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Article: The anatomy of a scandal.
- Article from:
- The Antioch Review
- Article date:
- September 22, 1995
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1995 Antioch Review, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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As the twentieth century draws to a noisy close, Americans, as is their wont, are disagreeing about many things, including the provenance of their right to disagree. There is widespread agreement, however, that the country is suffering from a demoralizing lack of virtue. The success of books as different as William J. Bennett's The Book of Virtues and Rush Limbaugh's The Way Things Ought to Be - to say nothing of TV programs like Hard Copy, American Journal, and Inside Edition - is hard to imagine apart from what Jean Bethke Elshtain has called "the American gift for moral panic" (see her "Sic Transit Gloria" in the 11 July 1994 New Republic).
Indeed, if anything in ...