(3089/898) Political tectonics

1779) Something is going on at the deep levels of political tectonics. A country cannot go through the cultural changes this country is going through without a more substantial political manifestation than we have had to date. This sustained and growing alienation between the public and the people whom it elects is going to be the central dynamic of politics for the next ten years or more. Until there is a rectifying of the disjunction between the political class and the public, we are going to go through more of these unpredicted events.

Tony Blankley
press secretary to Newt Gingrich
quoted by Michael Kelly in
"The Political Scene: Uninvited Guests" in
The New Yorker (3/11/1996)

1780) In July of 1994, the Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press, in Washington D.C., conducted a national survey of three thousand eight hundred voters and concluded that the two major parties had splintered into a multiplicity of subgroups, all of which derived their primary political identity not from either party but from their own subgroup. The Times Mirror study broke down the Republicans into anti-government, pro-business "enterprisers," religious and culturally conservative "moralists," and libertarians. Aligned with the Democrats were liberal "seculars" (college-educated urban and suburban sophisticates), centrist New Democrats, old New Dealers, and "the partisan poor." Between the two parties the survey identified a "detached center," dominated by what it called "new economic independents," which is to say those anxious middle-class jobholders who account for nearly twenty per cent of the total registered vote and support whoever best addresses their concerns at the moment. The Times Mirror study did find one common thread: a conviction that the politicians whom they had elected to office were not serving their interests.

Michael Kelly
"The Political Scene: Uninvited Guests" in
The New Yorker (3/11/1996)

1781) [Afrocentrism] creates a myth; and myths of this kind are disguised statements not about the past but about the present. At some level, the belief will persist that the case really has been - must have been - established, and that refutations, however detailed, are just another instance of the racial prejudices of the intellectual establishment.

Jasper Griffin
"Anxieties of Influence" in
New York Review of Books (6/20/1996)
[review of Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism
Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (1996)
by Mary Lefkowitz and Black Athena Revisited (1996),
edited by Mark Lefkowitz and Guy Maclean Rogers]

1782) Government did right by me. I'm the first one to admit that fact. No, let's back up for a minute - I don't just admit that fact, I savor it. I hold it up as an example of what government should be in the business of doing: providing opportunity. You will never hear me say that I am a self-made man. I am not. My parents gave me their love, their example, and the benefit of their hard work. And the government gave me a big hand.

James Carville
We're Right They're Wrong, A Handbook for
Spirited Progressives (1996)
"MicheleW", personal e-mail (6/3/1996)