Bringing the West to the Rest: The Transmission of Civilizing Knowledge

Abstract

On the surface, the first election of William Clinton appears to have signaled a major political and cultural shift in America, or at least a rejection of the Reagan-Bush legacy. Clinton’s platform certainly featured rhetorical repudiations of Reagan-Bush policies; Procter and Ritter (1996) argue that his inaugural address, for example, employed “regenerative rhetoric” (in the form of the political jeremiad) that included as one of its three themes an undermining of the community constructed by the Reagan and Bush administrations. Even more, his early calls for health care reform and nondiscrimination against gays and lesbians in the armed forces gave the electorate good reasons to expect his political wind to blow in a different direction. Yet Clinton refused to make a clean break with the conservative politics of the preceding twelve years. Once in office, his alternately liberal, centrist, and conservative decisions earned him much fascination and criticism in the press; moreover, he soon became stigmatized for his “flip-flops” and wishy-washy behavior.¹ Based on these observations, the descriptor “vacillating” might have applied to Clinton’s leadership equally as well as the centrist description.