Word: moynihanized
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...when 15,000-plus people gathered in the Tercentenary Theater on the muggy afternoon of Commencement Day 1976, June 17, to hear Moynihan address the annual meeting of the Associated Harvard Alumni, they probably heard Pat Moynihan's parting shot to Harvard. Offering the domestic version of the doomsday-for-democracy spiel he perfected as U.N. ambassador, Moynihan theorized that America's "educated class" must take on the "challenge of reformation and reconstitution" to head off a "calamitous" fate at the hands of a young elite full of contempt for the liberal tradition of the West. The crowd--dominated...
...insightful vision into the problems of Western democracies like the United States, but for its condescension, alarmism and hack psychologizing conspicuously cloaked in a Kissingerian veil of scholarly objectivism. These may seem like unnecessarily--and for those who know me, uncharacteristically--bitter words. But I believe Moynihan was being either intellectually dishonest or arrogantly blind, two popular Cambridge mindsets that, once revealed, should be pilloried with all the venom of a congregation of offended Puritans. My anger is sharpened by the frightening prospect of Moynihan's taking a seat in the Senate, where he would have at least six years...
Examine how Moynihan argued his apocalyptic hypothesis. For one, he carefully ignored the substance of the counter-culture's ideal, in part by focussing snidely on the left's most visible and fickle wing, the "children of the rich." The academic-turned-politician also evasively classified the critique of the discontent within a broad framework of Western development, comparing the present to the late 1930s and 40s, periods in which, he claimed, intellectuals in the West were disaffected with "'bourgeois' values such as liberty and democracy." Thus the left's critique of the United States can remain merely a negative...
...Moynihan made no exploration of the future that the left envisions, a world in which men and women are not channeled to perform certain narrow, stereotypical roles, a world in which the natural environment is treated with respect, a world in which resources are allocated according to the principles of equality and justice. These may be naive dreams, but many people are quietly shaping their lives around them, disdaining standard goals to concentrate on changing their own values and those of individuals around them. But Moynihan can see only the scion of an upper-class family screaming through a bullhorn...
...Moynihan's pseudo-scholarly attack on the left on Commencement day grew radically more offensive as he offered contemporary society the couch and set into some armchair analysis. A few excerpts illustrate the profound insight of Moynihan's thinking: "I would suggest that a liberal culture does indeed succeed in breeding aggression out of its privileged class...I do not believe that the young elites of this moment who will explain away any act, howsoever monstrous, of Arab terrorists or New World dictatorships do so out of admiration. I believe they do so out of fear. And with this fear...