11 - The Theory of Balance

NOT wishing to be disturbed over moral issues of the political economy, Americans cling to the idea that the government is a sort of automatic machine, regulated by the balancing of competing interests.

 

This image of politics is simply a carry-over from the official image of the economy: in both, an equilibrium is achieved by the pulling and hauling of many interests, each restrained only by legalistic and amoral interpretations of what the traffic will bear.

The ideal of the automatic balance reached its most compelling elaboration in eighteenth-century economic terms: the market is sovereign and in the magic economy of the small entrepreneur there is no authoritarian center. And in the political sphere as well: the division, the equilibrium, of powers prevails, and hence there is no chance of despotism.

'The nation which will not adopt an equilibrium of power,' John Adams wrote, 'must adopt a despotism. There is no other alternative.' ¹

As developed by the men of the eighteenth century, equilibrium, or checks and balances, thus becomes the chief mechanism by which both economic and political freedom were guaranteed and the absence of tyranny insured among the sovereign nations of the world.

Nowadays, the notion of an automatic political economy is best known to us as simply the practical conservatism of the anti-New Dealers of the 'thirties. It has been given new - although quite false  - appeal by the frightening spectacle of the totalitarian states of Germany yesterday and Russia today.

 

And although it is quite irrelevant to the political economy of modern America, it is the only rhetoric that prevails widely among the managerial elite of corporation and state.
 

1 - It is very difficult to give up the old model of power as an automatic balance, with its assumptions of a plurality of independent, relatively equal, and conflicting groups of the balancing society.

 

All these assumptions are explicit to the point of unconscious caricature in recent statements of 'who rules America.' According to Mr. David Riesman, for example, during the past half century there has been a shift from 'the power hierarchy of a ruling class to the power dispersal' of 'veto groups.'

 

Now no one runs anything: all is undirected drift.

'In a sense,' Mr. Riesman believes, 'this is only another way of saying that America is a middle-class country... in which, perhaps people will soon wake up to the fact that there is no longer a "we" who run things and a "they" who don't or a "we" who don't run things and a "they" who do, but rather that all "we's" are "they's" and all "they's" are "we's."'

 

'The chiefs have lost the power, but the followers have not gained it,' and in the meantime, Mr. Riesman takes his psychological interpretation of power and of the powerful to quite an extreme, for example: 'if businessmen feel weak and dependent, they are weak and dependent, no matter what material resources may be ascribed to them.'

'...The future,' accordingly, 'seems to be in the hands of the small business and professional men who control Congress: the local realtors, lawyers, car salesmen, undertakers, and so on; of the military men who control defense and, in part, foreign policy; of the big business managers and their lawyers, finance-committee men, and other counselors who decide on plant investment and influence the rate of technological change; of the labor leaders who control worker productivity and worker votes; of the black belt whites who have the greatest stake in southern politics; of the Poles, Italians, Jews, and Irishmen who have stakes in foreign policy, city jobs, and ethnic religious and cultural organizations; of the editorializers and storytellers who help socialize the young, tease and train the adult, and amuse and annoy the aged; of the farmers - themselves warring congeries of cattlemen, corn men, dairymen, cotton men, and so on - who control key departments and committees and who, as the living representatives of our inner-directed past, control many of our memories; of the Russians and, to a lesser degree, other foreign powers who control much of our agenda of attention; and so on.

 

The reader can complete the list.' ²

Here indeed is something that measures up 'to the modern standards of being fully automatic and completely impersonal.'³

 

Yet there is some reality in such romantic pluralism, even in such a pasticcio of power as Mr. Riesman invents: it is a recognizable, although a confused, statement of the middle levels of power, especially as revealed in Congressional districts and in the Congress itself. But it confuses, indeed it does not even distinguish between the top, the middle, and the bottom levels of power.

 

In fact, the strategy of all such romantic pluralism, with its image of a semi-organized stalemate, is rather clear:

You elaborate the number of groups involved, in a kind of bewildering, Whitmanesque enthusiasm for variety. Indeed, what group fails to qualify as a Veto group'? You do not try to clarify the hodge-podge by classifying these groups, occupations, strata, organizations according to their political relevance or even according to whether they are organized politically at all. You do not try to see how they may be connected with one another into a structure of power, for by virtue of his perspective, the romantic conservative focuses upon a scatter of milieux rather than upon their connections within a structure of power.

 

And you do not consider the possibility of any community of interests among the top groups. You do not connect all these milieux and miscellaneous groups with the big decisions: you do not ask and answer with historical detail: exactly what, directly or indirectly, did 'small retailers' or 'brick masons' have to do with the sequence of decision and event that led to World War II? What did 'insurance agents,' or for that matter, the Congress, have to do with the decision to make or not to make, to drop or not to drop, the early model of the new weapon?

 

Moreover, you take seriously the public-relations-minded statements of the leaders of all groups, strata, and blocs, and thus confuse psychological uneasiness with the facts of power and policy. So long as power is not nakedly displayed, it must not be power. And of course you do not consider the difficulties posed for you as an observer by the fact of secrecy, official and otherwise.

In short, you allow your own confused perspective to confuse what you see and, as an observer as well as an interpreter, you are careful to remain on the most concrete levels of description you can manage, defining the real in terms of the existing detail.

The balance of power theory, as Irving Howe has noted, is a narrow-focus view of American politics.⁴

 

With it one can explain temporary alliances within one party or the other. It is also narrow-focus in the choice of time-span: the shorter the period of time in which you are interested, the more usable the balance of power theory appears. For when one is up-close and dealing journalistically with short periods, a given election, for example, one is frequently overwhelmed by a multiplicity of forces and causes. One continual weakness of American 'social science,' since it became ever so empirical, has been its assumption that a mere enumeration of a plurality of causes is the wise and scientific way of going about understanding modern society.

 

Of course it is nothing of the sort: it is a paste-pot eclecticism which avoids the real task of social analysis: that task is to go beyond a mere enumeration of all the facts that might conceivably be involved and weigh each of them in such a way as to understand how they fit together, how they form a model of what it is you are trying to understand.⁵

Undue attention to the middle levels of power obscures the structure of power as a whole, especially the top and the bottom. American politics, as discussed and voted and campaigned for, have largely to do with these middle levels, and often only with them. Most 'political' news is news and gossip about middle-level issues and conflicts. And in America, the political theorist too is often merely a more systematic student of elections, of who voted for whom.

 

As a professor or as a free-lance intellectual, the political analyst is generally on the middle levels of power himself. He knows the top only by gossip; the bottom, if at all, only by 'research.' But he is at home with the leaders of the middle level, and, as a talker himself, with their 'bargaining.'

Commentators and analysts, in and out of the universities, thus focus upon the middle levels and their balances because they are closer to them, being mainly middle-class themselves; because these levels provide the noisy content of 'politics' as an explicit and reported-upon fact; because such views are in accord with the folklore of the formal model of how democracy works; and because, accepting that model as good, especially in their current patrioteering, many intellectuals are thus able most readily to satisfy such political urges as they may feel.

When it is said that a 'balance of power' exists, it may be meant that no one interest can impose its will or its terms upon others; or that any one interest can create a stalemate; or that in the course of time, first one and then another interest gets itself realized, in a kind of symmetrical taking of turns; or that all policies are the results of compromises, that no one wins all they want to win, but each gets something.

 

All these possible meanings are, in fact, attempts to describe what can happen when, permanently or temporarily, there is said to be 'equality of bargaining power.' But, as Murray Edelman has pointed out,⁶ the goals for which interests struggle are not merely given; they reflect the current state of expectation and acceptance.

 

Accordingly, to say that various interests are 'balanced' is generally to evaluate the status quo as satisfactory or even good; the hopeful ideal of balance often masquerades as a description of fact.

'Balance of power' implies equality of power, and equality of power seems wholly fair and even honorable, but in fact what is one man's honorable balance is often another's unfair imbalance. Ascendant groups of course tend readily to proclaim a just balance of power and a true harmony of interest, for they prefer their domination to be uninterrupted and peaceful.

 

So large businessmen condemn small labor leaders as 'disturbers of the peace' and upsetters of the universal interests inherent in business-labor cooperation. So privileged nations condemn weaker ones in the name of internationalism, defending with moral notions what has been won by force against those have-nots whom, making their bid for ascendancy or equality later, can hope to change the status quo only by force.⁷

The notion that social change proceeds by a tolerant give and take, by compromise and a network of vetoes of one interest balanced by another assumes that all this goes on within a more or less stable framework that does not itself change, that all issues are subject to compromise, and are thus naturally harmonious or can

be made such. Those who profit by the general framework of the status quo can afford more easily than those who are dissatisfied under it to entertain such views as the mechanics of social change. Moreover, 'in most fields... only one interest is organized, none is, or some of the major ones are not.' ⁸

 

In these cases, to speak, as Mr. David Truman does, of 'unorganized interests' ⁹ is merely to use another word for what used to be called 'the public,' a conception we shall presently examine.*

 

* See below, THIRTEEN: The Mass Society

The important 'pressure groups,' especially those of rural and urban business, have either been incorporated in the personnel and in the agencies of the government itself, both legislative and executive, or become the instruments of small and powerful cliques, which sometimes include their nominal leaders but often do not. These facts go beyond the centralization of voluntary groups and the usurpation of the power of apathetic members by professional executives.

 

They involve, for example, the use of the NAM by dominant cliques to reveal to small-business members that their interests are identical with those of big business, and then to focus the power of business-as-a-whole into a political pressure. From the standpoint of such higher circles, the 'voluntary association,' the 'pressure group,' becomes an important feature of a public-relations program. The several corporations which are commanded by the individual members of such cliques are themselves instruments of command, public relations, and pressure, but it is often more expedient to use the corporations less openly, as bases of power, and to make of various national associations their joint operating branches.

 

The associations are more operational organizations, whose limits of power are set by those who use them, than final arbiters of action and inaction.¹⁰

Checks and balances may thus be understood as an alternative statement of 'divide and rule,' and as a way of hampering the more direct expression of popular aspiration. For the theory of balance often rests upon the moral idea of a natural harmony of interests, in terms of which greed and ruthlessness are reconciled with justice and progress.

 

Once the basic structure of the American political economy was built, and for so long as it could be tacitly supposed that markets would expand indefinitely, the harmony of interest could and did serve well as the ideology of dominant groups, by making their interests appear identical with the interests of the community as a whole.

 

So long as this doctrine prevails, any lower group that begins to struggle can be made to appear inharmonious, disturbing the common interest.

'The doctrine of the harmony of interests,' E. H. Carr has remarked, 'thus serves as an ingenious moral device invoked, in perfect sincerity, by privileged groups in order to justify and maintain their dominant position.' ¹¹

2 - The prime focus of the theory of balance is the Congress of the United States, and its leading actors are the Congressmen.

 

Yet as social types, these 96 Senators and 435 Representatives are not representative of the rank and file citizens. They represent those who have been successful in entrepreneurial and professional endeavors. Older men, they are of the privileged white, native-born of native parents, Protestant Americans.

 

They are college graduates and they are at least solid, upper-middle class in income and status. On the average, they have had no experience of wage or lower salaried work.

 

They are, in short, in and of the new and old upper classes of local society.*
 

* Nowadays, the typical Senator is a college-educated man of about fifty-seven years of age - although in the 83rd Congress (1954) one was eighty-six years old. The typical Representative, also drawn from the less than 10 per cent of the adult population that has been to college, is about fifty-two - although one was only twenty-six in the latest Congress. Almost all of the Senators and Representatives have held local and state offices; and about half of them are veterans of one of the wars. Almost all of them have also worked in non-political occupations, usually occupations of the upper 15 per cent of the occupational hierarchy: in the 1949-51 Congress, for example, 69 per cent of both Senate and House were professional men, and another 24 per cent of the Senate and 22 per cent of the House were businessmen or managers. There are no wage workers, no low salaried white-collar men, no farm laborers in the Senate, and only one or two in the House.¹²
 

Their major profession is, of course, the law - which only 0.1 per cent of the people at work in the United States follow, but almost 65 per cent of the Senators and Representatives.

 

That they are mainly lawyers is easy to understand. The verbal skills of the lawyer are not unlike those needed by the politicians; both involve bargaining and negotiation and the giving of advice to those who make decisions in business and politics. Lawyers also often find that - win or lose - politics is useful to their communities, or from investments. Independently wealthy men are becoming increasingly common on Capitol Hill...

 

For those who are without private means... life as a member of Congress can border on desperation.'*

 

 

*From the end of World War II until 1955, the members of Congress received $15,000 annually, including a tax-free expense allowance of $2,500; but the average income - including investments, business, and professions as well as writing and speaking - of a member of the House was, in 1952, about $22,000; and of the Senate, $47,000. As of 1 March 1955, the annual salary for members of Congress was raised to $22,500.¹⁶

 

 

'If Federal law really meant what it seems to mean concerning the uses of cash in election campaigns,' Robert Bendiner has recently remarked, 'more politicians would wind up in Leavenworth than in Washington.'¹⁷

 

Some scrounge members of the the countryside Congress are expense millionaires. The others expenses must of office are now quite heavy, often including the maintenance of two homes and traveling between them, the demands of an often busy social life, and the greatly increased costs of getting elected and staying in office.

 

An outside income is now almost indispensable for the Congressmen; and, in fact, four out of five of the Representatives and two out of three of the Senators in 1952 received incomes other than their Congressional salaries 'from businesses or professions which they still maintain in their home profession of law, since it publicizes one's practice.

 

In addition, a private law practice, a business which can be carried in one's briefcase, can be set up almost anywhere. Accordingly, the lawyer as politician has something to fall back upon whenever he is not re-elected as well as something to lean upon if he wishes when he is elected. In fact, for some lawyers, a political term or two is thought of, and is in fact, merely a stepping stone to a larger law practice, in Washington or back home.

