Word: freedom
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville famously opposed freedom with equality, suggesting that the passion for the latter would always override the will for individual liberty. At present, we are confronted with an exception to his rule, as popular majorities assert their collective will by denying same-sex couples the equal legal standing they themselves enjoy. While America’s participatory democracy is in most cases something to be elevated and emulated, in the particular case of minority rights, electoral majorities should not have the final word. This is especially true when popular sentiment demands changes in the constitutions...
...Search for Order In America, political majorities live or die at the intersection of two public yearnings: for freedom and for order. A century ago, in the Progressive Era, modern American liberalism was born, in historian Robert Wiebe's words, as a "search for order." America's giant industrial monopolies, the progressives believed, were turning capitalism into a jungle, a wild and lawless place where only the strong and savage survived. By the time Roosevelt took office during the Great Depression, the entire ecosystem appeared to be in a death spiral, with Americans crying out for government to take control...
...everyone, it meant stifling conformity, a society suffocated by rules about how people should dress, pray, imbibe and love. In 1962, Students for a Democratic Society spoke for what would become a new, baby-boom generation "bred in at least modest comfort," which wanted less order and more freedom. And it was this movement for racial, sexual and cultural liberation that bled into the movement against Vietnam and assembled in August 1968 in Grant Park...
...Traditional liberalism died there because Americans - who had once associated it with order - came to associate it with disorder instead. For a vast swath of the white working class, racial freedom came to mean riots and crime; sexual freedom came to mean divorce; and cultural freedom came to mean disrespect for family, church and flag. Richard Nixon and later Reagan won the presidency by promising a new order: not economic but cultural, not the taming of the market but the taming of the street...
...bash heads, marches in gay-rights parades. Culturally, liberalism isn't that scary anymore. Younger Americans - who voted overwhelmingly for Obama - largely embrace the legacy of the '60s, and yet they constitute one of the most obedient, least rebellious generations in memory. The culture war is ending because cultural freedom and cultural order - the two forces that faced off in Chicago in 1968 - have turned out to be reconcilable after...