Word: moynihans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a great minder of Senate traditions and a stirring elected intellectual, perhaps Washington's last. But he sponsored no major legislation, was not the prophet he thinks he was--and never learned the difference between being right and being effective...
...begins Jacob Weisberg's latest New York Times Magazine feature on Senator Moynihan, an article whose depth of thought and research is matched only by its extraordinary levels of personal attack. The quote above is representative: Perhaps the issue of legislation can be verified, but notes on the Senator's thoughts on his own behavior represent significant presumptions for a reader of any political leaning...
...collapse of the Soviet Empire - and therefore, the end of the Cold War, the defining, nuke-menacing global reality for several generations? The computer? The mapping of the human genome? The revolution in science, communications, technology, medicine, all of which have transformed human life in the years since Moynihan came to work in the New Frontier. Globalization? (Global Americanization?) Triumph of markets, death of ideology, the liberating but culture-killing ascent of money as the planetary measure of worth. The Copernican change in the roles of men and women, because of the pill, the sexual revolution, the women's liberation...
...Many of these are connected, in chaotic ways. Moynihan focused on one dramatic strand of an overall pattern...
What is the unifying principle? Most of the social changes began under the heading of the Breakdown of Authority - a vast subversion (liberating or disastrous, depending on your point of view) that started in the '60s, just after Moynihan came to Washington, and altered every American institution, from the presidency to the military, the universities, the churches, the family. A regenerative turbulence, lasting through the '70s, began with l?se-majest? as a way of life but laid the foundations of a society new and different - and in many ways better...