Word: realisms
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...Solidarity Leader Lech Walesa and his fellow union leaders refused to be intimidated. Instead, Solidarity's National Commission charged the Polish Politburo with "a lack of realism" and rejected the official "scenario of provocation." Once again, the scene seemed to be set for a showdown, with the Soviets waiting none too patiently in the wings...
...ideological American Tourister ensemble; it may not hold too much, and its aesthetic is function, not beauty, but the damn stuff almost never breaks. "The message of this book," he writes on the second page of The Road From Here, "is the blending of realism and compassion in a manner that does not disrupt society...
...realism, he means in most cases the maxims of America's Dwight Eisenhower: The Soviet Union is an aggressor power whose arms buildup we must match dollar for dollar or face extinction; people will only work if a monetary incentive exists; the realm of international relations must be dominated by conflict. By compassion, he means the axioms of the New Deal and the Vietnam generation: we must give some minimum amount of aid to those who do not compete effectively in our economy; we should avoid full-scale invasions of other nations, especially if we do so in support...
...ANYWAY, IF one's goal is to compromise compassion with realism, then it would seem wiser to start from the point of defending absolute compassion. There will certainly always be someone around who is eager to defend absolute realism; it seems to be an inbred American intellectual trait. And so the compromise will be reached further toward realism if you start at some reasonable middle ground. Tsongas doesn't seem to like the messiness of negotiation; much better, he says, if both sides just decide beforehand that they'll agree on everything. But what if both sides don't decide...
Criticism that he was merely rejecting liberal values without offering a nonconservative alternative prompted Tsongas to expand his ideas into a book. He writes: "The core of this book is realism -nonideological, clear-eyed realism." It is devoted to the analysis of eight salient "realities" that will determine America's future: energy sources, Soviet aggressiveness, economic growth rates, finite natural resources, stirrings in the Third World, international trade, an overburdened environment and inflation...