 

The practice of law often allows a man to enter politics without much risk and some chance of advantage to a main source of money independent of the electorate's whims.¹³

Most of the members of Congress over the last fifteen years - and probably much longer than that - have originated from the same professional and entrepreneurial occupations as they themselves have followed over the last decade. Between 90 and 95 per cent of them have been sons of professionals or businessmen or farmers - although at the approximate time of their birth, in 1890, only 37 per cent of the labor force were of these entrepreneurial strata, and not all of these were married men with sons.¹⁴

There have been no Negroes in the Senate over the last half century, and, at any given time, never more than two in the House - although Negroes make up about 10 per cent of the American population. Since 1845, the percentage of the foreign-born in the Senate has never exceeded 8 per cent, and has always been much smaller than the percentage in the population - less than one-half of the representative proportion, for example, in 1949-51.

 

Moreover, both first and second generation Congressmen tend to be of the older, northern and western extraction, rather than of the newer immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Protestant denominations of higher status (Episcopal, Presbyterian, Unitarian, and Congregational) provide twice the number of Congressmen as their representative proportions in the population.

 

Middle-level Protestants (Methodists and Baptists) in the Congress are in rough proportion to the population, but Catholics and Jews are fewer: Catholics in the 81st Congress, for example, having only 16 per cent of the House and 12 per cent of the Senate, but 34 per cent of the 1950 population at large.¹⁸
 

The political career does not attract as able a set of men as it once did. From a money standpoint, the alert lawyer, who can readily make $25,000 to $50,000 a year, is not very likely to trade it for the perils of the Congressman's position; and, no doubt with exceptions, if they are not wealthy men, it is likely that the candidates for Congress will be a county attorney, a local judge, or a mayor - whose salaries are even less than those of Congressmen.

 

Many observers, both in and out of Congress, agree that the Congress has fallen in public esteem over the last fifty years; and that, even in their home districts and states, the Congressmen are by no means the important figures they once were.18 How many people, in fact, know the name of their Representative, or even of their Senators?

Fifty years ago, in his district or state, the campaigning Congressman did not have to compete in a world of synthetic celebrities with the mass means of entertainment and distraction. The politician making a speech was looked to for an hour's talk about what was going on in a larger world, and in debates he had neither occasion nor opportunity to consult a ghost writer. He was, after all, one of the best-paid men in his locality and a big man there.

 

But today, the politician must rely on the mass media, and access to these media is expensive.**


** One veteran Congressman has recently reported that in 1930, he could make the race for $7,500; today, for $25,000 to $50,000; and in the Senate, it might run to much more. John F. Kennedy (son of multimillionaire Joseph P. Kennedy), Democrat of Massachusetts, was reported to have spent $15,866 in his 1952 campaign, but 'committees on his behalf for the improvement of the shoe, fishing and other industries of the state, spent $217,995.'19

The simple facts of the costs of the modern campaign clearly tie the Congressman, if he is not personally well-to-do, to the sources of needed contributions, which are, sensibly enough, usually looked upon as investments from which a return is expected.

As free-lance law practitioners and as party politicians who must face elections, the professional politicians have cultivated many different groups and types of people in their localities. They are great 'joiners' of social and business and fraternal organizations, belonging to Masons and Elks and the American Legion.

 

In then-constituencies, the Congressmen deal with organized groups, and they are supported or approved according to their attitude toward the interests and programs of these groups. It is in the local bailiwick that the plunder groups, who would exchange votes for favors, operate most openly. The politicians are surrounded by the demands and requests of such groups, large and small, local and national.

 

As brokers of power, the politicians must compromise one interest by another, and, in the process, they are themselves often compromised into men without any firm line of policy.

Most professional politicians represent an astutely balanced variety of local interests, and such rather small freedom to act in political decisions as they have derives from precisely that fact: if they are fortunate they can juggle and play off these varied local interests against one another, but perhaps more frequently they come to straddle the issues in order to avoid decision. Protecting the interests of his electoral domain, the Congressman remains attentively loyal to his sovereign locality.

 

In fact, his parochialism is in some cases so intense that as a local candidate he may even invite and collect for local display an assortment of out-of-state attacks upon him, thus turning his campaign into a crusade of the sovereign locality against national outsiders.²⁰

Inside the Congress, as in his constituency, the politician finds a tangle of interests; and he also finds that power is organized according to party and according to seniority. The power of the Congress is centered in the committee; the power of the committee is usually centered in its chairman, who becomes chairman by seniority.

 

Accordingly, the politician's chance to reach a position of power within the Congress often rests upon his ability to stay in office for a long and uninterrupted period, and to do that, he cannot antagonize the important elements in his constituency. Flexible adjustment to these several interests and their programs, the agility to carry several, sometimes conflicting, lines of policy, but to look good doing it, is at a premium.

 

Therefore, by a mechanical process of selection, mediocre party 'regulars,' who for twenty years or more have been firmly anchored in their sovereign localities, are very likely to reach and to remain at the centers of Congressional power.

Even when the politician becomes a chairman - if possible, of a committee affecting the local interests of his district - he will not usually attempt to play the role of the national statesman. For however enjoyable such attendant prestige may be, it is secondary to the achievement of local popularity; his responsibility is not to the nation; it is to the dominant interests of his locality.

 

Moreover, 'better congressional machinery,' as Stanley High has remarked, 'does not cure the evil of localism; indeed it may provide members with more time and better facilities for its practice.' ²¹

Nonetheless, the chairman of the major committees are the elite members of the Congress. In their hands rest the key powers of Congress, both legislative and investigative. They can originate, push, halt, or confuse legislation; they are adept at evasion and stall. They can block a White House proposal so that it never reaches the floor for debate, let alone a vote. And they can tell the President what will and what will not gain the approval of the people in their district or of colleagues under their influence in Congress.

In the first and second decades of this century, only a few bills were presented during the six months of the first session or the three months of the second. These bills were considered during the ample time between committee study and their debate on the floor. Debate was of importance and was carried on before a sizable audience in the chamber. Legislation took up most of the member's time and attention. Today hundreds of bills are considered at each session; and since it would be impossible for members even to read them all - or a tenth of them - they have come to rely upon the committees who report the bills.

 

There is little debate and what there is often occurs before an emptied chamber.

The speeches that are made are mainly for the member's locality, and many are not delivered, but merely inserted in the record. While legislation goes through the assembly line, the Congressmen are busy in their offices, administering a small staff which runs errands for constituents and mails printed and typed matter to them.²²

In the campaigns of the professional politician, insistent national issues are not usually faced up to, but local issues are raised in a wonderfully contrived manner.

 

In the 472 Congressional elections of 1954, for example, no national issues were clearly presented, nor even local issues related clearly to them.*

 

 

* In one state, the desegregation issue seemed to matter most; in another, an Italian, married to an Irish woman, used the names of both with due effect. In one state, a tape-recording of a candidate's two-year-old talk about whom policemen tended to marry seemed important; in another, whether or not a candidate had been kind enough, or too kind, to his sister. Here bingo laws were important, and there the big question was whether or not an older man running for the Senate was virile enough. In one key state, twenty-year old charges that a candidate had been tied up with a steamship company which had paid off a judge for pier leases was the insistent issue expensively presented on TV. One of the most distinguished Senators asserted of his opponent - also a quite distinguished man of old wealth - that he 'was either dishonest or dumb or stupid and a dupe.' Another candidate broke down under pressure and confessed that he had been telling detailed lies about his war record. And everywhere, in the context of distrust, it was hinted, insinuated, asserted, guessed that, after all, the opponents were associated with Red spies, if they were not actually in the pay of the Soviet octopus. All over again the Democrats fought the depression; all over again, the Republicans were determined to put Alger Hiss in jail.²³

 

 

Slogans and personal attacks on character, personality defects, and countercharges and suspicions were all that the electorate could see or hear, and, as usual, many paid no attention at all.

 

Each candidate tried to dishonor his opponent, who in turn tried to dishonor him. The outraged candidates seemed to make themselves the issue, and on that issue virtually all of them lost. The electorate saw no issues at all, and they too lost, although they did not know it.²⁴

As part of the grim trivialization of public life, the American political campaign readily distracts attention from the possible debate of national policy. But one must not suppose that such noise is all that is involved. There are issues, in each district and state, issues set up and watched by organized interests of local importance. And that is the major implication to be drawn from the character of the campaigns:

There are no national parties to which the professional politicians belong and which by their debate focus national issues clearly and responsibly and continuously.

By definition, the professional politician is a party politician. And yet the two political parties in the United States are not nationally centralized organizations. As semi-feudal structures, they have operated by trading patronage and other favors for votes and protection. The lesser politician trades the votes that are in his domain for a larger share of the patronage and favors. But there is no national 'boss,' much less a nationally responsible leader of either of the parties.

 

Each of them is a constellation of local organizations curiously and intricately joined with various interest blocs. The Congressman is generally independent of the Congressional leaders of his party as far as campaign funds go. The national committees of each major party consist mainly of political nonentities; for, since the parties are coalitions of state and local organizations, each of them develops such national unity as it has only once every four years, for the Presidential election.²⁶

 

At the bottom and on the middle levels, the major parties are strong, even dictatorial; but, at the top, they are very weak. It is only the President and the Vice-President whose constituencies are national and who, by their actions and appointments, provide such national party unity as prevails.

The differences between the two parties, so far as national issues are concerned, are very narrow and very mixed up. Each seems to be forty-eight parties, one to each state; and accordingly, the professional politician, as Congressman and as campaigner, is not concerned with national party lines, if any are discernible.

 

He is not subject to any effective national party discipline. He speaks solely for his own locality, and he is concerned with national issues only in so far as they affect his locality, the interests effectively organized there, and the chances of his re-election. That is the major reason why, when he speaks of national matters, the political vocabulary of the politician is such an empty rhetoric.

 

Seated in his sovereign locality, the professional politician is not at the summit of national, political power: he is on and of the middle levels.

 

3 - More and more of the fundamental issues never come to any point of decision before the Congress, or before its most powerful committees, much less before the electorate in campaigns.

 

The entrance of the United States into World War II, for example, in so far as it involved American decision, by-passed the Congress quite completely. It was never a clearly debated issue clearly focused for a public decision. Under the executive's emergency power, the President, in a virtually dictatorial way, can make the decision for war, which is then presented to the Congress as a fact accomplished.

 

'Executive agreements' have the force of treaties but need not be ratified by the Senate: the destroyer deal with Great Britain and the commitment of troops to Europe under NATO, which Senator Taft fought so bitterly, are clear examples of that fact. And in the case of the Formosa decisions of the spring of 1955, the Congress simply abdicated all debate concerning events and decisions bordering on war to the executive.

When fundamental issues do come up for Congressional debate, they are likely to be so structured as to limit consideration, and even to be stalemated rather than resolved. For with no responsible, centralized parties, it is difficult to form a majority in Congress; and - with the seniority system, the rules committee, the possibility of filibuster, and the lack of information and expertise  - the Congress is all too likely to become a legislative labyrinth. It is no wonder that firm Presidential initiative is often desired by Congress on non-local issues, and that, in what are defined as emergencies, powers are rather readily handed over to the executive, in order to break the semi-organized deadlock.

 

Indeed, some observers believe that 'congressional abdication and obstruction, not presidential usurpation, has been the main cause of the shift of power to the Executive.' ²⁶

Among the professional politicians there are, of course, common denominators of mood and interests, anchored in their quite homogeneous origins, careers, and associations; and there is, of course, a common rhetoric in which their minds are often trapped. In pursuing their several parochial interests, accordingly, the Congressmen often coincide in ways that are of national relevance. Such interests seldom become explicit issues.

 

But the many little issues decided by local interest, and by bargain, by check and balance, have national results that are often unanticipated by any one of the locally rooted agents involved. Laws are thus sometimes made, as the stalemate is broken, behind the backs of the lawmakers involved. For Congress is the prime seat of the middle levels of power, and it is on these middle levels that checks and balances do often prevail.

The truly vested interests are those openly pushed and protected by each Representative and Senator. They are the parochial interests of the local societies of each Congressional district and state. In becoming vested in a Senator or a Representative they are compromised and balanced by other parochial interests.

 

The prime search of the Congressman is for the favor he can do for one interest that will not hurt any of the other interests he must balance.

It is not necessary for 'pressure groups' to 'corrupt' politicians in Congress. In fact, lobbyists, in their discrete way, may at times appear as honest men, while Congressmen may appear as lobbyists in disguise. It is not necessary for members of local society to pay off the professional politician in order to have their interests secured. For by social selection and by political training, he is of and by and for the key groups in his district and state.²⁷

 

The Congressmen are more the visible makers of pressure inside the government than the subjects of invisible pressures from the periphery. Fifty years ago, the old muckraker image of the Senator corrupted by money was often true,²⁸ and money is of course still a factor in politics. But the money that counts now is used mainly to finance elections rather than to pay off politicians directly for their votes and favors.

When we know that before entering politics one of the half dozen most powerful legislators, and chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, gained prominence by promoting and organizing Chambers of Commerce in half a dozen middle-ranking cities of the nation, 'without,' as he says, 'a cent of Federal aid,' we can readily understand why he fought extension of the excess-profits tax without any reference to invisible, behind-the-scenes pressures brought to bear upon him.²⁹

 

Seventy-eight-year-old Daniel Reed is a man of Puritan-like character and inflexible principle, but principles are derived from and further strengthen character, and character is selected and formed by one's entire career. Moreover, as one member of Congress recently remarked, 'there comes a time in the life of every Congressman when he must rise above principle.' ³⁰

 

As a political actor, the Congressman is part of the compromised balances of local societies, as well as one or the other of the nationally irresponsible parties. As a result, he is caught in the semi-organized stalemate of the middle levels of national power.

