Word: cultism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Aside from proving people will do anything for money and that hip capitalism is alive and kicking, the fact that Jeremy Rifkin and Ted Howard actually were the ones who slapped this fast-selling paperback together (in about 15 minutes it seems) indicates just how pervasive cultism in American politics has become...
...First Family cultism is back in a big way. What makes Billy Carter and redneck power such a phenomenon is the same thing that brought his brother out of the peanut warehouse. Populism (which is the element Rifkin and Howard respond to) is only part of the story. Far more potent is the affected lack of sophistication. Being ordinary is fashionable and it doesn't matter that the manifestations of that ordinary style emerge in completely different ways in the two brothers--both ways work...
...uninitiated usually find conversations between Heyer addicts incomprehensible, since one of the marks of Heyer cultism is an intimate knowledge of the rituals of the peerage. Heyer's work is peppered with references to laudelets, phaetons, barques of frailty, diamonds of the first water, and vouchers to Almack's. A careful reader is also likely to be familiar with the origin of Lady Sally Jersey's nickname, the Prince Regent's confused marital status, and Lord Petersham's penchant for mixing snuff. Heyer's research into the lifestyle of the peerage may not have produced great sociological tracts...
...John Kennedy, too much authority has been given by Americans to their Presidents and too much has been expected of them. Harvard Divinity Professor Harvey Cox goes so far as to contend that the U.S. public surrounds the Oval Office with a mystique that approaches "a national quasi-religious cultism...
Barr is sincerely concerned that today's students are so distracted by political activism and youth cultism that academic work is being slighted. His remedy is more adult models ("happy, controlled, competent people"). "What students need," he once wrote, "is something to rebel against that is worthy of their respect-even of healthy and manageable fear...