After 1945, Hofstadter identified with a political liberalism that seemed similar to the views of other "consensus historians". Hofstadter rejected the term, because in his view conflict, also on economic terms, remained an essential aspect of political development. The general misunderstanding of Hofstadter as an adherent of "consensus history" can be found in Eric Foner's statement that Hofstadter's book "The American Political Tradition" (1948) "propelled him to the very forefront of his profession." Foner argues:  Hofstadter in 1948 thus rejected the extremely simplified black-and-white polarization between pro- and anti-business politicians as early as his "American Political Tradition" (1948). But he was still viewing politics from a critical left-wing perspective. Making explicit reference to Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Cleveland, Bryan, Wilson, and Hoover, Hofstadter made a statement on the consensus in the American political tradition, which is sometimes seen as "ironic": "The fierceness of the political struggles has often been misleading...the major political traditions have shared a belief in the rights of property, the philosophy of economic individualism, the value of competition; they have accepted the economic virtues of capitalist culture as necessary qualities of man." Hofstadter later complained that this remark in a hastily written preface requested by the editor had been the reason for "lumping him" unfairly into the category of "consensus historians" like Boorstin, who celebrated this kind of ideological consensus as an achievement, whereas Hofstadter deplored it. In the former draft preface he had written, that American politics "has always been an arena in which conflicts of interests have been fought out, compromised, adjusted. Once these interests were sectional; now they tend more clearly to follow class lines; but from the beginning American political parties...have been intersectional and interclass parties, embracing a jumble of interests which often have reasons for contesting among themselves." Thus, Hofstadter modified Beard's interpretation of history as a succession of mainly socio-economic group conflicts without completely abandoning it. He thought that in almost all previous periods of the history of the United States, except the Civil War, there was an implicit fundamental consensus, shared by antagonists, explaining that the generation of Beard and Vernon Louis Parrington had "put such an excessive emphasis on conflict, that an antidote was needed." With a sociological understanding Hofstadter saw that "a political society cannot hang together, at all, unless there is some kind of consensus running through it".