Political power has become enlarged and made decisive, but not the power of the professional politician in the Congress. The considerable powers that do remain in the hands of key Congressmen are now shared with other types of political actors: There is the control of legislation, centered in the committee heads, but increasingly subject to decisive modification by the administrator.

 

There is the power to investigate, as a positive and a negative weapon, but it increasingly involves intelligence agencies, both public and private, and it increasingly becomes involved with what can only be called various degrees of blackmail and counter-blackmail.

In the absence of policy differences of consequences between the major parties, the professional party politician must invent themes about which to talk. Historically, this has involved the ordinary emptiness of 'campaign rhetoric' But since World War II, among frustrated politicians there has come into wider use the accusation and the impugnment of character - of opponents as well as of innocent neutrals.

 

This has, of course, rested upon the exploitation of the new historical fact that Americans now live in a military neighborhood; but it has also rested upon the place of the politician who practices a politics without real issue, a middle-level politics for which the real decisions, even those of patronage, are made by higher ups. Hunting headlines in this context, with less patronage and without big engaging issues, some Congressmen find the way to temporary success, or at least to public attention, in the universalization of distrust.

There is another way of gaining and of exercising power, one which involves the professional politician in the actions of cliques within and between the bureaucratic-like agencies of the administration. Increasingly, the professional politician teams up with the administrator who heads an agency, a commission, or a department in order to exert power with him against other administrators and politicians, often in a cut-and-thrust manner.

 

The traditional distinction between 'legislation' as the making of policy and 'administration' as its realization has broken down from both sides.³¹

In so far as the politician enters into the continuous policy-making of the modern political state, he does so less by voting for or against a bill than by entering into a clique that is in a position to exert influence upon and through the command posts of the executive administration, or by not investigating areas sensitive to certain clique interests.³²

 

It is as a member of quite complicated cliques that the professional politician, representing a variety of interests, sometimes becomes quite relevant in desisions of national consequence.

If governmental policy is the result of an interplay of group interests, we must ask: what interests outside the government are important and what agencies inside it serve them? If there are many such interests and if they conflict with one another, then clearly each loses power and the agency involved either gains a certain autonomy or is stalemated.33 In the legislative branch, many and competing interests, especially local ones, come to focus, often in a stalemate.

 

Other interests, on the level of national corporate power, never come to a focus but the Congressman, by virtue of what he is as a political and social creature, realizes them. But in the executive agency a number of small and coherent interests are often the only ones at play, and often they are able to install themselves within the agency or effectively nullify its action against themselves.

 

Thus regulatory agencies, as John Kenneth Galbraith has remarked, 'become, with some exceptions, either an arm of the industry they are regulating or servile.' ³⁴

 

The executive ascendancy, moreover, has either relegated legislative action - and inaction - to a subordinate role in the making of policy or bends it to the executive will. For enforcement' now clearly involves the making of policy, and even legislation itself is often written by members of the executive branch.

In the course of American history, there have been several oscillations between Presidential and Congressional leadership.³⁵

 

Congressional supremacy, for example, was quite plain during the last third of the nineteenth century. But in the middle third of the twentieth century, with which we are concerned, the power of the Executive, and the increased means of power at its disposal, is far greater than at any previous period, and there are no signs of its power diminishing.

 

The executive supremacy means the relegation of the legislature to the middle levels of political power; it means the decline of the professional politician, for the major locale of the party politician is the legislature. It is also a prime indicator of the decline of the old balancing society.

 

For - in so far as the old balance was not entirely automatic - it was the politician, as a specialist in balance and a broker of contending pressures, who adjusted the balances, reached compromises, and maintained the grand equilibrium. That politician who best satisfied or held off a variety of interests could best gain power and hold it. But now the professional politician of the old balancing society has been relegated to a position 'among those also present,' often noisy, or troublesome, or helpful to the ascendant outsiders, but not holding the keys to decision.

 

For the old balancing society in which he flourished no longer prevails.³⁶
 

4 - Back of the theory of checks and balances as the mode of political decision there is the class theory, well-known since Aristotle and held in firm view by the eighteenth-century Founding Fathers, that the state is, or ought to be, a system of checks and balances because the society is a balance of classes, and that society is a balance of classes because its pivot and its stabilizer is the strong and independent middle class.

Nineteenth-century America was a middle-class society, in which numerous small and relatively equally empowered organizations flourished. Within this balancing society there was an economy in which the small entrepreneur was central, a policy in which a formal division of authority was an operative fact, and a political economy in which political and economic orders were quite autonomous.

 

If at times it was not a world of small entrepreneurs, at least it was always a world in which small entrepreneurs had a real part to play in the equilibrium of power.

 

But the society in which we now live consists of an economy in which the small entrepreneurs have been replaced in key areas by a handful of centralized corporations, of a polity in which the division of authority has become imbalanced in such a way that the executive branch is supreme, the legislative relegated to the middle levels of power, and the judiciary, with due time-lag, to the drift of policy which it does not initiate; and finally, the new society is clearly a political economy in which political and economic affairs are intricately and deeply joined together.³⁷

The romantic pluralism of the Jeffersonian ideal prevailed in a society in which perhaps four-fifths of the free, white population were in one sense or another, independent proprietors. But in the epoch following the Civil War, that old middle class of independent proprietors began to decline, as, in one industry after another, larger and more concentrated economic units came into ascendancy; and in the later part of the progressive era, the independent middle class of farmers and small businessmen fought politically  - and lost their last real chance for a decisive role in the political balance.³⁸

 

Already appeals to them, as by David Graham Phillips, were nostalgic deifications of their imagined past, which they seemed to hope would dispel the world of twentieth-century reality.39 Such sentiments flared up briefly again in the La Follette campaign of 1924, and they were one of the sources of the New Deal's rhetorical strength.

 

But two facts about the middle classes and one fact about labor - which became politically important during the 'thirties - have become decisive during our own time:

I. The independent middle class became politically, as well as economically, dependent upon the machinery of the state. It is widely felt, for example, that the most successful 'lobby' in the United States is The Farm Bloc; in fact, it has been so successful that it is difficult to see it as an independent force acting upon the several organs of government.

 

It has become meshed firmly with these organs, especially with the Senate, in which, due to the peculiar geographic principle of representation, it is definitively over-represented. Ideologically, due to the exploitation of Jeffersonian myths about farming as a way of life, large commercial farmers as members of an industry are accepted as of that national interest which ought to be served by very special policies, rather than as one special interest among others.

 

This special policy is the policy of parity, which holds that the government ought to guarantee to this one sector of the free enterprise system a price level for its products that will enable commercial farmers to enjoy a purchasing power equivalent to the power it possessed in its most prosperous period just prior to World War I. In every sense of the word, this is of course 'class legislation,' but it is 'middleclass legislation,' and it is so wonderfully entrenched as political fact that in the realm of crackpot realism in which such ideas thrive, it is thought of as merely sound public policy.

Well-to-do farmers, who are the chief rural beneficiaries of the subsidized enterprise system, are businessmen and so think of themselves.

 

The hayseed and the rebel of the 'nineties have been replaced by the rural businessmen of the 'fifties. The political hold of the farmer is still strong but, as a demand upon the political top, it is more worrisome than decisive.

 

The farmers, it is true, are taken into account so far as their own special interests are concerned, but these do not include the major issues of peace and war that confront the big political outsiders today, and the issues of slump and boom, to which the farmer is quite relevant, are not now foremost in the political outsiders' attention.
 

II. Alongside the old independent middle class, there had arisen inside the corporate society a new dependent middle class of white-collar employees. Roughly, in the last two generations, as proportions of the middle classes as a whole, the old middle class has declined from 85 to 44 per cent; the new middle class has risen from 15 to 56 per cent. For many reasons, which I have elsewhere tried to make clear - this class is less the political pivot of a balancing society than a rear-guard of the dominant drift towards a mass society.⁴⁰

 

Unlike the farmer and the small businessman - and unlike the wage worker - the white-collar employee was born too late to have had even a brief day of autonomy. The occupational positions and status trends which form the white-collar outlook make of the salaried employees a rear-guard rather than a vanguard of historic change.

 

They are in no political way united or coherent. Their unionization, such as it is, is a unionization into the main drift and decline of labor organization, and serves to incorporate them as hangers-on of the newest interest trying, unsuccessfully, to invest itself in the state.

The old middle class for a time acted as an independent base of power; the new middle class cannot. Political freedom and economic security were anchored in the fact of small-scale and independent properties; they are not anchored in the job world of the new middle class. Scattered properties, and their holders, were integrated economically by free and autonomous markets; the jobs of the new middle class are integrated by corporate authority.

 

The white-collar middle classes do not form an independent base of power: economically, they are in the same situation as propertyless wage workers; politically they are in a worse condition, for they are not as organized.

III. Alongside the old middle class - increasingly invested within the state machinery - and the new middle class - born without independent political shape and developed in such a way as never to achieve it - a new political force came into the political arena of the 'thirties: the force of organized labor.

 

For a brief time, it seemed that labor would become a power-bloc independent of corporation and state but operating upon and against them. After becoming dependent upon the governmental system, however, the labor unions suffered rapid decline in power and now have little part in major national decisions. The United States now has no labor leaders who carry any weight of consequence in decisions of importance to the political outsiders now in charge of the visible government.

Viewed from one special angle, the labor unions have become organizations that select and form leaders who, upon becoming successful, take their places alongside corporate executives in and out of government, and alongside politicians in both major parties, among the national power elite.

 

For one function of labor unions-like social movements and political parties - is to attempt to contribute to the formation of this directorate. As new men of power, the labor leaders have come only lately to the national arena. Samuel Gompers was perhaps the first labor man to become, even though temporarily and quite uneasily, a member of the national power elite. His self-conscious attempt to establish his place within this elite, and thus to secure the labor interest as integral with national interests, has made him a prototype and model for the national labor career.

 

Sidney Hillman was not, of course, the only labor man to take up this course during the 'forties, but his lead during the early war years, his awareness of himself as a member of the national elite, and the real and imagined recognition he achieved as a member ('Clear it with Sidney'), signaled the larger entrance - after the great expansion of the unions during the New Deal - of labor leaders into the political elite.

 

With the advent of Truman's Fair Deal and Eisenhower's Great Crusade, no labor leader can readily entertain serious notions of becoming, formally or informally, a member. The early exit of a minor labor man - Durkin - from his weak cabinet post revealed rather clearly the situation faced by labor leaders as would-be members as well as the position of labor unions as a power bloc. Well below the top councils, they are of the middle levels of power.

Much of the often curious behavior and maneuvers of the labor chieftains over the last two decades is explainable by their search for status within the national power elite. In this context they have displayed extreme sensibility to prestige slights.

 

They feel that they have arrived; they want the status accoutrements of power. In middle and small-sized cities, labor leaders now sit with Chamber of Commerce officials on civic enterprises; and on the national level, they expect and they get places in production boards and price-control agencies.

Their claim for status and power rests on their already increased power - not on property, income, or birth; and power in such situations as theirs is a source of uneasiness as well as a base of operations. It is not yet a solidly bottomed, continuous base having the force of use and wont and law.

 

Their touchiness about prestige matters, especially on the national scene, has been due to,

1. their self-made character, and to the fact

2. that their self-making was helped no end by government and the atmosphere it created in the decade after 1935. They are government-made men, and they have feared - correctly, it turns out - that they can be unmade by government. Their status tension is also due to the fact

3. that they are simply new to the power elite and its ways

4. that they feel a tension between their publics: their union members - before whom it is politically dangerous to be too big a 'big shot' or too closely associated with inherited enemies - and their newly found companions and routines of life.

Many observers mistake the status accoutrements of labor leaders for evidence of labor's power.

 

In a way they are, but in a way they are not. They are when they are based on and lead to power. They are not when they become status traps for leaders without resulting in power. In such matters, it is well to remember that this is no chicken-and-egg issue.

 

The chicken is power, and comes first, the egg is status.*
 

* Like the corporate rich, the labor leaders as a group are not wholly unified. Yet the often noted tendency of 'the other side' to regard any move by some unit of one side as having significance in terms of the whole, indicates clearly that in the views, expectations, and demands of these men, they do form, even if unwillingly, blocs. They see one another as members of blocs, and in fact are inter-knit in various and quite intricate ways. Individual unions may lobby for particularistic interests, which is one key to such lack of unity as labor as a bracket displays. But increasingly the issues they face, and the contexts in which they must face them, are national in scope and effect, and so they must co-ordinate labor's line with reference to a national context, on pain of loss of power.

The corporate executive, like the labor leader, is a practical man and an opportunist, but for him enduring means, developed for other purposes, are available for the conduct of his political as well as of his business-labor affairs. The corporation is now a very stable basis of operation; in fact, it is more stable and more important for the continuance of the American arrangement than the lifetime family. The business member of the power elite can rely upon the corporation in the pursuit of his short-term goals and opportunistic maneuvering. But the union is often in a state of protest; it is on the defensive in a sometimes actually and always potentially hostile society. It does not provide such enduring means as are ready-made and at the business elite's disposal. If he wants such means, even for his little goals, the labor leader must himself build and maintain them. Moreover, the great organizing upsurge of the 'thirties showed that officers who were not sufficiently responsive to the demands of industrial workers could lose power. The corporation manager on the other hand, in the context of his corporation, is not an elected official in the same sense. His power does not depend upon the loyalty of the men who work for him and he does not usually lose his job if a union successfully invades his plants. The upsurges of the 'thirties did not oust the managers; their responsibilities are not to the workers whom they employ, but to themselves and their scattered stockholders.

This difference in power situation means that the power of the business leader is likely to be more continuous and more assured than that of the labor leader: the labor leader is more likely to be insecure in his job if he fails to 'deliver the goods.'

