [and urban] whites” (231). Reagan and fellow conservatives, however, left the basic institutions of government untouched even as federal spending—defense exempted—and taxes on the wealthy were reduced. Republican power was never fully entrenched and the Reagan years “never came close to returning America to the social world of the 1950s” (118). The first concerted attempt to roll back the advances of liberalism was only half of a counter-revolution.

6For the next few decades, conservative resistance stayed within the bounds of a national consensus. A sharp turn to the Right began with the election of a Republican dominated Congress in the 1990s. It gained momentum with the rise of the Tea Party movement and its demand for limited government, Republican efforts to demonize liberalism, and the greater public presence of groups with racist, xenophobic, anti-gay, and antisemitic agendas. Additionally, Evangelicals and Pentecostals, opposing abortion and gender fluidity, became politically active and saw the Republican Party as a political ally to entrench the country as a white, male-dominated Christian nation. That the working class was struggling to find well-paying jobs in an economy that no longer welcomed them was another political opening for arch-conservative Republicans to weaken liberalism and attack the Democratic Party. The election of an Ivy League-educated Black man—Barack Obama—as President in 2008 was another fulcrum in the divisiveness around race, immigration, and education. All of this was amplified by an increasingly fragmented and partisan social media.

7A more organized and more successful counter-revolution began with Donald Trump’s election in 2016. Trump campaigned unrestrained by concerns about civility. As Starr writes, “long-standing social norms no longer served as a deterrent to openly racist and sexist language and behavior” (256). At rallies and in the media, Trump demonized immigrants, flouted his misogyny, condoned violence against anyone (such as the mainstream press) that failed to flatter him, and vowed to remake the federal government and return the country to its imagined white, Christian, and working-class roots. During his first term, he failed to deliver on these grandiose promises. Joseph Biden was able to defeat Trump in the subsequent Presidential election, but Trump remained in control of the Republican Party and was re-elected in 2024. Starr labels Trump an “instinctual believer in the American contradiction” (335) and “the total backlash package, an icon of defiance of liberal values and the progressive project” (258).

8Conservative groups had prepared a well-formulated strategy of reaction and Trump entered the White House with a playbook meant to dismantle policies with liberal leanings (such as environmental and business regulations) and extend Presidential control over, for example, higher education and the federal civil service. He would also make the country “great” again with an America First approach to foreign affairs that would launch punitive tariffs to reduce the nation’s trade deficit, particularly with China. The liberal advances of previous decades were slated for full-scale attack. Conservatives would have their revenge.

9Clearly and convincingly, Starr portrays the clash between Far-Right political operatives and their white working class, business, and evangelical supporters, and liberal elites, advocates for social justice, and defenders of diversity. Labor, once the core of the Democratic Party and liberal thought, was now firmly in the Republican camp. In short, Starr’s story is one of clashing ideologies with one venerating social hierarchies, Christianity, nationalism, and paternalism, and the other challenging those values. More abstractly, and this is Starr, what now exists is a contradiction between (liberal) change and (conservative) resistance, the latter a direct response to liberalism’s successes at advancing inclusiveness, equality, and participatory democracy. In his telling, the Right is represented by the Republican Party and the Left by the Democratic Party, a pairing that fits well with institutional politics, but hides the fact—unmentioned by Starr—that a plurality of voters self-identify as Independents—45 percent in a 2026 Gallup Poll—neither Republican nor Democrat.

10Starr’s perspective is mainly institutional and reflects his previously published Entrenchment (2019) on the importance of institutional capture for assuring the endurance of reform. To this point, he laments that “while the American people changed, the nation and its institutions did not adjust” (333). His primary concerns are the Presidency and who occupies it, Supreme Court decisions, federal policy, and political party alignments. Social movements are recognized as vehicles for liberalism and Far Right conservatism, but what matters most to him are their consequences for political strategy and governmental policy. His history is history from above (national rather than local) and his sociology is one of organizations rather than interpersonal relations.

11Where Starr diverges from other assessments of America’s authoritarianism is his belief that the United States is a country “careening back and forth, on the basis of contradictory forces” (286). He is not the only one to do so. The historians Jill Lepore (2018) and Joseph Ellis (2025) in recent books have also adopted the trope of contradiction. Starr, though, does not develop the idea beyond a brief mention in the introduction and a few, fleeting comments in the main text. This is unfortunate given the concept’s prominence in the book’s title. Beyond being a descriptive device, how are we to interpret such a theoretically freighted term? What alternative points of view are being discarded? What does contradiction imply for how we think about political engagement? And, to what extent does this argument apply elsewhere?

12That America is a nation built on contradictions and that a contradiction can take other forms beyond its original manifestation as freedom vs. slavery are two keys to Starr’s argument. A third is that the only way to escape any specific contradiction is through revolutionary change, precisely what the Far Right is doing. In effect, Starr rejects a linear perspective that promises either progress, as is usually attributed to the US, or decline. He could have proposed, but did not, a cyclical version of change alternating between conservatism and liberalism or have remained with the trope of consensus vs. conflict that US historians such as Richard Hofstadter and political scientists such as Robert Dahl debated in the mid-twentieth century. And he explicitly rejects paradox, a softer version of contradiction with its fewer Marxist overtones, though the historian Michael Kammen (1973) effectively called on the country’s “paradoxical coupling of opposites” (89) to explain the origins of American civilization.

13More specifically, Starr’s choice of freedom vs. slavery as the country’s core and enduring contradiction sets idealism against materialism. Freedom is an abstraction, but slavery was an actual configuration of real people, violent acts, and immiseration. Here, Starr echoes Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944), a famous study of race in the US that highlighted the incongruity between the treatment of the “Negro” and American ideals of dignity, equality and inalienable rights. Moreover, Starr’s choice of change vs. resistance as the reigning contemporary contradiction is theoretically thin. In short, the interpretative questions posed by his conceptual framing are insufficiently addressed.

14I had a similar, quizzical reaction to the political implications of proposing contradiction as the essence of American society. Historical perspectives on American politics are almost always about its political possibilities. Given Starr’s liberal politics—he was a co-founder of The American Prospect, one of the country’s most progressive political magazines—I suspect that he intends his readers to consider contradictions as unstable and thereby susceptible to political activism. The message: liberalism is fragile, freedom is fragile, democracy is fragile, but so are conservatism, oppression, and authoritarianism. There is hope; I wish he had said more about this.

15Lastly, to what extent is the frame of contradiction applicable elsewhere? Starr implicitly suggests that contradiction is peculiar to America. I find it difficult, though, to imagine that other nations, countries, or cultures are free from opposing political, cultural, and economic alignments. While this is not Starr’s concern, it is relevant to any perspective that sets America apart from the world and grants it exceptional status, a well-acknowledged geopolitical danger.

16None of my concerns about the interpretive framing in which Starr has clothed his analysis should be taken as detracting from his careful, evidence-based assessment of the rise of Far-Right conservatism, the decline of liberalism, and the hollowing out of the political center in the United States. If you were to read one book on these matters, make it this one. That Starr felt he had to engage with the theme of contradiction speaks both to the positioning of his book among many others addressing the trauma of America’s surging authoritarianism and to a need for a more robust (and less liberally naive) framework for understanding America. That he, Kammen, Lepore, and Ellis—all accomplished scholars—find the frame of contradictions potentially fruitful is reason for greater clarity and further pursuit of this promising approach to what it means to be a nation.