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...survey research and concluded that an American malaise, a loss of faith in social institutions, was continuing unabated. Now, however, Lipset's view of the national climate has changed strikingly. "I think it will take some years for Americans to have digested the disappointment they felt over Viet Nam and Watergate," he says, "but I think we are witnessing a fundamental shift toward more positive attitudes about American institutions." Two-thirds of the respondents in a TIME-Yankelovich survey last month felt that things were going "very well" or "fairly well" in the U.S. It was the most upbeat...
...language of conventional, Decoration Day patriotism. Says Frank Quam, a farm-management teacher in Stewartville, Minn.: "Reagan is of that nature, the flag waving, and people like that." The Democrats, for their part, have a very tricky path to navigate. In a holdover from the supercharged politics of the Viet Nam War, many Democrats have been ill at ease with flag waving and the military trappings of national pride. Moreover, while Mondale must appeal to public worries about the monstrous deficit and the Reagan Administration's foreign policy stumbling, he cannot afford to seem a grim, party-pooping pessimist...
Though that latent urge never died, it grew robust only at the convergence of several trends and events. One crucial prerequisite: the country at last seems to be contemplating and unsnarling the residual complexities of the Viet Nam War. In Washington, the earth-and-black-granite monument to those who died in the war, which is not quite two years old, draws 12,000 visitors a day. Viet Nam Veteran Jack Wheeler, 39, a driving force behind it, is pleased. "More of the visitors are people my age who didn't go," says Wheeler, author of Touched with Fire...
...moved beyond the sense of powerlessness instilled by the Viet Nam debacle...
...Americans who came of age during the Viet Nam War, the patriotic impulse is tempered by their generational experience. "If patriotism is love of country, the land and communities, we'll buy that," says David McCauley, head of the Vermont American Friends Service Committee. "If it is just flag waving and adventurism in foreign policy, we won't." Jack Wheeler believes the disputes of the past 20 years permanently affected his peers' sense of citizenship. "The Viet Nam generation was an idealistic bunch of people," he told TIME Washington Correspondent Jay Branegan. "This idealism is fertile ground...