However it may be with the corporate and the political elite, there is nothing, it seems to me, in the makeup of the current labor leaders as individuals and as a group to lead us to believe that they can or will transcend the strategy of maximum adaptation. By this I mean that they react more than they lead, and that they do so to retain and to expand their position in the constellation of power and advantage. Certain things could happen that would cause the downfall of the present labor leadership or sections of it, and other types of leaders might then rise to union power; but the current crop of labor leaders is pretty well set up as a dependent variable in the main drift with no role in the power elite. Neither labor leaders nor labor unions are at the present juncture likely to he 'independent variables,' in the national context.⁴¹
 

During the 'thirties organized labor was emerging for the first time on an American scale; it had little need of any political sense of direction other than the slogan, 'organize the unorganized.'

 

This is no longer the case, but labor - without the mandate of the slump  - still remains without political, or for that matter economic, direction. Like small business, its leaders have tried to follow the way of the farmer. Once this farmer was a source of insurgency; in the recent past, labor has seemed to be such. Now the large farmer is a unit in an organized bloc, entrenched within and pressuring the welfare state.

 

Despite its greater objective antagonism to capitalism as a wage system, labor now struggles, unsuccessfully, to go the same way.

5 - In the old liberal society, a set of balances and compromises prevailed among Congressional leaders, the executive branch of the government, and various pressure groups.

 

The image of power and of decision is the image of a balancing society in which no unit of power is powerful enough to do more than edge forward a bit at a time, in compromised counterbalance with other such forces, and in which, accordingly, there is no unity, much less coordination, among the higher circles.

 

Some such image, combined with the doctrine of public opinion, is still the official view of the formal democratic system of power, the standard theory of most academic social scientists, and the underlying assumption of most literate citizens who are neither political spokesmen nor political analysts.

But as historical conditions change, so do the meanings and political consequences of the mechanics of power. There is nothing magical or eternal about checks and balances. In time of revolution, checks and balances may be significant as a restraint upon unorganized and organized masses. In time of rigid dictatorship, they may be significant as a technique of divide and rule. Only under a state which is already quite well balanced, and which has under it a balanced social structure, do checks and balances mean a restraint upon the rulers.

The eighteenth-century political theorists had in mind as the unit of power the individual citizen, and the classic economists had in mind the small firm operated by an individual. Since their time, the units of power, the relations between the units, and hence the meaning of the checks and balances, have changed. In so far as there is now a great scatter of relatively equal balancing units, it is on the middle levels of power, seated in the sovereign localities and intermittent pressure groups, and coming to its high point within the Congress.

 

We must thus revise and relocate the received conception of an enormous scatter of varied interests, for, when we look closer and for longer periods of time, we find that most of these middle-level interests are concerned merely with their particular cut, with their particular area of vested interest, and often these are of no decisive political importance, although many are of enormous detrimental value to welfare.

 

Above this plurality of interests, the units of power - economic, political, and military -  that count in any balance are few in number and weighty beyond comparison with the dispersed groups on the middle and lower levels of the power structure.

Those who still hold that the power system reflects the balancing society often confuse the present era with earlier times of American history, and confuse the top and the bottom levels of the present system with its middle levels. When it is generalized into a master model of the power system, the theory of balance becomes historically unspecific; whereas in fact, as a model, it should be specified as applicable only to certain phases of United States development - notably the Jacksonian period and, under quite differing circumstances, the early and middle New Deal.

The idea that the power system is a balancing society also assumes that the units in balance are independent of one another, for if business and labor or business and government, for example, are not independent of one another, they cannot be seen as elements of a free and open balance.

 

But as we have seen, the major vested interests often compete less with one another in their effort to promote their several interests than they coincide on many points of interest and, indeed, come together under the umbrella of government. The units of economic and political power not only become larger and more centralized; they come to coincide in interest and to make explicit as well as tacit alliances.

The American government today is not merely a framework within which contending pressures jockey for position and make politics. Although there is of course some of that, this government now has such interests vested within its own hierarchical structure, and some of these are higher and more ascendant than others. There is no effective countervailing power against the coalition of the big businessmen - who, as political outsiders, now occupy the command posts - and the ascendant military men - who with such grave voices now speak so frequently in the higher councils.

 

Those having real power in the American state today are not merely brokers of power, resolvers of conflict, or compromisers of varied and clashing interest - they represent and indeed embody quite specific national interests and policies.

While the professional party politicians may still, at times, be brokers of power, compromisers of interests, negotiators of issues, they are no longer at the top of the state, or at the top of the power system as a whole.

The idea that the power system is a balancing society leads us to assume that the state is a visible mask for autonomous powers, but in fact, the powers of decision are now firmly vested within the state. The old lobby, visible or invisible, is now the visible government.

 

This 'governmentalization of the lobby' has proceeded in both the legislative and the executive domains, as well as between them. The executive bureaucracy becomes not only the center of power but also the arena within which and in terms of which all conflicts of power are resolved or denied resolution. Administration replaces electoral politics; the maneuvering of cliques replaces the clash of parties.

The agrarian revolt of the 'nineties, the small-business revolt that has been more or less intermittent since the 'eighties, the labor revolt of the 'thirties - all of these have failed and all of these have succeeded. They have failed as autonomous movements of small property or of organized workmen which could countervail against the power of the corporate rich, and they have failed as politically autonomous third parties.

 

But they have succeeded, in varying degrees, as vested interests inside the expanded state, and they have succeeded as parochial interests variously seated in particular districts and states where they do not conflict with larger interests. They are well-established features of the middle levels of balancing power.

Among the plurality of these middle powers, in fact, are all those strata and interests which in the course of American history have been defeated in their bids for top power or which have never made such bids. They include: rural small property, urban small property, the wage-worker unions, all consumers, and all major white-collar groups.

 

These are indeed still in an unromantic scatter; being structurally unable to unite among themselves, they do indeed balance one another - in a system of semi-organized stalemate. They 'get in the way' of the unified top, but no one of them has a chance to come into the top circles, where the political outsiders from corporate institution and military order are firmly in command.

When the multifarious middle classes are a political balance wheel, the professional politician is the ascendant decision-maker. When the middle classes decline as a set of autonomous political forces, the balancing society as a system of power declines, and the party politicians of the sovereign localities are relegated to the middle levels of national power.

These structural trends came to political shape during the period of the New Deal, which was of course a time of slump.

 

That our own immediate period has been a time of material prosperity has obscured these facts, but it has not altered them; and, as facts, they are important to the understanding of the power elite today.

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12 - The Power Elite

EXCEPT for the unsuccessful Civil War, changes in the power system of the United States have not involved important challenges to its basic legitimations.

 

Even when they have been decisive enough to be called 'revolutions,' they have not involved the 'resort to the guns of a cruiser, the dispersal of an elected assembly by bayonets, or the mechanisms of a police state.'1 Nor have they involved, in any decisive way, any ideological struggle to control masses. Changes in the American structure of power have generally come about by institutional shifts in the relative positions of the political, the economic, and the military orders.

 

From this point of view, and broadly speaking, the American power elite has gone through four epochs, and is now well into a fifth.
 

1 -

I. During the first - roughly from the Revolution through the administration of John Adams - the social and economic, the political and the military institutions were more or less unified in a simple and direct way: the individual men of these several elites moved easily from one role to another at the top of each of the major institutional orders. Many of them were many-sided men who could take the part of legislator and merchant, frontiersman and soldier, scholar and surveyor.²

Until the downfall of the Congressional caucus of 1824, political institutions seemed quite central; political decisions, of great importance; many politicians, considered national statesmen of note.

'Society, as I first remember it,' Henry Cabot Lodge once said, speaking of the Boston of his early boyhood, 'was based on the old families; Doctor Holmes defines them in the "Autocrat" as the families which had held high position in the colony, the province and during the Revolution and the early decades of the United States. They represented several generations of education and standing in the community... They had ancestors who had filled the pulpits, sat upon the bench, and taken part in the government under the crown; who had fought in the Revolution, helped to make the State and National constitutions and served in the army or navy; who had been members of the House or Senate in the early days of the Republic, and who had won success as merchants, manufacturers, lawyers, or men of letters.' ³

Such men of affairs, who - as I have noted - were the backbone of Mrs. John Jay's social list of 1787, definitely included political figures of note.

 

The important fact about these early days is that social life, economic institutions, military establishment, and political order coincided, and men who were high politicians also played key roles in the economy and, with their families, were among those of the reputable who made up local society. In fact, this first period is marked by the leadership of men whose status does not rest exclusively upon their political position, although their political activities are important and the prestige of politicians high. And this prestige seems attached to the men who occupy Congressional position as well as the cabinet.

 

The elite are political men of education and of administrative experience, and, as Lord Bryce noted, possess a certain largeness of view and dignity of character.' ⁴
 

II. During the early nineteenth century - which followed Jefferson's political philosophy, but, in due course, Hamilton's economic principles - the economic and political and military orders fitted loosely into the great scatter of the American social structure.

 

The broadening of the economic order which came to be seated in the individual property owner was dramatized by Jefferson's purchase of the Louisiana Territory and by the formation of the Democratic-Republican party as successor to the Federalists.

In this society, the 'elite' became a plurality of top groups, each in turn quite loosely made up. They overlapped to be sure, but again quite loosely so. One definite key to the period, and certainly to our images of it, is the fact that the Jacksonian Revolution was much more of a status revolution than either an economic or a political one.

 

The metropolitan 400 could not truly flourish in the face of the status tides of Jacksonian democracy; alongside it was a political elite in charge of the new party system. No set of men controlled centralized means of power; no small clique dominated economic, much less political, affairs. The economic order was ascendant over both social status and political power; within the economic order, a quite sizable proportion of all the economic men were among those who decided. For this was the period -  roughly from Jefferson to Lincoln - when the elite was at most a loose coalition.

 

The period ended, of course, with the decisive split of southern and northern types.

Official commentators like to contrast the ascendancy in totalitarian countries of a tightly organized clique with the American system of power. Such comments, however, are easier to sustain if one compares mid-twentieth-century Russia with mid-nineteenth century America, which is what is often done by Tocqueville quoting Americans making the contrast.

 

But that was an America of a century ago, and in the century that has passed, the American elite have not remained as patrioteer essayists have described them to us. The 'loose cliques' now head institutions of a scale and power not then existing and, especially since World War I, the loose cliques have tightened up.

 

We are well beyond the era of romantic pluralism.
 

III. The supremacy of corporate economic power began, in a formal way, with the Congressional elections of 1866, and was consolidated by the Supreme Court decision of 1886 which declared that the Fourteenth Amendment protected the corporation.

 

That period witnessed the transfer of the center of initiative from government to corporation. Until the First World War (which gave us an advanced showing of certain features of our own period) this was an age of raids on the government by the economic elite, an age of simple corruption, when Senators and judges were simply bought up.

 

Here, once upon a time, in the era of McKinley and Morgan, far removed from the undocumented complexities of our own time, many now believe, was the golden era of the American ruling class.⁵

The military order of this period, as in the second, was subordinate to the political, which in turn was subordinate to the economic. The military was thus off to the side of the main driving forces of United States history. Political institutions in the United States have never formed a centralized and autonomous domain of power; they have been enlarged and centralized only reluctantly in slow response to the public consequence of the corporate economy.

In the post-Civil-War era, that economy was the dynamic; the 'trusts' - as policies and events make amply clear - could readily use the relatively weak governmental apparatus for their own ends. That both state and federal governments were decisively limited in their power to regulate, in fact meant that they were themselves regulatable by the larger moneyed interests.

 

Their powers were scattered and unorganized; the powers of the industrial and financial corporations concentrated and interlocked. The Morgan interests alone held 341 directorships in 112 corporations with an aggregate capitalization of over $22 billion - over three times the assessed value of all real and personal property in New England.⁶

 

With revenues greater and employees more numerous than those of many states, corporations controlled parties, bought laws, and kept Congressmen of the 'neutral' state. And as private economic power overshadowed public political power, so the economic elite overshadowed the political.

Yet even between 1896 and 1919, events of importance tended to assume a political form, foreshadowing the shape of power which after the partial boom of the 'twenties was to prevail in the New Deal. Perhaps there has never been any period in American history so politically transparent as the Progressive era of President-makers and Muckrakers.
 

IV. The New Deal did not reverse the political and economic relations of the third era, but it did create within the political arena, as well as in the corporate world itself, competing centers of power that challenged those of the corporate directors.

 

As the New Deal directorate gained political power, the economic elite, which in the third period had fought against the growth of 'government' while raiding it for crafty privileges, belatedly attempted to join it on the higher levels. When they did so they found themselves confronting other interests and men, for the places of decision were crowded. In due course, they did come to control and to use for their own purposes the New Deal institutions whose creation they had so bitterly denounced.

But during the 'thirties, the political order was still an instrument of small propertied farmers and businessmen, although they were weakened, having lost their last chance for real ascendancy in the Progressive era. The struggle between big and small property flared up again, however, in the political realm of the New Deal era, and to this struggle there was added, as we have seen, the new struggle of organized labor and the unorganized unemployed.

 

This new force flourished under political tutelage, but nevertheless, for the first time in United States history, social legislation and lower-class issues became important features of the reform movement.

In the decade of the 'thirties, a set of shifting balances involving newly instituted farm measures and newly organized labor unions - along with big business - made up the political and administrative drama of power. These farm, labor, and business groups, moreover, were more or less contained within the framework of an enlarging governmental structure, whose political directorship made decisions in a definitely political manner.

 

These groups pressured, and in pressuring against one another and against the governmental and party system, they helped to shape it.

 

But it could not be said that any of them for any considerable length of time used that government unilaterally as their instrument. That is why the 'thirties was a political decade: the power of business was not replaced, but it was contested and supplemented: it became one major power within a structure of power that was chiefly run by political men, and not by economic or military men turned political.

The earlier and middle Roosevelt administrations can best be understood as a desperate search for ways and means, within the existing capitalist system, of reducing the staggering and ominous army of the unemployed. In these years, the New Deal as a system of power was essentially a balance of pressure groups and interest blocs.

