Word: creedal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...will always fall short of the absolutes: certainly it will never be able to erase the continuing suspicions about government power. This gap between expectations and performance (or, in Huntington's brushed-chrome lingo, between ideals and institutions, abbreviated as the "IvI gap") fuels our volatile periods of creedal passion. "The ideological challenge to American government thus comes not from abroad but from home, not from imported Marxist doctrines but from homegrown American idealism...
Convulsive outbursts like the 1960s, occur only occasionally in our history, not because the gap between hopes and achievements is necessarily greater in such periods, but because it is perceived as such. The continuing "cognitive dissonance" created by this gap breeds four responses--the intense moralism of the creedal passion periods, cynicism, hypocrisy (a denial that the gap exists, known under other circumstances as patriotism), and complacency. Relative deprivation amidst general prosperity, and increased numbers of politically active young people (who tend to moralism, becoming cynical, patriotic or complacent as they age) are among the possible triggers of activist phases...
...Revolutionary Era, and George Gallup was still several generations distant when Old Hickory sat in the White House, Huntington concentrates on the 1960s and 1970s, a span lotted up and graphed more completely than any in our history. His contention that the 1960s closely resembled the other "creedal passion periods" in the degree of adherence to traditional American political values is not so much wrong as incomplete. Certainly, adherence to some "American creed," especially in the early years, is a current that runs through much of the writing from the New Left. Mario Savio, the leader of the Free Speech...
...even get a grip on the thornier question of economic rights for minorities. Indeed, the most discouraging portion of The Promise of Disharmony deals with the limits to reform--not only in the 60s but throughout our history. Beginning with the notion that there is "considerable repetition from one creedal passion period to another: the favorite causes of one era tend to reappear in the next." Huntington reaches the obvious conclusion...
...this increasingly depressing outcome to America's creedal passion periods? A conflict between "history and progress," Huntington explains, one that involves the difficulty of campaigning for the old ways, made more difficult by the inertia of modern institutions. But a more convincing explanation might be this: that many Americans, not out of patriotism but out of callous economic or political self-interest, have perverted the American Creed itself (and not, as Huntington argues, just the institutional reforms that emerge from it) to hold people in bondage. It is no accident, it seems to me, that words like rights and liberty...