Word: jacksonian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...even psychic pretensions. Today, snobbery is back in more familiar channels. A generation of high-gloss magazines (Connoisseur, Architectural Digest, House and Garden, for example) flourishes by telling Americans what the right look is. The American ideal of the Common Man seems to have got lost somewhere; the Jacksonian theme was overwhelmed by the postwar good life and all the dreamy addictions of the best brand names. The citizen came to be defined not so much by his political party as by his consumer preferences. It might be instructive to compare the style of the White House under Ronald Reagan...
...escape the pain and depression." He never ceased his long-distance political work or bailed out of classes altogether. But the costs cannot be recovered--the long periods of isolation, the decision to drop plans for a senior honors thesis. "It was going to be on Jacksonian era conceptions of the American Revolution....It was something that would have been the great challenge. It became impossible." He also lost an opportunity to travel to Germany after graduation on a Rotary Club fellowship because of doubts about his health...
...struggles of the 1960s did not involve conflicts between partisans of different principles. What the 1960s did involve was a reaffirmation of traditional American ideals and values." Indeed, Huntington insists, the same is true of all four periods of activism ("creedal passion") in our history--the Revolutionary era, the Jacksonian period, the Progressive era and the 1960s and early 70s. "In sum, creedal passion periods involve intense efforts by large numbers of Americans to return to first principles," an "American creed" represented by vague and symbolic words like freedom, equality, justice, and individual rights, and marked by a pervasive "antipower...
...like are such words, held close and uttered reverently by radicals and reactionaries, apologists and activists, crusaders and cops. So to say that 60s activists shared some belief in those goals is correct, but to link them too closely to the campaigners of the Progressive era of the Jacksonian period may be an exaggeration. By the end of the period, the leader, and many of the followers, were angry and bitter, they wanted liberty, freedom, and equality, and they mistrusted power, but--in their intense frustration--they were willing, at least rhetorically, to tear the whole American construct down. Some...