 

The political top adjusted many conflicts, gave way to this demand, sidetracked that one, was the unilateral servant of none, and so evened it all out into such going policy line as prevailed from one minor crisis to another. Policies were the result of a political act of balance at the top. Of course, the balancing act that Roosevelt performed did not affect the fundamental institutions of capitalism as a type of economy.

 

By his policies, he subsidized the defaults of the capitalist economy, which had simply broken down; and by his rhetoric, he balanced its political disgrace, putting 'economic royalists' in the political doghouse.

The 'welfare state,' created to sustain the balance and to carry out the subsidy, differed from the 'laissez-faire' state:

'If the state was believed neutral in the days of T.R. because its leaders claimed to sanction favors for no one,' Richard Hofstadter has remarked, 'the state under F.D.R. could be called neutral only in the sense that it offered favors to everyone.' ⁷

The new state of the corporate commissars differs from the old welfare state.

 

In fact, the later Roosevelt years - beginning with the entrance of the United States into overt acts of war and preparations for World War II - cannot be understood entirely in terms of an adroit equipoise of political power.

2 - We study history, it has been said, to rid ourselves of it, and the history of the power elite is a clear case for which this maxim is correct.

 

Like the tempo of American life in general, the long-term trends of the power structure* have been greatly speeded up since World War II, and certain newer trends within and between the dominant institutions have also set the shape of the power elite and given historically specific meaning to its fifth epoch:

 

* See above, ONE: The Higher Circles.
 

I. In so far as the structural clue to the power elite today lies in the political order, that clue is the decline of politics as genuine and public debate of alternative decisions - with nationally responsible and policy-coherent parties and with autonomous organizations connecting the lower and middle levels of power with the top levels of decision.

 

America is now in considerable part more a formal political democracy than a democratic social structure, and even the formal political mechanics are weak.

The long-time tendency of business and government to become more intricately and deeply involved with each other has, in the fifth epoch, reached a new point of explicitness. The two cannot now be seen clearly as two distinct worlds. It is in terms of the executive agencies of the state that the rapprochement has proceeded most decisively.

 

The growth of the executive branch of the government, with its agencies that patrol the complex economy, does not mean merely the 'enlargement of government' as some sort of autonomous bureaucracy: it has meant the ascendancy of the corporation's man as a political eminence.

During the New Deal the corporate chieftains joined the political directorate; as of World War II they have come to dominate it. Long interlocked with government, now they have moved into quite full direction of the economy of the war effort and of the postwar era.

 

This shift of the corporation executives into the political directorate has accelerated the long-term relegation of the professional politicians in the Congress to the middle levels of power.
 

II. In so far as the structural clue to the power elite today lies in the enlarged and military state, that clue becomes evident in the military ascendancy.

 

The warlords have gained decisive political relevance, and the military structure of America is now in considerable part a political structure. The seemingly permanent military threat places a premium on the military and upon their control of men, materiel, money, and power; virtually all political and economic actions are now judged in terms of military definitions of reality: the higher warlords have ascended to a firm position within the power elite of the fifth epoch.

In part at least this has resulted from one simple historical fact, pivotal for the years since 1939: the focus of elite attention has been shifted from domestic problems, centered in the 'thirties around slump, to international problems, centered in the 'forties and 'fifties around war.

 

Since the governing apparatus of the United States has by long historic usage been adapted to and shaped by domestic clash and balance, it has not, from any angle, had suitable agencies and traditions for the handling of international problems. Such formal democratic mechanics as had arisen in the century and a half of national development prior to 1941, had not been extended to the American handling of international affairs.

 

It is, in considerable part, in this vacuum that the power elite has grown.
 

III. In so far as the structural clue to the power elite today lies in the economic order, that clue is the fact that the economy is at once a permanent-war economy and a private-corporation economy.

 

American capitalism is now in considerable part a military capitalism, and the most important relation of the big corporation to the state rests on the coincidence of interests between military and corporate needs, as defined by warlords and corporate rich. Within the elite as a whole, this coincidence of interest between the high military and the corporate chieftains strengthens both of them and further subordinates the role of the merely political men. Not politicians, but corporate executives, sit with the military and plan the organization of war effort.

The shape and meaning of the power elite today can be understood only when these three sets of structural trends are seen at their point of coincidence: the military capitalism of private corporations exists in a weakened and formal democratic system containing a military order already quite political in outlook and demeanor.

 

Accordingly, at the top of this structure, the power elite has been shaped by the coincidence of interest between those who control the major means of production and those who control the newly enlarged means of violence; from the decline of the professional politician and the rise to explicit political command of the corporate chieftains and the professional warlords; from the absence of any genuine civil service of skill and integrity, independent of vested interests.

The power elite is composed of political, economic, and military men, but this instituted elite is frequently in some tension: it comes together only on certain coinciding points and only on certain occasions of 'crisis.' In the long peace of the nineteenth century, the military were not in the high councils of state, not of the political directorate, and neither were the economic men - they made raids upon the state but they did not join its directorate.

 

During the 'thirties, the political man was ascendant. Now the military and the corporate men are in top positions.

Of the three types of circle that compose the power elite today, it is the military that has benefited the most in its enhanced power, although the corporate circles have also become more explicitly entrenched in the more public decision-making circles.

 

It is the professional politician that has lost the most, so much that in examining the events and decisions, one is tempted to speak of a political vacuum in which the corporate rich and the high warlord, in their coinciding interests, rule.

It should not be said that the three 'take turns' in carrying the initiative, for the mechanics of the power elite are not often as deliberate as that would imply. At times, of course, it is - as when political men, thinking they can borrow the prestige of generals, find that they must pay for it, or, as when during big slumps, economic men feel the need of a politician at once safe and possessing vote appeal. Today all three are involved in virtually all widely ramifying decisions.

 

Which of the three types seems to lead depends upon 'the tasks of the period' as they, the elite, define them. Just now, these tasks center upon 'defense' and international affairs. Accordingly, as we have seen, the military are ascendant in two senses: as personnel and as justifying ideology. That is why, just now, we can most easily specify the unity and the shape of the power elite in terms of the military ascendancy.

But we must always be historically specific and open to complexities. The simple Marxian view makes the big economic man the real holder of power; the simple liberal view makes the big political man the chief of the power system; and there are some who would view the warlords as virtual dictators. Each of these is an oversimplified view.

 

It is to avoid them that we use the term 'power elite' rather than, for example, 'ruling class.'*

 

* 'Ruling class' is a badly loaded phrase. 'Class' is an economic term; 'rule' a political one. The phrase, 'ruling class,' thus contains the theory that an economic class rules politically. That short-cut theory may or may not at times be true, but we do not want to carry that one rather simple theory about in the terms that we use to define our problems; we wish to state the theories explicitly, using terms of more precise and unilateral meaning. Specifically, the phrase 'ruling class,' in its common political connotations, does not allow enough autonomy to the political order and its agents, and it says nothing about the military as such. It should be clear to the reader by now that we do not accept as adequate the simple view that high economic men unilaterally make all decisions of national consequence. We hold that such a simple view of 'economic determinism' must be elaborated by 'political determinism' and 'military determinism'; that the higher agents of each of these three domains now often have a noticeable degree of autonomy; and that only in the often intricate ways of coalition do they make up and carry through the most important decisions. Those are the major reasons we prefer 'power elite' to 'ruling class' as a characterizing phrase for the higher circles when we consider them in terms of power.

 

In so far as the power elite has come to wide public attention, it has done so in terms of the 'military clique.'

 

The power elite does, in fact, take its current shape from the decisive entrance into it of the military. Their presence and their ideology are its major legitimations, whenever the power elite feels the need to provide any. But what is called the 'Washington military clique' is not composed merely of military men, and it does not prevail merely in Washington.

 

Its members exist all over the country, and it is a coalition of generals in the roles of corporation executives, of politicians masquerading as admirals, of corporation executives acting like politicians, of civil servants who become majors, of vice-admirals who are also the assistants to a cabinet officer, who is himself, by the way, really a member of the managerial elite.

Neither the idea of a 'ruling class' nor of a simple monolithic rise of 'bureaucratic politicians' nor of a 'military clique' is adequate. The power elite today involves the often uneasy coincidence of economic, military, and political power.
 

3 - Even if our understanding were limited to these structural trends, we should have grounds for believing the power elite a useful, indeed indispensable, concept for the interpretation of what is going on at the topside of modern American society.

 

But we are not, of course, so limited: our conception of the power elite does not need to rest only upon the correspondence of the institutional hierarchies involved, or upon the many points at which their shifting interests coincide. The power elite, as we conceive it, also rests upon the similarity of its personnel, and their personal and official relations with one another, upon their social and psychological affinities. In order to grasp the personal and social basis of the power elite's unity, we have first to remind ourselves of the facts of origin, career, and style of life of each of the types of circle whose members compose the power elite.

The power elite is not an aristocracy, which is to say that it is not a political ruling group based upon a nobility of hereditary origin. It has no compact basis in a small circle of great families whose members can and do consistently occupy the top positions in the several higher circles which overlap as the power elite.

 

But such nobility is only one possible basis of common origin. That it does not exist for the American elite does not mean that members of this elite derive socially from the full range of strata composing American society. They derive in substantial proportions from the upper classes, both new and old, of local society and the metropolitan 400. The bulk of the very rich, the corporate executives, the political outsiders, the high military, derive from, at most, the upper third of the income and occupational pyramids.

 

Their fathers were at least of the professional and business strata, and very frequently higher than that. They are native-born Americans of native parents, primarily from urban areas, and, with the exceptions of the politicians among them, overwhelmingly from the East. They are mainly Protestants, especially Episcopalian or Presbyterian. In general, the higher the position, the greater the proportion of men within it who have derived from and who maintain connections with the upper classes.

 

The generally similar origins of the members of the power elite are underlined and carried further by the fact of their increasingly common educational routine. Overwhelmingly college graduates, substantial proportions have attended Ivy League colleges, although the education of the higher military, of course, differs from that of other members of the power elite.

But what do these apparently simple facts about the social composition of the higher circles really mean? In particular, what do they mean for any attempt to understand the degree of unity, and the direction of policy and interest that may prevail among these several circles? Perhaps it is best to put this question in a deceptively simple way: in terms of origin and career, who or what do these men at the top represent?

Of course, if they are elected politicians, they are supposed to represent those who elected them; and, if they are appointed, they are supposed to represent, indirectly, those who elected their appointers. But this is recognized as something of an abstraction, as a rhetorical formula by which all men of power in almost all systems of government nowadays justify their power of decision. At times it may be true, both in the sense of their motives and in the sense of who benefits from their decisions.

 

Yet it would not be wise in any power system merely to assume it.

The fact that members of the power elite come from near the top of the nation's class and status levels does not mean that they are necessarily 'representative' of the top levels only. And if they were, as social types, representative of a cross-section of the population, that would not mean that a balanced democracy of interest and power would automatically be the going political fact.

We cannot infer the direction of policy merely from the social origins and careers of the policy-makers. The social and economic backgrounds of the men of power do not tell us all that we need to know in order to understand the distribution of social power.

 

For:

1. Men from high places may be ideological representatives of the poor and humble

2. Men of humble origin, brightly self-made, may energetically serve the most vested and inherited interests

3. Moreover, not all men who effectively represent the interests of a stratum need in any way belong to it or personally benefit by policies that further its interests. Among the politicians, in short, there are sympathetic agents of given groups, conscious and unconscious, paid and unpaid.

4. Finally, among the top decision-makers we find men who have been chosen for their positions because of their 'expert knowledge.'

These are some of the obvious reasons why the social origins and careers of of the power elite do not enable us to infer the class interests and policy directions of a modern system of power.

Do the high social origin and careers of the top men mean nothing, then, about the distribution of power? By no means. They simply remind us that we must be careful of any simple and direct inference from origin and career to political character and policy, not that we must ignore them in our attempt at political understanding.

 

They simply mean that we must analyze the political psychology and the actual decisions of the political directorate as well as its social composition. And they mean, above all, that we should control, as we have done here, any inference we make from the origin and careers of the political actors by close understanding of the institutional landscape in which they act out their drama.

 

Otherwise we should be guilty of a rather simple-minded biographical theory of society and history.

Just as we cannot rest the notion of the power elite solely upon the institutional mechanics that lead to its formation, so we cannot rest the notion solely upon the facts of the origin and career of its personnel. We need both, and we have both - as well as other bases, among them that of the status intermingling.

But it is not only the similarities of social origin, religious affiliation, nativity, and education that are important to the psychological and social affinities of the members of the power elite. Even if their recruitment and formal training were more heterogeneous than they are, these men would still be of quite homogeneous social type.

 

For the most important set of facts about a circle of men is the criteria of admission, of praise, of honor, of promotion that prevails among them; if these are similar within a circle, then they will tend as personalities to become similar. The circles that compose the power elite do tend to have such codes and criteria in common. The co-optation of the social types to which these common values lead is often more important than any statistics of common origin and career that we might have at hand.

There is a kind of reciprocal attraction among the fraternity of the successful - not between each and every member of the circles of the high and mighty, but between enough of them to insure a certain unity. On the slight side, it is a sort of tacit, mutual admiration; in the strongest tie-ins, it proceeds by intermarriage.

 

And there are all grades and types of connection between these extremes. Some overlaps certainly occur by means of cliques and clubs, churches and schools.

If social origin and formal education in common tend to make the members of the power elite more readily understood and trusted by one another, their continued association further cements what they feel they have in common. Members of the several higher circles know one another as personal friends and even as neighbors; they mingle with one another on the golf course, in the gentleman's clubs, at resorts, on transcontinental airplanes, and on ocean liners.

 

They meet at the estates of mutual friends, face each other in front of the TV camera, or serve on the same philanthropic committee; and many are sure to cross one an-other's path in the columns of newspapers, if not in the exact cafes from which many of these columns originate.

