Word: moynihans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...side, Moynihan contends, a certain mindset has gained sway since the Second World War that bears responsibility for our loss of ground. It has involved the elevation of what he defines as "high politics"--arms and strategy--and the demotion of "low politics"--questions of political and cultural values and institutions. "A kind of male/female principle took hold," he argues...
...Moynihan explains that as U.N. Ambassador, he was attempting to throw down a challenge to the liberal establishment (he never defines what that now means for him) to take low politics seriously--and to the Third World to recognize liberalism's capacity to fight back. In Moynihan's view, it was necessary to denounce each assault on democracy, no matter how indirect or symbolic, for implicit in each assault on our system was a campaign to extinguish democracy as an idea...
There is an irony here, though, that provides the key to Moynihan's view of world politics. Moynihan continues to use the language of "containment," while even condemning its narrow militarist focus. It is the vocabulary of the Cold War warmed up again: totalitarianism is "advancing," the liberal elites are shrinking from "retaliation," the West has begun to sink into "irreversible patterns of appeasement." This is not to detract from the importance of Moynihan's initial premise: ideology has come to assume a higher profile in international relations, and the Soviets and the Chinese have certainly been better at addressing...
...PROBLEM is that Moynihan fails to make some crucial distinctions, and also to face some undeniable realities. To begin with, he never stipulates his exact criteria for those states he classes as totalitarian: he himself admits, for example, that there are states with formal constitutional rights that systematically ignore them, as well as despotic regimes that welcome large margins of economic liberalism. He also fails to point out that states are more than just receptacles of ideas. They have also become brokers of power, based on their natural resources and geopolitical positioning. This means that the U.S. cannot hope...
...realized that the current phase of Third World grandstanding against Western imperialism is also a reaction to individual histories of economic exploitation and political tampering at the hands of liberal internationalism. There is also the historical reality that state socialism has been a structural imperative in many countries. Moynihan never pauses to discuss these sorts of complexities, however; to him, the world must be seen in sharp contrasts, in terms of "us" and "them." Yet if the U.S. hopes to better promote the cause of liberal ideas in the future, it must learn to better understand these histories and experiences...