Moral Markets and the Collapse of Consensus
As we learned in previous lessons, the late twentieth century saw profound changes in American community structures and family life. These transformations set the stage for one of the most dramatic shifts in American society: the collapse of moral consensus and the rise of what scholars call “moral markets.” This lesson examines how the United States transformed from a relatively unified society with shared moral standards into a complex marketplace of competing values and lifestyles.
The Great Transformation: From Consensus to Markets
To understand the magnitude of this change, imagine the America of 1950 compared to 1990. In the earlier period, most Americans shared basic assumptions about right and wrong, proper behavior, and social expectations. By the later period, the United States had become what one observer described as “the most tumultuous, anarchic, and cosmopolitan of global-liberal societies; a stupendous sociocultural bazaar in which everyone had to find their own path among myriads of proffered norms, virtues, and ways.”
This transformation didn’t happen overnight, but it was remarkably swift in historical terms. The key question is: how did a “relatively prudish and parochial national liberal society,” as one commentator described it, become this vast moral marketplace? The answer lies in several interconnected forces that reshaped American life during the global era.
The Role of Global Capitalism
Global capitalism played a crucial role in breaking down traditional moral consensus. The economic growth and technological advances of the post-war era made migration and cultural exchange affordable across the globe, leading to massive sociocultural diversity within American communities. When people from different backgrounds with different values began living side by side, the old consensus naturally weakened.
Capitalist mobility disrupted traditional sources of moral authority. As people moved frequently for economic opportunities, they lost connection to the stable communities that had previously enforced shared moral standards. The extended family networks, neighborhood institutions, and local religious congregations that had sustained consensus found their influence diminished.
The capitalist media system amplified this effect by delivering “floods of content to, from, and about immensely varied societies and cultures all over the world.” Americans were suddenly exposed to vastly different ways of life, moral systems, and cultural practices through television, movies, and later the internet. This exposure made it harder to maintain the belief that their local community’s way of doing things was the only legitimate approach.
Technology and the Decline of Face-to-Face Community
Technology played a particularly important role in undermining consensus by displacing the direct human contact that had traditionally sustained shared moral understanding. As attention turned “from face-to-face social interaction to television sets, computer monitors, game consoles, and hand-held devices, chains of direct personal influence withered.”
This technological displacement had profound effects on how moral values were transmitted from generation to generation. Parents and community members found themselves “cut out of the loop” as young people increasingly formed their values through “generationally segregated media.” The explosion of youth culture, driven by shared media experiences rather than community traditions, created unprecedented generational divides.
Without the informal social networks that had previously allowed communities to “teach, model, monitor, and enforce morality,” traditional mechanisms of moral consensus broke down. People had fewer opportunities to influence each other’s behavior through personal relationships and more contact with distant, mediated sources of values and lifestyle choices.
The Shift from Consensus to Politics
As shared moral understanding weakened, American society increasingly relied on politics and legal mechanisms to resolve disputes that had once been settled through appeal to common values. This shift reflected deeper changes in how people thought about social problems. The experience of economic markets, with their emphasis on rational calculation and individual choice, made “politics and negotiation” seem more natural than consensus-building based on “common norms and virtues.”
This change appeared in many areas of life. Parent-child relationships became more transactional, with children “frequently paid or otherwise rewarded from the late 1960s to do chores they once would have been persuaded to do with moral force.” Schools shifted from moral authority to “behavior modification” and medication as primary means of maintaining classroom discipline.
On a larger scale, American society “increasingly relied more upon legislatures, courts, and police through which collective decisions were mechanically produced and enforced, and less upon earnest conversation toward agreement.” When consensus could be achieved at all, it was often “engineered by large economic and political interests and contrived by PR firms” rather than emerging organically from shared community values.
The Problem of Public Morality
One of the most significant consequences of the moral marketplace was what economist Robert Reich identified as a crisis in public morality. While political leaders focused intensively on private moral issues like sexuality and reproductive choices, American society experienced “a far more significant crisis in public morality.”
This crisis manifested in the behavior of economic and political elites. Over two decades, there was “a steady decline in the willingness of people in leading positions in the private sector—on Wall Street and in large corporations especially—to maintain minimum standards of public morality.” These leaders began to “seek the highest profits and highest compensation for themselves regardless of social consequences.”
