One Nation After All: What Middle-Class Americans Really Think (Viking, 1998) is Alan Wolfe's concise and telling critique of recent descriptions of the United States as a country where the center cannot hold. Instead of portraying the United States as the site of bitter and unending culture wars, Wolfe's book presents an American public bound together in fair equanimity by a commonly held sense of moral responsibility leavened with tolerance for the weaknesses and differences of others.
The book is an exercise in suburban psychology that Wolfe based on interviews with over 200 middle-class Americans, with the overall conclusion of the work being that Americans are far more tolerant than we are generally given credit for being.
There are lingering elements of what might be seen as Puritan ideas about morality (using the term in a literal rather than simply a derogative sense) in what Wolfe finds. The Americans he talked to can be quite harsh in judging their own behavior, believing that they have an obligation to be as good as they can possibly and perhaps just a little bit better. And yet they are in general willing to be fairly tolerant of other people's behavior, even when that behavior is something that they themselves would not pursue. They are even in general fairly tolerant of people who violent their own moral standards, understanding that it is more important to have those standards than always to be able to meet them. Wolfe notes and spends a fair amount of time discussing the one major exception that he finds to this rule, which is people's attitudes about homosexuality. These tend toward the morally, legalistically and sometimes even physically punitive, certainly towards other people and sometimes even towards themselves.
One of the major themes of Wolfe's book and one suspects that this might have in fact have been the motivating force in writing it is the idea that Americans are not torn ap...