Word: vietnam
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Long before the Angolan civil war was rendered newsworthy as a backdrop for CIA disclosures, foreign policy foibles and the restive ghost of Vietnam, there was a war raging in Angola. And it now appears that in the next few years there will be a still more intense guerrilla war raging in Angola. Few have understood the real issue at stake in this conflict--majority rule--buried as it were beneath the stifling mantle of superpower politics. But if Vietnam has taught little else, surely we have learned that the will of a people, regardless of the odds against them...
...believe that the Angolan people, after having fought 14 years against Portuguese minority rule, will willingly submit to Russian-backed minority rule is to mock the conception of liberation and genuine human progress. The Americans found in Vietnam what the Russians are quickly finding in Angola, a hostile, guerrilla-organized rural majority intent on victory...
...with single issues), which gave rise to popular disaffection (since our polarized opinions could not be accommodated by the government). The public has thus developed expectations which are impossible for the governing elites to satisfy. The solution, according to the author of the U.S. forced-draft urbanization program in Vietnam, entails a cutback on democratic decision-making in areas like universities where the "claims of expertise, seniority, experience and special talents" cancel out the "claims of democracy." Huntington also hopes that some measure of "apathy and non-involvement on the part of some individuals and groups" will replace the activism...
...logical conclusion of all this is S.M. Lipset's piece, the most bizarre in the collection, which finds a peculiar American streak of moralism at fault in most political conflicts of this century--Joe McCarthy's witch-hunts, Vietnam demonstrators, Daniel Ellsberg and Nixon are examples of the perception of politics as "a struggle between good and evil forces rather than as a series of collective bargaining issues." Hopefully, Lipset writes, the two-party system will absorb and then compromise the moralistic passions of the present-day Left and Right--the worst since the early 20s--as the parties have...
...experience of the last ten years, largely, which seems to inform the Public Interest conservatives' viewpoint. As members of the government and influential social scientists, many of them constructed and supported the anti-poverty and welfare programs and the Vietnam policy which led to popular revulsion. More importantly, the government of the '60s was headed, for the first time, by conscious elitists--Bundy, the Rostows, McNamara, and Ball, many of whom the essayists in the Public Interest cite in their papers and served with on faculties. Rather than admit the failure of elitist political leadership cut off from vulgar opinion...