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WELL INTO THE 2010S, American political elites of both parties shared a common vision. They remained gripped by a cold-war imagination that saw the ascendancy of American liberalism not as a unique confluence of events generated by the combination of the Depression, war, and Soviet competition, but…

Cold-war rhetoric also downplayed the extent to which systematic forms of political and economic subordination defined the experience of racial minorities and indigenous peoples within US borders. The cold-war vision presented the achievement of racial equality as a matter of simply completing the …

Both parties had committed to the basic elements of what became “the American model.” At home, it involved a modest welfare state combined with meliorism on issues of race. Abroad, the goal was the reconstruction of foreign societies on American terms through the spread of market capitalism and the legal-political institutions of liberal democracy.

As opposed to those of its global adversary, they contended, the interests of America were coterminous with the world’s interests.

IN SEARCH OF historical analogies for our present crisis, pundits often compare the present to the Civil War or to the reassertion of white supremacy immediately following the end of Reconstruction. But it is the longer Gilded Age that our own moment more closely resembles. In the 1890s, the US suf…