FORGING THE LIBERAL CONSENSUS #3.
Cultural Basis: Affluence, Domesticity, Normalization.
Suburbanization: Maximizing economic rewards and psychic benefits of Cold War. Suburban housing project promises comfort, security and racial homogeneity.
Automobility and Consumer Durables: Car as primary sign of American freedom and abundance. Key link in the welfare-warfare economy, guaranteeing high profits for corporations, the benefit of conversion between defense-related and consumption related goods, and promise of labor peace through wage and productivity agreements with unions.
Domestic Ideology: Women as "Homemakers."" Familial centered heterosexuality as the basis of social order.
EXCERPTS FROM NSC-'68, April 7th, 1950.
Thus unwillingly our free society finds itself mortally challenged by the Soviet system. No other value system is so wholly irreconcilable with ours, so implacable in its purpose to destroy ours, so capable of turning to its own uses the most dangerous and divisive trends in our own society, no other so skillfully and powerfully evokes the elements of irrationality in human nature everywhere, and no other has the support of a great and growing center of military power. .
B. OBJECTIVES .
The objectives of a free society are determined by its fundamental values and by the necessity for maintaining the material environment in which they flourish. Logically and in fact, therefore, the Kremlin's challenge to the United States is directed not only to our values but to our physical capacity to protect their environment. It is a challenge which encompasses both peace and war and our objectives in peace and war must take account of it. .
1. Thus we must make ourselves strong, both in the way in which we affirm our values in the conduct of our national life, and in the development of our military and economic strength. .
2. We must lead in building a successfully functioning political and economic system in the free world.