Word: reform
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Party discipline, waning in the mid-'60s, had its last hurrah at the 1968 Democratic Convention, where the barons forced the nomination of Hubert Humphrey. That provoked a spasm of reform that had stunning (and debilitating) success. The first in a series of party commissions radically altered the rules in favor of "open democracy." Increasingly, delegates chosen by primary or caucus would be bound to actual candidates rather than to party leaders who might use them in brokerage. Though the movement was a Democratic invention, Republicans were also affected because many changes were imposed by Democratic legislatures...
Since no central authority had the power to establish a logical sequence of contests, a few enterprising state party officials were able to seize the initiative. Iowa Democrats moved fastest, pushing their 1972 caucuses ahead of the New Hampshire primary. George McGovern, chairman of the first reform commission, understood the new dynamics well. The obscure Senator from neighboring South Dakota had both cultural affinity and the antiwar movement going for him in Iowa...
Gorbachev's admonition, delivered Jan. 8 to Soviet editors and published last week by TASS, was another clear sign that his reform drive is running into stiff opposition. His economic restructuring program, known as perestroika, entered a bold new phase on New Year's Day, when 60% of Soviet industry was put on a "self-financing" basis. The new system allows enterprises to decide what to produce and where to sell it, but it also requires them to earn a profit or go out of business. Those elements of capitalist-style risk taking are frighteningly foreign to managers accustomed...
...widespread among Soviet citizens, who are being asked to work harder but have yet to see any tangible benefits in the form of increased supplies of better- quality goods. Party and government bureaucrats fear lost privileges and deviations from socialist ideology. Even some of the Soviet leader's reform- minded allies have reservations. Economist Gavril Popov, a Gorbachev adviser, has argued publicly that the self-financing plan is doomed to become a "fiction." Writing in the newspaper Sovetskaya Kultura, he said Soviet plants would still sell most of their goods to the government...
...claim the middle ground, telling Soviet editors, "We are frequently criticized by some from the right and some from the left." Referring indirectly to last year's ouster of Boris Yeltsin as head of the Moscow Communist Party organization, he denied that the move was a setback for reform. He indicated that Yeltsin, once a close ally, had pushed too hard for sweeping changes. As for criticism from the right, Gorbachev insisted that his initiatives were actually strengthening socialism rather than creating a Western-style "private-owner mentality" -- something that could not develop, he argued, as long as the state...