 

As we have seen, of 'The New 400' of cafe society, one chronicler has named forty-one members of the very rich, ninety-three political leaders, and seventy-nine chief executives of corporations.*

 

* See above, FOUR: The Celebrities.
 

'I did not know, I could not have dreamed,' Whittaker Chambers has written, 'of the immense scope and power of Hiss' political alliances and his social connections, which cut across all party lines and ran from the Supreme Court to the Religious Society of Friends, from governors of states and instructors in college faculties to the staff members of liberal magazines. In the decade since I had last seen him, he had used his career, and, in particular, his identification with the cause of peace through his part in organizing the United Nations, to put down roots that made him one with the matted forest floor of American upper class, enlightened middle class, liberal and official life. His roots could not be disturbed without disturbing all the roots on all sides of him.' ⁸

The sphere of status has reflected the epochs of the power elite.

 

In the third epoch, for example, who could compete with big money? And in the fourth, with big politicians, or even the bright young men of the New Deal? And in the fifth, who can compete with the generals and the admirals and the corporate officials now so sympathetically portrayed on the stage, in the novel, and on the screen? Can one imagine Executive Suite as a successful motion picture in 1935? Or The Caine Mutiny?

The multiplicity of high-prestige organizations to which the elite usually belong is revealed by even casual examination of the obituaries of the big businessman, the high-prestige lawyer, the top general and admiral, the key senator: usually, high-prestige church, business associations, plus high-prestige clubs, and often plus military rank. In the course of their lifetimes, the university president, the New York Stock Exchange chairman, the head of the bank, the old West Pointer - mingle in the status sphere, within which they easily renew old friendships and draw upon them in an effort to understand through the experience of trusted others those contexts of power and decision in which they have not personally moved.

In these diverse contexts, prestige accumulates in each of the higher circles, and the members of each borrow status from one another. Their self-images are fed by these accumulations and these borrowings, and accordingly, however segmental a given man's role may seem, he comes to feel himself a 'diffuse' or 'generalized' man of the higher circles, a 'broad-gauge' man.

 

Perhaps such inside experience is one feature of what is meant by 'judgment.'

The key organizations, perhaps, are the major corporations themselves, for on the boards of directors we find a heavy overlapping among the members of these several elites. On the lighter side, again in the summer and winter resorts, we find that, in an intricate series of overlapping circles; in the course of time, each meets each or knows somebody who knows somebody who knows that one.

The higher members of the military, economic, and political orders are able readily to take over one another's point of view, always in a sympathetic way, and often in a knowledgeable way as well. They define one another as among those who count, and who, accordingly, must be taken into account. Each of them as a member of the power elite comes to incorporate into his own integrity, his own honor, his own conscience, the viewpoint, the expectations, the values of the others.

 

If there are no common ideals and standards among them that are based upon an explicitly aristocratic culture, that does not mean that they do not feel responsibility to one another.

All the structural coincidence of their interests as well as the intricate, psychological facts of their origins and their education, their careers and their associations make possible the psychological affinities that prevail among them, affinities that make it possible for them to say of one another: He is, of course, one of us.

 

And all this points to the basic, psychological meaning of class consciousness. Nowhere in America is there as great a 'class consciousness' as among the elite; nowhere is it organized as effectively as among the power elite. For by class consciousness, as a psychological fact, one means that the individual member of a 'class' accepts only those accepted by his circle as among those who are significant to his own image of self.

Within the higher circles of the power elite, factions do exist; there are conflicts of policy; individual ambitions do clash. There are still enough divisions of importance within the Republican party, and even between Republicans and Democrats, to make for different methods of operation.

 

But more powerful than these divisions are the internal discipline and the community of interests that bind the power elite together, even across the boundaries of nations at war.⁹
 

4 - Yet we must give due weight to the other side of the case which may not question the facts but only our interpretation of them. There is a set of objections that will inevitably be made to our whole conception of the power elite, but which has essentially to do with only the psychology of its members.

 

It might well be put by liberals or by conservatives in some such way as this:

To talk of a power elite - isn't this to characterize men by their origins and associations? Isn't such characterization both unfair and untrue? Don't men modify themselves, especially Americans such as these, as they rise in stature to meet the demands of their jobs? Don't they arrive at a view and a line of policy that represents, so far as they in their human weaknesses can know, the interests of the nation as a whole? Aren't they merely honorable men who are doing their duty?'

What are we to reply to these objections?

I. We are sure that they are honorable men.

 

But what is honor? Honor can only mean living up to a code that one believes to be honorable. There is no one code upon which we are all agreed. That is why, if we are civilized men, we do not kill off all of those with whom we disagree. The question is not: are these honorable men? The question is: what are their codes of honor?

 

The answer to that question is that they are the codes of their circles, of those to whose opinions they defer. How could it be otherwise? That is one meaning of the important truism that all men are human and that all men are social creatures. As for sincerity, it can only be disproved, never proved.
 

II. To the question of their adaptability - which means their capacity to transcend the codes of conduct which, in their life's work and experience, they have acquired - we must answer: simply no, they cannot, at least not in the handful of years most of them have left.

 

To expect that is to assume that they are indeed strange and expedient: such flexibility would in fact involve a violation of what we may rightly call their character and their integrity. By the way, may it not be precisely because of the lack of such character and integrity that earlier types of American politicians have not represented as great a threat as do these men of character?

It would be an insult to the effective training of the military, and to their indoctrination as well, to suppose that military officials shed their military character and outlook upon changing from uniform to mufti. This background is more important perhaps in the military case than in that of the corporate executives, for the training of the career is deeper and more total.

'Lack of imagination,' Gerald W. Johnson has noted, 'is not to be confused with lack of principle. On the contrary, an unimaginative man is often a man of the highest principles. The trouble is that his principles conform to Cornford's famous definition: "A principle is a rule of inaction giving valid general reasons for not doing in a specific instance what to unprincipled instinct would seem to be right." ' ¹⁰

Would it not be ridiculous, for example, to believe seriously that, in psychological fact, Charles Erwin Wilson represented anyone or any interest other than those of the corporate world?

 

This is not because he is dishonest; on the contrary, it is because he is probably a man of solid integrity - as sound as a dollar. He is what he is and he cannot very well be anything else. He is a member of the professional corporation elite, just as are his colleagues, in the government and out of it; he represents the wealth of the higher corporate world; he represents its power; and he believes sincerely in his oft-quoted remark that 'what is good for the United States is good for the General Motors Corporation and vice versa.'

The revealing point about the pitiful hearings on the confirmation of such men for political posts is not the cynicism toward the law and toward the lawmakers on the middle levels of power which they display, nor their reluctance to dispose of their personal stock.¹¹

 

The interesting point is how impossible it is for such men to divest themselves of their engagement with the corporate world in general and with their own corporations in particular. Not only their money, but their friends, their interests, their training - their lives in short - are deeply involved in this world. The disposal of stock is, of course, merely a purifying ritual. The point is not so much financial or personal interests in a given corporation, but identification with the corporate world.

 

To ask a man suddenly to divest himself of these interests and sensibilities is almost like asking a man to become a woman.
 

III. To the question of their patriotism, of their desire to serve the nation as a whole, we must answer first that, like codes of honor, feelings of patriotism and views of what is to the whole nation's good, are not ultimate facts but matters upon which there exists a great variety of opinion.

 

Furthermore, patriotic opinions too are rooted in and are sustained by what a man has become by virtue of how and with whom he has lived. This is no simple mechanical determination of individual character by social conditions; it is an intricate process, well established in the major tradition of modern social study.

 

One can only wonder why more social scientists do not use it systematically in speculating about politics.
 

IV. The elite cannot be truly thought of as men who are merely doing their duty.

 

They are the ones who determine their duty, as well as the duties of those beneath them. They are not merely following orders: they give the orders. They are not merely 'bureaucrats': they command bureaucracies. They may try to disguise these facts from others and from themselves by appeals to traditions of which they imagine themselves the instruments, but there are many traditions, and they must choose which ones they will serve.

 

They face decisions for which there simply are no traditions.

Now, to what do these several answers add up?

 

To the fact that we cannot reason about public events and historical trends merely from knowledge about the motives and character of the men or the small groups who sit in the seats of the high and mighty. This fact, in turn, does not mean that we should be intimidated by accusations that in taking up our problem in the way we have, we are impugning the honor, the integrity, or the ability of those who are in high office.

 

For it is not, in the first instance, a question of individual character; and if, in further instances, we find that it is, we should not hesitate to say so plainly. In the meantime, we must judge men of power by the standards of power, by what they do as decision-makers, and not by who they are or what they may do in private life. Our interest is not in that: we are interested in their policies and in the consequences of their conduct of office.

 

We must remember that these men of the power elite now occupy the strategic places in the structure of American society; that they command the dominant institutions of a dominant nation; that, as a set of men, they are in a position to make decisions with terrible consequences for the underlying populations of the world.
 

5 - Despite their social similarity and psychological affinities, the members of the power elite do not constitute a club having a permanent membership with fixed and formal boundaries.

 

It is of the nature of the power elite that within it there is a good deal of shifting about, and that it thus does not consist of one small set of the same men in the same positions in the same hierarchies. Because men know each other personally does not mean that among them there is a unity of policy; and because they do not know each other personally does not mean that among them there is a disunity. The conception of the power elite does not rest, as I have repeatedly said, primarily upon personal friendship.

As the requirements of the top places in each of the major hierarchies become similar, the types of men occupying these roles at the top - by selection and by training in the jobs - become similar. This is no mere deduction from structure to personnel. That it is a fact is revealed by the heavy traffic that has been going on between the three structures, often in very intricate patterns.

 

The chief executives, the warlords, and selected politicians came into contact with one another in an intimate, working way during World War II; after that war ended, they continued their associations, out of common beliefs, social congeniality, and coinciding interests. Noticeable proportions of top men from the military, the economic, and the political worlds have during the last fifteen years occupied positions in one or both of the other worlds: between these higher circles there is an interchangeability of position, based formally upon the supposed transferability of 'executive ability,' based in substance upon the co-optation by cliques of insiders.

 

As members of a power elite, many of those busy in this traffic have come to look upon 'the government' as an umbrella under whose authority they do their work.

As the business between the big three increases in volume and importance, so does the traffic in personnel. The very criteria for selecting men who will rise come to embody this fact. The corporate commissar, dealing with the state and its military, is wiser to choose a young man who has experienced the state and its military than one who has not. The political director, often dependent for his own political success upon corporate decisions and corporations, is also wiser to choose a man with corporate experience.

 

Thus, by virtue of the very criterion of success, the interchange of personnel and the unity of the power elite is increased.

Given the formal similarity of the three hierarchies in which the several members of the elite spend their working lives, given the ramifications of the decisions made in each upon the others, given the coincidence of interest that prevails among them at many points, and given the administrative vacuum of the American civilian state along with its enlargement of tasks - given these trends of structure, and adding to them the psychological affinities we have noted - we should indeed be surprised were we to find that men said to be skilled in administrative contacts and full of organizing ability would fail to do more than get in touch with one another.

 

They have, of course, done much more than that: increasingly, they assume positions in one another's domains.

The unity revealed by the interchangeability of top roles rests upon the parallel development of the top jobs in each of the big three domains. The interchange occurs most frequently at the points of their coinciding interest, as between regulatory agency and the regulated industry; contracting agency and contractor.

 

And, as we shall see, it leads to co-ordinations that are more explicit, and even formal.

The inner core of the power elite consists, first, of those who interchange commanding roles at the top of one dominant institutional order with those in another: the admiral who is also a banker and a lawyer and who heads up an important federal commission; the corporation executive whose company was one of the two or three leading war materiel producers who is now the Secretary of Defense; the wartime general who dons civilian clothes to sit on the political directorate and then becomes a member of the board of directors of a leading economic corporation.

Although the executive who becomes a general, the general who becomes a statesman, the statesman who becomes a banker, see much more than ordinary men in their ordinary environments, still the perspectives of even such men often remain tied to their dominant locales. In their very career, however, they interchange roles within the big three and thus readily transcend the particularity of interest in any one of these institutional milieux. By their very careers and activities, they lace the three types of milieux together. They are, accordingly, the core members of the power elite.

These men are not necessarily familiar with every major arena of power. We refer to one man who moves in and between perhaps two circles - say the industrial and the military - and to another man who moves in the military and the political, and to a third who moves in the political as well as among opinion-makers. These in-between types most closely display our image of the power elite's structure and operation, even of behind-the-scenes operations.

 

To the extent that there is any 'invisible elite,' these advisory and liaison types are its core. Even if - as I believe to be very likely - many of them are, at least in the first part of their careers, 'agents' of the various elites rather than themselves elite, it is they who are most active in organizing the several top milieux into a structure of power and maintaining it.

The inner core of the power elite also includes men of the higher legal and financial type from the great law factories and investment firms, who are almost professional go-betweens of economic, political and military affairs, and who thus act to unify the power elite. The corporation lawyer and the investment banker perform the functions of the 'go-between' effectively and powerfully.

 

By the nature of their work, they transcend the narrower milieu of any one industry, and accordingly are in a position to speak and act for the corporate world or at least sizable sectors of it. The corporation lawyer is a key link between the economic and military and political areas; the investment banker is a key organizer and unifier of the corporate world and a person well versed in spending the huge amounts of money the American military establishment now ponders.

 

When you get a lawyer who handles the legal work of investment bankers you get a key member of the power elite.

During the Democratic era, one link between private corporate organizations and governmental institutions was the investment house of Dillon, Read. From it came such men as James Forrestal and Charles F. Detmar, Jr.; Ferdinand Eberstadt had once been a partner in it before he branched out into his own investment house from which came other men to political and military circles. Republican administrations seem to favor the investment firm of Kuhn, Loeb and the advertising firm of Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn.

Regardless of administrations, there is always the law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell.