The contrast with earlier periods was stark. In the first three decades after World War II, “there was a sense in the business community and on Wall Street of some degree of accountability to the nation.” This accountability wasn’t imposed by law but was “assumed to be a bedrock of how people with great economic power should behave.” CEOs earned no more than 40 times what typical workers earned, and profitable firms avoided large layoffs.
International Variations
The collapse of moral consensus wasn’t uniform across all societies. Japan maintained relatively strong consensus compared to Western nations, though it too experienced significant weakening from its early postwar levels. Japanese management and politics remained “able to rely upon consensus to a degree impossible in the west,” largely due to the country’s relative ethnic homogeneity and continuing respect for hierarchical authority.
At the other extreme, Muslim societies reacted to global moral markets by strengthening and rigidifying their traditional consensus. Rather than accepting moral pluralism, these societies imposed increasingly authoritarian controls on individual behavior. The result was often violence against those who challenged traditional norms, with large majorities in countries like Egypt and Pakistan supporting severe punishments for moral transgressions.
China presented yet another pattern, with strong consensus maintained through external coercion rather than internal commitment. As one observer noted, China seemed “like a bunch of individuals who behave themselves only when they think they might get caught.”
The Consequences of Moral Market Competition
The rise of moral markets had profound consequences for American society. Without shared standards, people found it “less uncomfortable to walk out of relationships and friendships than to work through difference or to finesse and tolerate it.” The social skills and patience required for maintaining long-term relationships atrophied as alternatives became readily available.
The welfare state inadvertently contributed to moral breakdown by shielding people from the natural consequences of poor decisions. When “welfare benefits were widely and abundantly made available, irrespective of desert,” fewer people learned from their mistakes. As the text notes, “most learn from their own and others’ mistakes if they have to face their consequences. Distinctly fewer learn if people are shielded from them by government intervention and subsidy.”
Perhaps most troubling, the moral marketplace made it difficult for even well-intentioned middle-class families to reliably transmit their values to their children. A “quiet, relatively solid center” of Americans managed to maintain some moral equilibrium by thoughtfully combining pragmatism with traditional moral principles. However, “under the difficult circumstances of the moral markets, this middle-class center was unable to reliably pass on its moderation and equilibration to its children.”
Economic Markets and Moral Discipline
Paradoxically, while global capitalism contributed to moral market competition, traditional economic markets had historically provided important moral discipline. The “astounding secret that early-liberal societies inadvertently discovered” was that “economic markets confer moral discipline as a most important side effect, discipline that overcomes the grand moral cycle of traditional hierarchical societies.”
This market-induced discipline had “tamed the grand moral cycle into the mild one of modern liberal societies from 1500 to 1965.” However, “the displacement and hobbling of economic markets by the welfare and regulatory states” helped bring about the return of more severe moral instability. The “scores of new welfare programs and hundreds of thousands of new regulations” arising since the 1960s contributed significantly to “current moral disorder” by reducing people’s exposure to market discipline.
Key Takeaways
The United States transformed rapidly from a society with strong moral consensus to a “moral marketplace” where competing values and lifestyles competed for adherents.
Global capitalism, through increased mobility, cultural exchange, and media exposure, played a major role in breaking down traditional moral consensus by exposing Americans to vastly different ways of life.
Technology, particularly electronic media, weakened the face-to-face community relationships that had traditionally transmitted and enforced shared moral standards.
As moral consensus weakened, American society increasingly relied on politics, law, and force rather than persuasion and shared values to resolve conflicts.
The collapse of public morality among economic and political elites represented a significant departure from earlier periods when business leaders felt accountable to broader community standards.
The welfare state inadvertently contributed to moral breakdown by shielding people from the natural consequences of poor decisions, reducing opportunities for moral learning.
Traditional economic markets had historically provided important moral discipline, but their displacement by government regulation and welfare programs weakened this disciplinary effect.
This collapse of moral consensus set the stage for significant political upheaval, as we’ll explore in our next lesson on “Trump and the Restoration: The Middle Class Fights Back,” which examines how these cultural changes contributed to a populist political backlash.
