Word: consensus
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...first weeks and months of social revolution following the Lisbon Spring of 1974 suggested that a united people was advancing toward its goals. But since the failed right-wing coups of September 1974 and especially, March 1975, it has become apparent that no consensus exists among ordinary Portuguese on the pace or the methods for the nation's transition to socialism, nor does agreement truly exist yet on the fact of revolution itself. Too many Portuguese, poisoned by the years when the fascist rulers identified all proposals for reform as Communist conspiracies, still identify socialism with atheism and totalitarian government...
Other reasons are less obvious but perhaps more important. As University of Pennsylvania Historian Michael Zuckerman points out, the colonies before and during the Revolution were made up of isolated communities that used a common method to achieve political consensus, mobilize for collective action, and control crime: the public manipulation of reputations and the creation of a powerful nexus of human interdependence. Majority opinion not only dominated political decision making, but controlled most public and much private conduct as well. This is why there was such frequent resort to humiliation as a penalty. Stocks, pillory, and tar and feathers were...
Very possibly we are seeing the beginning of some consensus on how to maintain the Postal Service. At least I am struck by the fact that knowledgeable people who may have dissimilar points of view on other matters have lately expressed remarkably similar ideas about the postal dilemma...
Finest Hour. With her occasional bias of the 1960s, Kearns tends to belittle L.B. J.'s politics of consensus. But she understands that consensus was needed after John Kennedy's assassination and that Johnson provided it in what was his finest hour. Reaching the presidency on that grim November day was no joy to Johnson, as he explained: "For millions of Americans, I was still illegitimate, a naked man with no presidential covering, a pretender to the throne. And then there was Texas, my home, the home of both the murder and the murder of the murderer...
Kilbridge said yesterday that the committee of chairmen reached its decision "by consensus," declining to specify how individual members of the panel reacted to the proposal...