The years between 1944 and 1949—Marshall Plan, GI Bill, the Cold War, fiscal and monetary planning, cultural and economic regimentation--set the stage for the next half century... In the same way that a socialized economy cannot put new technology into effect, and thus yields no civilizational advance, the world of ideas was frozen into a pattern that was fixed and unchanging. There were official texts, official journals, official schools from which all lower schools took their marching orders, and public schools became extensions of this overarching, top-down system of idea enforcement. Christian churches put US flags in their sanctuaries, baseball fans sang the national anthem, American families had the president’s picture on the wall, as did children’s TV shows, and everyone watched the same news anchors and read the same news feeds. There was a national culture that the neocons say we should recapture – and it was awful. [More]
The New Intellectuals
