Recorded on January 21, 2026, this video features a talk by Paul Starr, Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, and Stuart Professor of Communications and Public Affairs, at Princeton University. Professor Starr discussed his book, American Contradiction: Revolution and Revenge from the 1950s to Now.
The talk was moderated by Jake Grumbach, Associate Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, and was co-sponsored by the Goldman School of Public Policy, the Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS), and the Department of Sociology.
About the Book
How did Americans come to elect Barack Obama-and then Donald Trump? Those choices capture, in a nutshell, what Paul Starr calls the American contradiction. The whole truth about America, Starr argues in this new history of the United States since the 1950s, has never been contained in one consistent set of values or interests. Our nation was born in the contradiction between freedom and slavery. Today it is beset by a contradiction between a changing people and a resisting nation, a nation with entrenched institutions that have empowered those who fear the changes and look to restore an old America of their imagining.
Starr tells this history from the dual standpoints of the progressive movements that changed the American people and of the movements that emerged in response. Black Americans, he argues, served as a model minority, setting in motion America’s twentieth-century revolutions in gender as well as race and rights. With industry’s decline and the rise of economic inequality, millions of Americans have felt dispossessed and want the old America back. Trump is their revenge. American Contradiction tells the story of how 1950s America became the almost unrecognizable America of the 2020s.
