Word: consensus
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...there is any broad consensus in the U.S. on energy policy, it is that the nation must cut back on fuel consumption and reduce its dependence on foreign oil. But voluntarism has failed. How, then, should the power of Government be used in a large democracy to make citizens consume less energy? President Ford's package of tariffs and taxes is aimed at raising the prices of gasoline, heating oil and other petroleum products in the hope that the market mechanism will yield a reduction in demand. Ford's complex, costly and contentious proposal has not only stirred...
Floor Fight. Similarly, the energy proposals grew into a consensus among a different group of advisers. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger early convinced Ford of the necessity of a tough conservation program. That was urgently needed, he argued, to stop the hemorrhage of dollars to oil-exporting countries and demonstrate to the other oil-importing countries, which the U.S. is trying to weld into a coordinated bloc for bargaining with the OPEC cartel, that the U.S. really means to reduce imports. But Kissinger played little part in putting together the details of the proposals. That was done by a group...
...they cut through convention and go right to the heart of the matter--any matter. Take the idea of a university. Most of the time, nobody admits to knowing what it is. President Bok announces the time has come to revolutionize it and re-establish a consensus that will last 20 years, Dean Rosovsky sets up six or seven task forces to discuss it. In the meantime things limp along somehow without their assistance, and late in December everyone goes off, still in the dark, to celebrate the season of peace and goodwill. Bok says an important point...
WHAT,THEN,distinguished such benevolent maneuvering from the nefarious language employed by Nixon, who also could claim that he was attempting to build a consensus of social groups? Johnson was sincere, Fairlie responds; Nixon lacked conviction in his own values. And with this we see that at bottom Fairlie differs little from Newman, with his evil grin on his face as he turns to a page in the O.E.D., or from Schlesinger, aloft on a white horse and extending his lance-like pen. The precise-writing journalist, the university sage, the charismatic politician: in each case power is wielded...
Democracy will require more than literary appeals to consensus and true words. It will require another concept that is conspicuously missing from these discussions of writing: communication. Until groups in power stop dictating rules and regulations and take fuller account of grievances from those groups out of power, democracy will continue to be as elusive as it was during the verbicidal days of Watergate...