Outsiders locking in

A detailed Summary of Outsiders locking in

In the United States something very odd happened during the period of time from the middle of the 1950's up to the impact of the crisis of the 1960's. For once in the storied history of the United States a majority of Americans accepted the same system of assumptions. This shared system of assumptions is known as the liberal consensus. The main reason there was such a thing as liberal consensus was because of the extreme economic growth we experienced in the U.S. during the post World War II era. However, the consensus didn't apply to one important group of people. These were the combat soldiers it the Vietnam War. Their experiences at home and abroad suggest that they were outsiders to the ideology that Godfrey Hodgson outlines in his book America In Our Time and that they were not motivated by the promises and values of the liberal consensus.

To understand what makes these soldiers outsiders we must first understand what the liberal consensus was. Hogson argues that the social and intellectual world view of the 1950's and early 1960's was based on the ideology that "capitalism was a revolutionary force for social change, that economic growth was supremely good because it obviated the need

for redistribution and social conflict, that class had no place in American politics." This is the reason for such a liberal consensus, but what is it really? First, the liberals consisted of the Democratic Party, middle class college students, the civil rights movement, and some members of the labor community. Also known as the Left, these groups of people shared a common belief in anti-communism, the rights of minorities, the willingness to accept the existence of the labor unions, and that the federal government had to play some role in the economic life of the U.S. capitalist system. "Since the consensus had made converts on the Right as well as on the Left, only a handful dissidents were excluded from the Big Tent: southern diehards, rural reactionaries, the more farouche and paranoid fringes of the radical Right, and the divided remnants of the old, Marxist, Left."(Hodgson 116) Not many people were left out of the "Big Tent".

In Illinois, for example, men who lived in towns with a median salary above $15,000 were four times less likely to die in the Vietnam war than those men who lived in towns were the salary was $5,000. Even though the U.S. had all these policies that were supposed to fair and undiscriminitory "those who fought and died in Vietnam were overwhelmingly drawn from the bottom half of the American social structure."(Appy 24) According to Appy eighty percent of the men who went to fight, for what they believed to be Vietnamese liberation, had no more than high school education.

The class free principles of the liberal consensus had long since been forgotten in the draft. The American working class ultimately shouldered the burden of what was known by the soldiers as "the war for nothing". The anti-communism fervor of the liberal consensus was no longer present in the soldiers or back home in the U.S. It has now become evident that the values and promises of the liberal consensus neither motivated nor even applied to the working class soldiers of Vietnam. When one takes a further look into the experiences of the soldiers at home and abroad it becomes very clear that, while the liberal consensus was the shared system of views at the time that, the argument presented by Hodgson did not apply to the combat soldiers of the Vietnam War.

The situation for the soldiers fighting the war was much worse than for those at home though. "Some Americans arrived in Vietnam convinced that no Vietnamese were to be trusted, that all were potential enemies, and that all of them were "gooks"."(Appy 132) The soldiers were fighting against two enemies in the jungles. They were fighting the Viet Cong and Ho Chi Minh's communist North Vietnamese forces. The Viet Cong consisted of many of the South Vietnamese that the soldiers had once thought they were brought in to protect. The strength of the anti-communism movement created by the liberal consensus began to dwindle and so did the spirits of the men fighting the war. It began to be clear to them that we were fighting a war we could not win. The main goal for the soldiers simply became survival, while the U.S. policy makers still felt they could not lose Vietnam because the

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Approximate Word count = 2137
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: History