 

Mid-West investment banker Cyrus Eaton has said that,

'Arthur H. Dean, a senior partner of Sullivan & Cromwell of No. 48 Wall Street, was one of those who assisted in the drafting of the Securities Act of 1933, the first of the series of bills passed to regulate the capital markets. He and his firm, which is reputed to be the largest in the United States, have maintained close relations with the SEC since its creation, and theirs is the dominating influence on the Commission.' ¹²

There is also the third largest bank in the United States: the Chase National Bank of New York (now Chase-Manhattan).

 

Regardless of political administration, executives of this bank and those of the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development have changed positions: John J. McCloy, who became Chairman of the Chase National in 1953, is a former president of the World Bank; and his successor to the presidency of the World Bank was a former senior vice-president of the Chase National Bank.¹³

 

And in 1953, the president of the Chase National Bank, Winthrop W. Aldrich, had left to become Ambassador to Great Britain.

The outermost fringes of the power elite - which change more than its core - consist of 'those who count' even though they may not be 'in' on given decisions of consequence nor in their career move between the hierarchies. Each member of the power elite need not be a man who personally decides every decision that is to be ascribed to the power elite.

 

Each member, in the decisions that he does make, takes the others seriously into account. They not only make decisions in the several major areas of war and peace; they are the men who, in decisions in which they take no direct part, are taken into decisive account by those who are directly in charge.

On the fringes and below them, somewhat to the side of the lower echelons, the power elite fades off into the middle levels of power, into the rank and file of the Congress, the pressure groups that are not vested in the power elite itself, as well as a multiplicity of regional and state and local interests. If all the men on the middle levels are not among those who count, they sometimes must be taken into account, handled, cajoled, broken or raised to higher circles.

When the power elite find that in order to get things done they must reach below their own realms - as is the case when it is necessary to get bills passed through Congress - they themselves must exert some pressure. But among the power elite, the name for such high-level lobbying is 'liaison work.'

 

There are 'liaison' military men with Congress, with certain wayward sections of industry, with practically every important element not directly concerned with the power elite. The two men on the White House staff who are named 'liaison' men are both experienced in military matters; one of them is a former investment banker and lawyer as well as a general.

Not the trade associations but the higher cliques of lawyers and investment bankers are the active political heads of the corporate rich and the members of the power elite.

'While it is generally assumed that the national associations carry tremendous weight in formulating public opinion and directing the course of national policy, there is some evidence to indicate that interaction between associations on a formal level is not a very tight-knit affair. The general tendency within associations seems to be to stimulate activities around the specific interests of the organization, and more effort is made to educate its members rather than to spend much time in trying to influence other associations on the issue at hand ...

 

As media for stating and re-stating the over-all value structure of the nation they (the trade associations) are important... But when issues are firmly drawn, individuals related to the larger corporate interests are called upon to exert pressure in the proper places at the strategic time The national associations may act as media for coordinating such pressures, but a great volume of intercommunication between members at the apex of power of the larger corporate interests seems to be the decisive factor in final policy determination.' ¹⁴

Conventional 'lobbying,' carried on by trade associations, still exists, although it usually concerns the middle levels of power-usually being targeted at Congress and, of course, its own rank and file members.

 

The important function of the National Association of Manufacturers, for example, is less directly to influence policy than to reveal to small businessmen that their interests are the same as those of larger businesses. But there is also 'high level lobbying.'

 

All over the country the corporate leaders are drawn into the circle of the high military and political through personal friendship, trade and professional associations and their various subcommittees, prestige clubs, open political affiliation, and customer relationships.

 

There is... an awareness among these power leaders,' one first-hand investigator of such executive cliques has asserted,

'of many of the current major policy issues before the nation such as keeping taxes down, turning all productive operations over to private enterprises, increasing foreign trade, keeping governmental welfare and other domestic activities to a minimum, and strengthening and maintaining the hold of the current party in power nationally.' ¹⁵

There are, in fact, cliques of corporate executives who are more important as informal opinion leaders in the top echelons of corporate, military, and political power than as actual participants in military and political organizations. Inside military circles and inside political circles and 'on the sidelines' in the economic area, these circles and cliques of corporation executives are in on most all major decisions regardless of topic.

 

And what is important about all this high-level lobbying is that it is done within the confines of that elite.
 

6 - The conception of the power elite and of its unity rests upon the corresponding developments and the coincidence of interests among economic, political, and military organizations. It also rests upon the similarity of origin and outlook, and the social and personal intermingling of the top circles from each of these dominant hierarchies.

 

This conjunction of institutional and psychological forces, in turn, is revealed by the heavy personnel traffic within and between the big three institutional orders, as well as by the rise of go-betweens as in the high-level lobbying.

 

The conception of the power elite, accordingly, does not rest upon the assumption that American history since the origins of World War II must be understood as a secret plot, or as a great and coordinated conspiracy of the members of this elite. The conception rests upon quite impersonal grounds.

There is, however, little doubt that the American power elite -  which contains, we are told, some of, 'the greatest organizers in the world' - has also planned and has plotted. The rise of the elite, as we have already made clear, was not and could not have been caused by a plot; and the tenability of the conception does not rest upon the existence of any secret or any publicly known organization.

 

But, once the conjunction of structural trend and of the personal will to utilize it gave rise to the power elite, then plans and programs did occur to its members and indeed it is not possible to interpret many events and official policies of the fifth epoch without reference to the power elite.

"There is a great difference,' Richard Hofstadter has remarked, 'between locating conspiracies in history and saying that history is, in effect, a conspiracy...' ¹⁶

The structural trends of institutions become defined as opportunities by those who occupy their command posts. Once such opportunities are recognized, men may avail themselves of them.

 

Certain types of men from each of the dominant institutional areas, more far-sighted than others, have actively promoted the liaison before it took its truly modern shape. They have often done so for reasons not shared by their partners, although not objected to by them either; and often the outcome of their liaison has had consequences which none of them foresaw, much less shaped, and which only later in the course of development came under explicit control.

 

Only after it was well under way did most of its members find themselves part of it and become gladdened, although sometimes also worried, by this fact. But once the co-ordination is a going concern, new men come readily into it and assume its existence without question.

So far as explicit organization - conspiratorial or not - is concerned, the power elite, by its very nature, is more likely to use existing organizations, working within and between them, than to set up explicit organizations whose membership is strictly limited to its own members. But if there is no machinery in existence to ensure, for example, that military and political factors will be balanced in decisions made, they will invent such machinery and use it, as with the National Security Council. Moreover, in a formally democratic polity, the aims and the powers of the various elements of this elite are further supported by an aspect of the permanent war economy: the assumption that the security of the nation supposedly rests upon great secrecy of plan and intent.

 

Many higher events that would reveal the working of the power elite can be withheld from public knowledge under the guise of secrecy. With the wide secrecy covering their operations and decisions, the power elite can mask their intentions, operations, and further consolidation. Any secrecy that is imposed upon those in positions to observe high decision-makers clearly works for and not against the operations of the power elite.

There is accordingly reason to suspect - but by the nature of the case, no proof - that the power elite is not altogether 'surfaced.' There is nothing hidden about it, although its activities are not publicized. As an elite, it is not organized, although its members often know one another, seem quite naturally to work together, and share many organizations in common.

 

There is nothing conspiratorial about it, although its decisions are often publicly unknown and its mode of operation manipulative rather than explicit.

It is not that the elite 'believe in' a compact elite behind the scenes and a mass down below. It is not put in that language. It is just that the people are of necessity confused and must, like trusting children, place all the new world of foreign policy and strategy and executive action in the hands of experts. It is just that everyone knows somebody has got to run the show, and that somebody usually does. Others do not really care anyway, and besides, they do not know how.

 

So the gap between the two types gets wider.

When crises are defined as total, and as seemingly permanent, the consequences of decision become total, and the decisions in each major area of life come to be integrated and total. Up to a point, these consequences for other institutional orders can be assessed; beyond such points, chances have to be taken. It is then that the felt scarcity of trained and imaginative judgment leads to plaintive feelings among executives about the shortage of qualified successors in political, military, and economic life. This feeling, in turn, leads to an increasing concern with the training of successors who could take over as older men of power retire.¹⁷

 

In each area, there slowly arises a new generation which has grown up in an age of coordinated decisions.

In each of the elite circles, we have noticed this concern to recruit and to train successors as 'broad-gauge' men, that is, as men capable of making decisions that involve institutional areas other than their own. The chief executives have set up formal recruitment and training programs to man the corporate world as virtually a state within a state.

 

Recruitment and training for the military elite has long been rigidly professionalized, but has now come to include educational routines of a sort which the remnants of older generals and admirals consider quite nonsensical.

Only the political order, with its absence of a genuine civil service, has lagged behind, creating an administrative vacuum into which military bureaucrats and corporate outsiders have been drawn. But even in this domain, since World War II, there have been repeated attempts, by elite men of such vision as the late James Forrestal's, to inaugurate a career service that would include periods in the corporate world as well as in the governmental.¹⁸

What is lacking is a truly common elite program of recruitment and training; for the prep school, Ivy League College, and law school sequence of the metropolitan 400 is not up to the demands now made upon members of the power elite.* ¹⁹

 

* See above, THREE: Metropolitan 400

 

Britishers, such as Field Marshall Viscount Montgomery, well aware of this lack, recently urged the adoption of a system 'under which a minority of high-caliber young students could be separated from the mediocre and given the best education possible to supply the country with leadership.'

 

His proposal is echoed, in various forms, by many who accept his criticism of 'the American theory of public education on the ground that it is ill-suited to produce the "elite" group of leaders... this country needs to fulfill its obligations of world leadership.' ²⁰

In part these demands reflect the unstated need to transcend recruitment on the sole basis of economic success, especially since it is suspect as often involving the higher immorality; in part it reflects the stated need to have men who, as Viscount Montgomery says, know 'the meaning of discipline.'

 

But above all these demands reflect the at least vague consciousness on the part of the power elite themselves that the age of coordinated decisions, entailing a newly enormous range of consequences, requires a power elite that is of a new caliber. In so far as the sweep of matters which go into the making of decisions is vast and interrelated, the information needed for judgments complex and requiring particularized knowledge,²¹ the men in charge will not only call upon one another; they will try to train their successors for the work at hand.

 

These new men will grow up as men of power within the co-ordination of economic and political and military decision.
 

7 - The idea of the power elite rests upon and enables us to make sense of,

1. the decisive institutional trends that characterize the structure of our epoch, in particular, the military ascendancy in a privately incorporated economy, and more broadly, the several coincidences of objective interests between economic, military, and political institutions

2. the social similarities and the psychological affinities of the men who occupy the command posts of these structures, in particular the increased interchangeability of the top positions in each of them and the increased traffic between these orders in the careers of men of power

3. the ramifications, to the point of virtual totality, of the kind of decisions that are made at the top, and the rise to power of a set of men who, by training and bent, are professional organizers of considerable force and who are unrestrained by democratic party training.

Negatively, the formation of the power elite rests upon,

1. the relegation of the professional party politician to the middle levels of power

2. the semi-organized stalemate of the interests of sovereign localities into which the legislative function has fallen

3. the virtually complete absence of a civil service that constitutes a politically neutral, but politically relevant, depository of brainpower and executive skill

4. the increased official secrecy behind which great decisions are made without benefit of public or even Congressional debate

As a result, the political directorate, the corporate rich, and the ascendant military have come together as the power elite, and the expanded and centralized hierarchies which they head have encroached upon the old balances and have now relegated them to the middle levels of power.

 

Now the balancing society is a conception that pertains accurately to the middle levels, and on that level the balance has become more often an affair of entrenched provincial and nationally irresponsible forces and demands than a center of power and national decision.

But how about the bottom? As all these trends have become visible at the top and on the middle, what has been happening to the great American public? If the top is unprecedentedly powerful and increasingly unified and willful; if the middle zones are increasingly a semi-organized stalemate - in what shape is the bottom, in what condition is the public at large?

The rise of the power elite, we shall now see, rests upon, and in some ways is part of, the transformation of the publics of America into a mass society.

 

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13 - The Mass Society

IN the standard image of power and decision, no force is held to be as important as The Great American Public. More than merely another check and balance, this public is thought to be the seat of all legitimate power.

 

In official life as in popular folklore, it is held to be the very balance wheel of democratic power. In the end, all liberal theorists rest their notions of the power system upon the political role of this public; all official decisions, as well as private decisions of consequence, are justified as in the public's welfare; all formal proclamations are in its name.
 

1 - Let us therefore consider the classic public of democratic theory in the generous spirit in which Rousseau once cried, 'Opinion, Queen of the World, is not subject to the power of kings; they are themselves its first slaves.'

The most important feature of the public of opinion, which the rise of the democratic middle class initiates, is the free ebb and flow of discussion. The possibilities of answering back, of organizing autonomous organs of public opinion, of realizing opinion in action, are held to be established by democratic institutions.

 

The opinion that results from public discussion is understood to be a resolution that is then carried out by public action; it is, in one version, the 'general will' of the people, which the legislative organ enacts into law, thus lending to it legal force. Congress, or Parliament, as an institution, crowns all the scattered publics; it is the archetype for each of the little circles of face-to-face citizens discussing their public business.

This eighteenth-century idea of the public of public opinion parallels the economic idea of the market of the free economy. Here is the market composed of freely competing entrepreneurs; there is the public composed of discussion circles of opinion peers. As price is the result of anonymous, equally weighted, bargaining individuals, so public opinion is the result of each man's having thought things out for himself and contributing his voice to the great chorus.

 

To be sure, some might have more influence on the state of opinion than others, but no one group monopolizes the discussion, or by itself determines the opinions that prevail.

Innumerable discussion circles are knit together by mobile people who carry opinions from one to another, and struggle for the power of larger command. The public is thus organized into associations and parties, each representing a set of viewpoints, each trying to acquire a place in the Congress, where the discussion continues. Out of the little circles of people talking with one another, the larger forces of social movements and political parties develop; and the discussion of opinion is the important phase in a total act by which public affairs are conducted.

