Somewhere, It's Always 1968

Here's a wonderful article from economics author Arnold Kling on conventional wisdom in 1968:

In 1968, liberals thought that that Communism could work reasonably well for some countries. The Soviet Union was thought to be ahead of us in engineering. Many liberal intellectuals considered Communism a viable option for achieving development in the Third World. A reader of Noam Chomsky's article in the August 13, 1970 New York Review of Books would have thought that North Vietnam's regime, while not perfect, was closer to the ideal than any other existing government. Anti-Communism, on the other hand, was seen by the Conventional Wisdom as only a pretext for misbegotten wars and hysterical blacklists of Hollywood screenwriters.

This is a fascinating article and definitely worth your time! Read the whole thing here. And thanks to InstaPundit for the link!