Word: progressions
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...year after Mao's death, the Party hierarchy emerged victorious Deng Xiaoping, former Secretary General and now newly anointed as Vice Premier, led the return of the Party. With the legacy of poverty and ineffective educational and economic leadership, it is unlikely, despite new pragmatic rhetoric and uneven progress toward openness, that China will join the ranks of the advanced industrial powers before the 21st century...
...preachments seemed to have little effect, as the Shah set about building the most thoroughly Westernized nation in all of the Muslim world. The progress achieved in a deeply backward country was stunning. Petroleum revenues built steel mills, nuclear power plants, telecommunication systems and a formidable military machine, complete with U.S. supersonic fighters and missiles. Dissent was ruthlessly suppressed, in part by the use of torture in the dungeons of SAVAK, the secret police. It is still not clear how widespread the tortures and political executions were; but the Shah did not heed U.S. advice to liberalize his regime...
...From the Arab oil boycott of 1973 onward, the decade was bathed in a cold Spenglerian apprehension that the lights were about to go out, that history's astonishing material indulgence of the U.S. was about to end. Possibilities seemed to contract. Americans tutored in the gospels of progress began for the first time to peer at the future as a possible enemy. A few of them started waving pistols in the gas lines...
...Material progress advanced handsomely enough, but the psychology of the decade seemed to follow a downward trajectory. A consensus was lost, and authority seemed to operate only erratically. The nation split into single-interest power factions. The screws of the American machine jarred loose; the whole thing rattled. Yet any such bleak view of the decade is not entirely justified. Norman Mailer has observed that Americans are obsessed by the question of whether they behave virtuously or not; the ambiguities of the '70s may disturb their moral self-image, and with it, their yearning for clear-cut conclusions...
...gaveled into session last January, members talked solemnly about sensing a new mood of conservatism across the land, about voters demanding less spending, less legislation, less Government. "Go slow," warned the electorate, and Congress did just that. The mood lingered. When new crises forced new problems on Congress, progress remained slow. As they adjourned for the year-end holidays, the Senators and Representatives left unresolved some pressing national issues that they will have to confront when they reconvene...