SOME MOYNIHANISMS

Excerpts from speeches, essays and interviews:

POST-VIET NAM. Nations lose wars, and there are almost always consequences that are not so much political as social.

[In the U.S.] the elites found themselves assaulted from within. Not to put too fine a point on it, their children would not fight in their war. Before it was over, the ROTC building at Harvard had been converted into a day-care center. Worse, a singularly derelict day-care center. . . as if fecundity itself had been discredited and shame was everywhere. Time heals such hurts.

GUILT. The Marxist argument has a superior capacity to induce guilt, and [America's capacity to absorb] guilt is what makes us most human as well as, at times, a bit absurd. It is said that if a Communist regime were to take over in the Sahara, there would in time be a shortage of sand. We shall doubtless in time have tested that hypothesis, but we can be fairly confident that to the very end there would be those in the West convinced that the sand had gone to build swimming pools for the rich--in the West. Yeats sensed the mood: "Come fix upon me that accusing eye/I thirst for accusation."

ORDERLY PROCEDURE. When procedure is destroyed, liberty is destroyed. It is not an aspect of governance. It is the essence of government.

HUNGER. The Third World must feed itself and this will not be done by suggesting that Americans eat too much.

THIRD WORLD REGIMES. There is no nation so poor that it cannot afford free speech, but there are few elites which will put up with the bother of it.

SOCIALISM. Everywhere save in Europe and a few English-speaking outposts, democratic socialism has become steadily less democratic. We cannot know whether this is because socialism produced demands on government which made democracy impossible, or because socialism was never nearly so democratic as we thought.

AMERICA'S FAULTS. Am I embarrassed to speak for a less than perfect democracy? Not one bit. Find me a better one. Do I suppose there are societies which are free of sin? No I don't. Do I think ours is on balance incomparably the most hopeful set of human relations the world has? (I mean by ours those two-dozen-odd democracies of the world.) Yes, I do. Have we done obscene things? Yes, we have. How did our people learn about them? They learned about them on television, in the newspapers.

AN AMERICAN REVIVAL. Out of the decline of the West there will, I sense, emerge a rise in spirits. We have shortened our lines. We are under attack. [But] there is nothing in our culture that suggests we will not in the end defend ourselves successfully. We are the party of liberty. Always have been, even when least true to it. As the lights go out in the rest of the world, they shine all the brighter here.

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