Let me first thank Jeffrey Isaac for choosing our books for this exchange, and Shane Hamilton for his review. I would like to draw on Hamilton's main criticisms to consider political change in two ways: first, as it relates to political actors; and second, to political orders.

In our books on the rise of modern conservatism, Hamilton and I both provide accounts of how our subjects developed conservative political commitments. But our understanding of this process differs. Hamilton argues that by foregrounding race in the rise of modern conservatism, I miss the central role of economic change in postwar American politics. I thus “provide little insight into the central irony of modern conservatism”—that material beneficiaries of the New Deal would come to oppose it. The rise of modern conservatism looks ironic only if we expect that economics should be, a priori, the primary force behind politics. That view changes if we start from the premise that political interests are not prior to, but rather the product of, politics. The question is no longer why voters failed to act in their economic interests, but rather how certain interpretations of economic conditions prevailed over others. Answering this, in my view, requires an analysis of the ways in which political appeals were expressed, altered, combined, received, circulated, and acted on within changing political circumstances. My argument is that as the black freedom movement began pressing its claims on the democratic order in the postwar era, actors on the right sought out ways to articulate white working-class identity through a producerist language of race that was ultimately directed against, as Kevin Phillips put it, “the Northeastern Establishment and ghetto alike” (The Emerging Republican Majority 1968, 471). And this identity was effectively established during a time of steadily increasing wages. Moreover, race made possible an alliance across class lines as blackness was made a signifier for a series of perceived threats to the entire nation: crime, welfare dependency, social protest, excessive taxation, and family breakdown, among others. This political logic, developed over decades by segregationists, economic conservatives, and others, reconstituted dominant understandings of American national identity, so that an aggrieved white nation was now pitted against an intrusive racialized state.

The character of political orders, and when and how they change, is the second major concern raised by Hamilton's critique. Echoing Richard Hofstadter, he describes the New Deal as marked by multiple inconsistencies and points of rupture, rather than by coherence and stability. True as far as it goes, but not all forms of regime vulnerability were exploited, or exploited to the same degree. In a nation deeply configured by white supremacy, political actors found race a credible framework through which to make other assaults on the New Deal credible. I do not mean to say that there was anything predetermined about this course, or that race, any more than class, was the fundamental feature of American identity (indeed, they are hardly separable in the U.S. context). The very contingency of the New Deal that Hamilton depicts in his book prompted actors to seek opportunities both in and outside the Democratic Party, continually reconstructing their rhetoric, strategies, and alliances as they went. Seen this way, historical context is not a set of constraints, but rather a set of resources with which actors can unsettle extant political identities and generate new ones. Such an approach, I argue, helps move us beyond narratives that naturalize the role of either racism or economics in the rise of modern conservatism.