Are we trying to return to those days of Cold War Glory?
Posted: Wed May 23, 2018 7:47 pm
A friend posted this earlier.
nplusonemag.com/issue-30/politics/Goodbye Cold War
An interesting perspective here, and a history lesson.
It seems that we are trying to shrug off the advances of civilization that were a result of the end of the global war, and the building of a "New World Order" spawned by the Cold War.
Would we have actually gone to the Moon if the Russians had not put up Sputnik?
I remember reading in the later 80s that the collapse of the Soviet Union would lead to the downfall of Western Civilization. I remember the idea being criticized by many of the pundits of the day, and yet, in the second decade of the new Century, I suspect that the author of that piece may be feeling a bit justified.
I wish I could find that article, now, just to see how much seems prophetic now.
An interesting bit:
But as pre-cold-war reformers understood, American political institutions actually require precisely the opposite to work: a near-angelic degree of social cohesion (if not agreement on political ends) among empowered elites. The cold-war order had in fact been forged on two related facts. The first was an organized working class that helped deliver the supermajorities needed to defeat barriers to mass democracy in the 1930s, and then mustered enough electoral strength in the decades that followed to expand, or at least protect, the social safety net their efforts had secured. Just as essential, the confrontation with the Soviet Union fostered cohesion among political elites in ways that produced the conditions for compromise, most dramatically evidenced during the period of 1960s civil rights legislation. When the Republican senator Everett Dirksen helped break the Southern filibuster of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, declaring, “The time has come for equality of opportunity. . . . It will not be stayed or denied,†he was speaking the same liberal universalist language as Lyndon Johnson and was motivated, regardless of the partisan divide, by much the same vision of the country and its global mission.
nplusonemag.com/issue-30/politics/Goodbye Cold War
An interesting perspective here, and a history lesson.
It seems that we are trying to shrug off the advances of civilization that were a result of the end of the global war, and the building of a "New World Order" spawned by the Cold War.
Would we have actually gone to the Moon if the Russians had not put up Sputnik?
I remember reading in the later 80s that the collapse of the Soviet Union would lead to the downfall of Western Civilization. I remember the idea being criticized by many of the pundits of the day, and yet, in the second decade of the new Century, I suspect that the author of that piece may be feeling a bit justified.
I wish I could find that article, now, just to see how much seems prophetic now.
An interesting bit:
But as pre-cold-war reformers understood, American political institutions actually require precisely the opposite to work: a near-angelic degree of social cohesion (if not agreement on political ends) among empowered elites. The cold-war order had in fact been forged on two related facts. The first was an organized working class that helped deliver the supermajorities needed to defeat barriers to mass democracy in the 1930s, and then mustered enough electoral strength in the decades that followed to expand, or at least protect, the social safety net their efforts had secured. Just as essential, the confrontation with the Soviet Union fostered cohesion among political elites in ways that produced the conditions for compromise, most dramatically evidenced during the period of 1960s civil rights legislation. When the Republican senator Everett Dirksen helped break the Southern filibuster of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, declaring, “The time has come for equality of opportunity. . . . It will not be stayed or denied,†he was speaking the same liberal universalist language as Lyndon Johnson and was motivated, regardless of the partisan divide, by much the same vision of the country and its global mission.