Every political community needs its story. It needs an account of itself, its heroes and villains, its founding wounds and saving deeds. The public does not merely remember these things but also reinforces them by making them a template for education, teaching the young what is noble, what is shameful, what must be revered, and what must never be permitted to return. This is not simply propaganda. It belongs to political life. No polity can live by disembodied ideals alone, and no people can endure without memory, piety, gratitude, and shared attachments.
The difficulty begins when people start to forget that their sacred story, however reflective of the truth it may be, is nevertheless a parable or a narrative about justice, not justice itself.
The American postwar consensus is such a story, and one that has been generating a fair amount of controversy of late. This consensus is not merely the historical fact that the United States and its allies defeated Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, or the moral fact that this was a good thing. Nor is it merely the institutional settlement that followed the war: Bretton Woods, the United Nations, NATO, the national security state, the administrative welfare state, and the open-ended commitment to upholding the liberal international order. At its deepest level, the postwar consensus is how America came to understand itself under Franklin Roosevelt.
