Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and by Michael E. Latham

By Michael E. Latham

Supplying new perception at the highbrow and cultural dimensions of the chilly conflict, Michael Latham unearths how social technological know-how idea contributed to shaping American overseas coverage throughout the Kennedy management. He exhibits how, in the middle of America's protracted fight to include communism within the constructing global, the idea that of worldwide modernization moved past its beginnings in academia to develop into a motivating ideology in the back of coverage decisions.After tracing the increase of modernization thought in American social technology, Latham analyzes the way in which its middle assumptions motivated the Kennedy administration's Alliance for growth with Latin the US, the production of the Peace Corps, and the strategic hamlet application in Vietnam. yet as he demonstrates, modernizers went past insisting at the relevance of America's event to the dilemmas confronted via impoverished nations. trying to speed up the stream of international societies towards a liberal, democratic, and capitalist modernity, Kennedy and his advisers additionally reiterated a miles deeper feel in their personal nation's important strengths and crucial benevolence. on the top of the chilly warfare, Latham argues, modernization recast older ideologies of appear future and imperialism.

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Flag burning is seen as an important component of democratic dialogue because it, and other acts of dissent like it, call attention to the failure of the country to live up to its ideals. The Bill of Rights progressives seek to encourage and protect the Emersonian dissenter,58 and flag burners squarely fit that model. But the dissent model is not premised exclusively on notions that individuals thrive when they feel free to speak out. It is not just a self-expression model. The dissent model assumes that in large-scale societies powerful interest groups and self-seeking politicians and bureaucrats are unavoidable.

53 The flag amendment was uniquely threatening to progressives because it struck a symbolic dagger at the notion that the First Amendment is an important reflection of our “profound national commitment” to protect dissent. No doubt, the symbolic effect of a flag-burning statute upheld by the Supreme Court would be disheartening, but the relative rhetorical and constituting power of statutes, decisions, and the Constitution are not the same. The scriptural Constitution is a more important cultural symbol, and it constitutes us in ways that statutes upheld by the Supreme Court do not.

The connection of liberals (and many radicals) to the country is not just a Hobbesian bargain; it is a form of nationalism,89 a matter of cultural and political identity. It may be thought that this is a benign form of nationalism, and to a large extent it is. 90 Nonetheless, the liberal position on free speech rights has political costs. Some of the subtle political costs are intrinsically bound up with the flag-burning controversy or the controversy over funding of the arts. In order to uphold their position, liberals91 have championed the view that this country values and prizes dissent, freedom, liberty, the marketplace of ideas, democratic dialogue, and/or controversy.

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