Interesting you say that, Wattenburg asked him why he was criticized by some for being "afraid" to conclude a fundamentalist grand design from his scholarly overview.
He said he's generally optimistic but the data isn't yet conclusive. Quite an amusing comment when you think about it..
I haven't read his other stuff to give that context.
I like your other comment, where a Communist state would have an effect on the US state of religion. But imagine if, say, JFK had continued and later acted as an elder statesman. Religious, but intelligent and connected with the people in ways never before seen, allowing an entirely different American zeitgeist to flower. I look at the retrospectives in amazement at the decency that's been lost.
Instead we got a successor who admitted seeing "a damn Murder Incorporated" and doing nothing about it, followed by the generational damage of the Vietnam debacle. Followed by crooks, a micromanager, and a succession of dummies, but one.
This pendulum may swing back, but it's got a very long periodicity. We have a lot to re-learn.
The "Warrior Politics" has to be an amazing bit of RANDian effluvia, it sounds like a think tank's version of Mein Kampf.
We're starting to get a lot of that. It would be terrific if someone could catalogue all of that echoing propaganda, by paragraph and concept. You could trace much of its sources that way. |
