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Introduction: Myron Magnet's The Dream and the Nightmare
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11249 |
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BOOK WORLD
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9 / 1993 |
362 Words |
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It has been said that every civilization is only one generation away from barbarism. A cursory review of the social ills of our nation's inner cities over the last thirty years suggests that our urban civilization is threatened within its very gates: The pathologies of pervasive crime, intractable poverty, drug addiction, homelessness, and welfare dependency have proven resistant to the most concerted efforts of the therapeutic state.
What has gone terribly wrong in the cities, argues Myron Magnet, can be traced to our very wrong perception of the causes of the problems since the cultural revolution of the 1960s. The Dream and the Nightmare, excerpted and discussed in the following pages, demonstrates that intellectual elites have consistently overlooked the difference culture makes on every front. The values of the counterculture have wreaked havoc on the country in general and the poor in particular.
Political scientist Larry Nachman ("Why the Dream Was Deferred," p. 294) gives an overview of the book and concludes that it is a call to restoration of America's core values. But Magnet is not without his critics. Feminist author Theresa Funiciello ("Keep the Mothers at Home," p. 304), without directly challenging Magnet's central thesis, faults Magnet for having a male bias and for suggesting remedies that would only increase federal intervention and welfare spending. An interview with Magnet (p. 312) explores his own intellectual odyssey from sixties radicalism to nineties conservatism. A key chapter of the book follows ("Victimizing the Poor," p. 314), in which Magnet argues that social policy experts as divergent as Michael Harrington (The Other America) and Charles Murray (Losing Ground) have overemphasized economic factors and
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