When I started this blog some 14 months ago, I told myself that I would never devote a post wholly to a lengthy quote from a source, without adding my own comment. Never is a long time...
Looking at the many pages of America in Our Time (see previous post) which I've dog-eared, I've come across just such a long quote, worth sharing without further comment. This sums up Godfrey Hodgson's analysis and argument admirably. The emphasis is mine.
The American governmental and intellectual elite made a discover in those years [1960-72] that can be compared to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. They had assumed that they could study the world with objectivity. They had also assumed that they could change it by exerting money, or force, or both, with surgical dispassion, without themselves being changed. They found that can't be done.
They supposed that they could intervene in Indochina as if from Mount Olympus and that their intervention would have no effect on the United States. They were wrong.
They supposed that it would be possible to eliminate segregation in the South without changing the social relations or political institutions of the country as a whole. That was wrong, too. And when they discovered that mistake, they went on to imagine that they could get rid of the poverty and discrimination that they had rather belatedly discovered in the North without that effort, either, having any great effect on themselves. And that was the worst miscalculation of all.
They discredited their own doctrines. They lost the confidence of the majority...
Such a dénouement...raises the possibility that it wasn't so much that something went wrong with their plans as that there was something wrong with the liberals' perception of reality all along. And in fact if we look once again at the major assumptions of the liberal consensus...it is plain that each of them has been at least apparently or partially discredited in one way or another by the events of the sixties. As a system, the liberal ideology is in ruins.
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