E.J. Dionne
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Washington Post writer E.J. Dionne's beliefs about the relationship between the American population and American polity is pretty clear from the title of his book: Why Americans Hate Politics: The Death of the Democratic Process. Whether or not one actually believes this claim to be true - and by the end of the book I was not convinced that it was - Dionne clearly does not hate politics. In no small measure, one has the feeling that Dionne wrote this book because he was honestly interested in figuring out why it is that Americans do not vote, do not get involved in the political process, do not respect their leaders. Dionne's examination of the relationship between the American people and our government are incisive and as well as being just a little mournful. Dionne himself clearly does not hate politics, and he wishes that Americans at both ends of the political spectrum - as well as those few who remain in the middle - could exhibit both a little more civility and a little more willingness to acknowledge that we are responsible for our own government. The fact that he both clearly believes simultaneously in the vitality of this task as well as its near-impossibility gives the book much of its emotional and intellectual weight (Levy 41).The roots of this unsatisfactory relationship between Americans and the leaders who represent them and who speak for them lie in large measure - Dionne argues - in the 1960s. He is not the first person to make this argument, for the sixtie
. . .
the 1950s - and the Cold War and anti-Communist propaganda - set up the rise of the particular kind of liberalism (and anti-liberalism) that defined the 1960s, as Love (1992) agrees. He describes the ways in which the sixties gave birth to two different sets of stereotypes that still inform American political debate.
The left often seeks advantage by contrasting a heroic and generous spirit ascribed to that time with a "culture of selfishness" that is said to have taken root afterward. The right often casts the sixties as a time of disorder, degeneracy, and cultural collapse, contrasting tat period with a healthier era of work and "entrepreneurship" that followed (p. 32).
These different positions give rise to the stereotypical (at least from the point of the opposition) partisan on each side. On the one side (looking from the left towards the rights) there is the following view:
In the heroic account, the young radicals are pictured as people who took the liberal creed at its word and found the injustices of modern America, notably racial discrimination, intolerable. Freed by prosperity to contemplate life more thoughtfully than their economically pressed parents, these young rebels sought to throws off personal constraints
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Approximate Word count = 1462
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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