Word: brinkley
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Nobody can accuse CHRISTIE BRINKLEY of being slow. This, after all, is the woman who thought to take photos of herself minutes after a near fatal helicopter crash to sell to PEOPLE magazine. Two months later, she agreed to marry a fellow crash survivor. Now "after much thought and consideration" --and seven months of togetherness--she is separating from that man, real estate developer RICK TAUBMAN, whose son she bore but eight weeks ago. Apart from Brinkley's tendency to overthink issues, it's unclear why her third marriage went sour, although there's ugly talk that money...
...Brinkley sketches out the beginning of the era of mass consumption, recounting how America evolved from an economy driven by production to one stimulated by consumer spending. The prophet of this change was the British economist John Maynard Keynes, who preached that the way out of the U.S.'s 1937 recession was the triggering of demand, not the revival of investment. This idea was new to the industrial age, which had always followed Say's Law of Markets in asserting that production drove consumption...
...Brinkley's scholarship suggests that while the convictions of liberals have changed, those of ordinary Americans have remained consistently contradictory. In 1936, he writes, "much of the American electorate welcomed (even expected) assistance from government in solving their problems but nonetheless remained skeptical of state power." As evidenced by the 1994 elections, that skepticism has apparently intensified; millions of voters benefit from Social Security and Medicare and simultaneously complain that government is evil and inept...
William O. Douglas once remarked that liberalism is the spirit that is not too sure it's right. Brinkley suggests that liberals were certain they were right but were never exactly sure what they stood for. Brinkley illuminates the rather arcane arguments in which some liberals urged "managed competition" (a phrase the Clinton Administration considered and abandoned for its health plan), while others advocated economic decentralization, and still others promulgated an expanded welfare state...
...Democrats was attempting to dismantle the mechanisms of the New Deal, such as the National Resources Planning Board. The House Un-American Activities Committee began a campaign to link liberalism with communism, suggesting that liberals were not simply lukewarm about capitalism but were actively plotting to upend it. Brinkley, a professor of American history at Columbia University, suggests that the compromises made by New Dealers in the early '40s--backing down on their antimonopolism and support of industrial "planning"--explain in part why "modern American liberalism has proved to be a so much weaker and more vulnerable force than almost...