Word: moralizer
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...still believe Carter will be renominated, perhaps because many still doubt Kennedy will seek the prize. Moreover, Carter's stepped-up criticism of the Congress was greeted by more than half of those polled as positive. He gets good marks for his Middle East policies, for his moral fervor, his personal appearance, his personality and such abilities as speaking and bringing people together. Unlike other Presidents who have fallen as low as Carter in the polls, there seems to be little personal animosity directed at the man in the White House...
...morality campaign of 1976, a Connally candidacy would have been almost unthinkable. But the pendulum of American political preferences seems always swinging, moving from a fear of an imperial leader to a fear of a weak one, from a desire for a moral President to a desire for a shrewd horse trader. So, as Johnson and Nixon begat Carter, now Carter could just conceivably beget John Connaly, if the horse-trading rancher can satisfy skeptical Americans that his steed is white and he will never come home with a spavined and one-eyed...
...less happily, is the simple moral that runs through almost all of his work. As Starbuck puts it, "We are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one." Yet Vonnegut does not believe that people are capable of doing so, at least not in a way that will make them happy. This leads to the static quality of his books: nothing much ever changes except to get a little worse. Some of the evidence Vonnegut offers is rigged: Starbuck comes to believe that wisdom does not exist and hence can not be used to improve...
...problems with the concept of decadence is that it has such a long moral shoreline, stretching from bleak and mountainously serious considerations of history to the shallow places where ideas evaporate 30 seconds after they splash. For all the range of its uses, decadence is a crude term. It houses fallacies. People think of decadence as the reason for the collapse of Rome, but the point is arguable. Rome at the height of its imperial power was as morally depraved as in its decline. Perhaps more...
...could construct a kind of "worst-case scenario" to prove that the U.S., with the rest of the West, has fallen into dangerous decline. The case might be argued thus: the nation's pattern is moral and social failure, embellished by hedonism. The work ethic is nearly as dead as the Weimar Republic. Bureaucracies keep cloning themselves. Resources vanish. Education fails to educate. The system of justice collapses into a parody of justice. An underclass is trapped, half out of sight, while an opulent traffic passes overhead. Religion gives way to narcissistic self-improvement cults...