President Bush giving a speech to first responders in the aftermath of 9/11.
The 1970s marked an important turning point in the history of Western democracies. Having led their populations to the obscene carnage of World War II in reaction to Nazi aggression, the elites of North America and their non-communist European subjects understood — above all, for pragmatic reasons linked to the need to rebuild markets and industries — that it was in their interest to provide ordinary citizens of their societies with social and democratic rights and privileges seldom, if ever, seen in the history of humankind.
The effort was, for the most part, an enormous success. And therein lay precisely the problem: the masses who had grown up during the three decades following the war did not understand that the economic and governmental elites had no intention of allowing the regimes of supervised democracy of those years to evolve, over time, into true receptacles of the popular will.
The masses' inability to comprehend the implicit limits on their political agency was not a new problem. What was new were the restrictions on elite manoeuvrability imposed by the reality of the Cold War in this historical moment.
How could the elites resort to overwhelming violence, as they had traditionally done, to crush youthful rebellions in areas under their control when heavy-handedness of this type was precisely what they were criticizing day after day in their anti-communist propaganda?
Comment: At least the University hasn't disowned and cancelled him, as of yet. One wonders, though, if his days are numbered. You can't have University students getting even a brief glimpse of the truth. It interferes with the indoctrination programming.
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