ABSTRACT
The National Association of Scholars has been blessed by its association with many outstanding scholars. America's cultural and political leadership embraced values that were about identical to those of the average citizen. This allowed for a level of social concord, as well as an agreement about the nature of American governing institutions, without parallel elsewhere. And it produced, after the Civil War, an uncommonly stable polity. Stanley Joel Reiser was in the right place at the right time, analyzing the splits along a seismic rift with all the sophisticated social science instruments, and the unfailing social science honesty, needed to give it accurate measurement. Stan bore up under the assaults of life with stoic fortitude and an all the more tenacious commitment to his scholarship. According to that wisdom the United States was in the process of bidding goodbye to ideology, installing in its stead an essentially status quo pragmatism.