The autonomy of these discussions is an important element in the idea of public opinion as a democratic legitimation. The opinions formed are actively realized within the prevailing institutions of power; all authoritative agents are made or broken by the prevailing opinions of these publics. And, in so far as the public is frustrated in realizing its demands, its members may go beyond criticism of specific policies; they may question the very legitimations of legal authority. That is one meaning of Jefferson's comment on the need for an occasional 'revolution.'

The public, so conceived, is the loom of classic, eighteenth-century democracy; discussion is at once the threads and the shuttle tying the discussion circles together. It lies at the root of the conception of authority by discussion, and it is based upon the hope that truth and justice will somehow come out of society as a great apparatus of free discussion.

 

The people are presented with problems. They discuss them. They decide on them. They formulate viewpoints. These viewpoints are organized, and they compete.

One viewpoint "wins out.' Then the people act out this view, or their representatives are instructed to act it out, and this they promptly do.

Such are the images of the public of classic democracy which are still used as the working justifications of power in American society. But now we must recognize this description as a set of images out of a fairy tale: they are not adequate even as an approximate model of how the American system of power works. The issues that now shape man's fate are neither raised nor decided by the public at large.

 

The idea of the community of publics is not a description of fact, but an assertion of an ideal, an assertion of a legitimation masquerading - as legitimations are now apt to do - as fact. For now the public of public opinion is recognized by all those who have considered it carefully as something less than it once was.

These doubts are asserted positively in the statement that the classic community of publics is being transformed into a society of masses. This transformation, in fact, is one of the keys to the social and psychological meaning of modern life in America.

I. In the democratic society of publics it was assumed, with John Locke, that the individual conscience was the ultimate seat of judgment and hence the final court of appeal. But this principle was challenged - as E. H. Carr has put it - when Rousseau 'for the first time thought in terms of the sovereignty of the whole people, and faced the issue of mass democracy.'1
 

II. In the democratic society of publics it was assumed that among the individuals who composed it there was a natural and peaceful harmony of interests. But this essentially conservative doctrine gave way to the Utilitarian doctrine that such a harmony of interests had first to be created by reform before it could work, and later to the Marxian doctrine of class struggle, which surely was then, and certainly is now, closer to reality than any assumed harmony of interests.
 

III. In the democratic society of publics it was assumed that before public action would be taken, there would be rational discussion between individuals which would determine the action, and that, accordingly, the public opinion that resulted would be the infallible voice of reason. But this has been challenged not only (1) by the assumed need for experts to decide delicate and

intricate issues, but (2) by the discovery - as by Freud - of the irrationality of the man in the street, and (3) by the discovery -  as by Marx - of the socially conditioned nature of what was once assumed to be autonomous reason.
 

IV. In the democratic society of publics it was assumed that after determining what is true and right and just, the public would act accordingly or see that its representatives did so. In the long run, public opinion will not only be right, but public opinion will prevail. This assumption has been upset by the great gap now existing between the underlying population and those who make decisions in its name, decisions of enormous consequence which the public often does not even know are being made until well after the fact.

Given these assumptions, it is not difficult to understand the articulate optimism of many nineteenth-century thinkers, for the theory of the public is, in many ways, a projection upon the community at large of the intellectual's ideal of the supremacy of intellect.

 

The 'evolution of the intellect,' Comte asserted, 'determines the main course of social evolution.' If looking about them, nineteenth-century thinkers still saw irrationality and ignorance and apathy, all that was merely an intellectual lag, to which the spread of education would soon put an end.

How much the cogency of the classic view of the public rested upon a restriction of this public to the carefully educated is revealed by the fact that by 1859 even John Stuart Mill was writing of 'the tyranny of the majority,' and both Tocqueville and Burckhardt anticipated the view popularized in the recent past by such political moralists as Ortega y Gasset.

 

In a word, the transformation of public into mass - and all that this implies - has been at once one of the major trends of modern societies and one of the major factors in the collapse of that liberal optimism which determined so much of the intellectual mood of the nineteenth century.

By the middle of that century: individualism had begun to be replaced by collective forms of economic and political life; harmony of interests by inharmonious struggle of classes and organized pressures; rational discussions undermined by expert decisions on complicated issues, by recognition of the interested bias of argument by vested position; and by the discovery of the effectiveness of ir

rational appeal to the citizen. Moreover, certain structural changes of modern society, which we shall presently consider, had begun to cut off the public from the power of active decision.
 

2 - The transformation of public into mass is of particular concern to us, for it provides an important clue to the meaning of the power elite. If that elite is truly responsible to, or even exists in connection with, a community of publics, it carries a very different meaning than if such a public is being transformed into a society of masses.

The United States today is not altogether a mass society, and it has never been altogether a community of publics These phrases are names for extreme types; they point to certain features of reality, but they are themselves constructions; social reality is always some sort of mixture of the two. Yet we cannot readily understand just how much of which is mixed into our situation if we do not first understand, in terms of explicit dimensions, the clear-cut and extreme types:

At least four dimensions must be attended to if we are to grasp the differences between public and mass.

I. There is first, the ratio of the givers of opinion to the receivers, which is the simplest way to state the social meaning of the formal media of mass communication.

 

More than anything else, it is the shift in this ratio which is central to the problems of the public and of public opinion in latter-day phases of democracy. At one extreme on the scale of communication, two people talk personally with each other; at the opposite extreme, one spokesman talks impersonally through a network of communications to millions of listeners and viewers.

 

In between these extremes there are assemblages and political rallies, parliamentary sessions, law court debates, small discussion circles dominated by one man, open discussion circles with talk moving freely back and forth among fifty people, and so on.
 

II. The second dimension to which we must pay attention is the possibility of answering back an opinion without internal or external reprisals being taken.

 

Technical conditions of the means of communication, in imposing a lower ratio of speakers to listeners, may obviate the possibility of freely answering back. Informal rules, resting upon conventional sanction and upon the informal structure of opinion leadership, may govern who can speak, when, and for how long. Such rules may or may not be in congruence with formal rules and with institutional sanctions which govern the process of communication.

 

In the extreme case, we may conceive of an absolute monopoly of communication to pacified media groups whose members cannot answer back even 'in private.' At the opposite extreme, the conditions may allow and the rules may uphold the wide and symmetrical formation of opinion.
 

III. We must also consider the relation of the formation of opinion to its realization in social action, the ease with which opinion is effective in the shaping of decisions of powerful consequence. This opportunity for people to act out their opinions collectively is of course limited by their position in the structure of power. This structure may be such as to limit decisively this capacity, or it may allow or even invite such action.

 

It may confine social action to local areas or it may enlarge the area of opportunity; it may make action intermittent or more or less continuous.
 

IV. There is, finally, the degree to which institutional authority, with its sanctions and controls, penetrates the public. Here the problem is the degree to which the public has genuine autonomy from instituted authority.

 

At one extreme, no agent of formal authority moves among the autonomous public. At the opposite extreme, the public is terrorized into uniformity by the infiltration of informers and the universalization of suspicion. One thinks of the late Nazi street-and-block-system, the eighteenth-century Japanese kumi, the Soviet cell structure.

 

In the extreme, the formal structure of power coincides, as it were, with the informal ebb and flow of influence by discussion, which is thus killed off.

By combining these several points, we can construct little models or diagrams of several types of societies. Since 'the problem of public opinion' as we know it is set by the eclipse of the classic bourgeois public, we are here concerned with only two types: public and mass.

In a public, as we may understand the term,

1. virtually as many people express opinions as receive them

2. public communications are so organized that there is a chance immediately and effectively to answer back any opinion expressed in public. Opinion formed by such discussion

3. readily finds an outlet in effective action, even against - if necessary - the prevailing system of authority

4. authoritative institutions do not penetrate the public, which is thus more or less autonomous in its operations. When these conditions prevail, we have the working model of a community of publics, and this model fits closely the several assumptions of classic democratic theory

At the opposite extreme, in a mass,

1. Far fewer people express opinions than receive them; for the community of publics becomes an abstract collection of individuals who receive impressions from the mass media

2. The communications that prevail are so organized that it is difficult or impossible for the individual to answer back immediately or with any effect

3. The realization of opinion in action is controlled by authorities who organize and control the channels of such action

4. The mass has no autonomy from institutions; on the contrary, agents of authorized institutions penetrate this mass, reducing any autonomy it may have in the formation of opinion by discussion.

The public and the mass may be most readily distinguished by their dominant modes of communication: in a community of publics, discussion is the ascendant means of communication, and the mass media, if they exist, simply enlarge and animate discussion, linking one primary public with the discussions of another.

 

In a mass society, the dominant type of communication is the formal media, and the publics become mere media markets: all those exposed to the contents of given mass media.
 

3 - From almost any angle of vision that we might assume, when we look upon the public, we realize that we have moved a considerable distance along the road to the mass society. At the end of that road there is totalitarianism, as in Nazi Germany or in Communist Russia. We are not yet at that end. In the United States today, media markets are not entirely ascendant over primary publics.

 

But surely we can see that many aspects of the public fife of our times are more the features of a mass society than of a community of publics. What is happening might again be stated in terms of the historical parallel between the economic market and the public of public opinion. In brief, there is a movement from widely scattered little powers to concentrated powers and the attempt at monopoly control from powerful centers, which, being partially hidden, are centers of manipulation as well as of authority.

 

The small shop serving the neighborhood is replaced by the anonymity of the national corporation: mass advertisement replaces the personal influence of opinion between merchant and customer.

 

The political leader hooks up his speech to a national network and speaks, with appropriate personal touches, to a million people he never saw and never will see. Entire brackets of professions and industries are in the 'opinion business,' impersonally manipulating the public for hire.

In the primary public the competition of opinions goes on between people holding views in the service of their interests and their reasoning. But in the mass society of media markets, competition, if any, goes on between the manipulators with their mass media on the one hand, and the people receiving their propaganda on the other.

Under such conditions, it is not surprising that there should arise a conception of public opinion as a mere reaction - we cannot say 'response' - to the content of the mass media. In this view, the public is merely the collectivity of individuals each rather passively exposed to the mass media and rather helplessly opened up to the suggestions and manipulations that flow from these media.

 

The fact of manipulation from centralized points of control constitutes, as it were, an expropriation of the old multitude of little opinion producers and consumers operating in a free and balanced market

In official circles, the very term itself, 'the public' - as Walter Lippmann noted thirty years ago - has come to have a phantom meaning, which dramatically reveals its eclipse. From the standpoint of the deciding elite, some of those who clamor publicly can be identified as 'Labor,' others as 'Business,' still others as 'Farmer.'

 

Those who can not readily be so identified make up The Public' In this usage, the public is composed of the unidentified and the non-partisan in a world of defined and partisan interests. It is socially composed of well-educated salaried professionals, especially college professors; of non-unionized employees, especially white-collar people, along with self-employed professionals and small businessmen.

In this faint echo of the classic notion, the public consists of those remnants of the middle classes, old and new, whose interests are not explicitly defined, organized, or clamorous. In a curious adaptation, 'the public' often becomes, in fact, 'the unattached expert,' who, although well informed, has never taken a clear-cut, public stand on controversial issues which are brought to a focus by organized interests.

 

These are the 'public' members of the board, the commission, the committee. What the public stands for, accordingly, is often a vagueness of policy (called open-mindedness), a lack of involvement in public affairs (known as reasonableness), and a professional disinterest (known as tolerance).

 

Some such official members of the public, as in the field of labor-management mediation, start out very young and make a career out of being careful to be informed but never taking a strong position; and there are many others, quite unofficial, who take such professionals as a sort of model.

 

The only trouble is that they are acting as if they were disinterested judges but they do not have the power of judges; hence their reasonableness, their tolerance, and their open-mindedness do not often count for much in the shaping of human affairs.
 

4 - All those trends that make for the decline of the politician and of his balancing society bear decisively upon the transformation of public into mass.*

 

*See, especially, the analysis of the decline of the independent middle classes, ELEVEN: The Theory of Balance.

 

One of the most important of the structural transformations involved is the decline of the voluntary association as a genuine instrument of the public. As we have already seen, the executive ascendancy in economic, military, and political institutions has lowered the effective use of all those voluntary associations which operate between the state and the economy on the one hand, and the family and the individual in the primary group on the other.

 

It is not only that institutions of power have become large-scale and inaccessibly centralized; they have at the same time become less political and more administrative, and it is within this great change of framework that the organized public has waned.

In terms of scale, the transformation of public into mass has been underpinned by the shift from a political public decisively restricted in size (by property and education, as well as by sex and age) to a greatly enlarged mass having only the qualifications of citizenship and age.

In terms of organization, the transformation has been underpinned by the shift from the individual and his primary community to the voluntary association and the mass party as the major units of organized power.

Voluntary associations have become larger to the extent that they have become effective; and to just that extent they have become inaccessible to the individual who would shape by discussion the policies of the organization to which he belongs. Accordingly, along with older institutions, these voluntary associations have lost their grip on the individual.

 

As more people are drawn into the political arena, these associations become mass in scale; and as the power of the individual becomes more dependent upon such mass associations, they are less accessible to the individual's influence.*

 

* At the same time - and also because of the metropolitan segregation and distraction, which I shall discuss in a moment - the individual becomes more dependent upon the means of mass communication for his view of the structure as a whole.

Mass democracy means the struggle of powerful and large-scale interest groups and associations, which stand between the big decisions that are made by state, corporation, army, and the will of the individual citizen as a member of the public. Since these middle-level associations are the citizen's major link with decision, his relation to them is of decisive importance. For it is only through them that he exercises such power as he may have.

The gap between the members and the leaders of the mass association is becoming increasingly wider. As soon as a man gets to be a leader of an association large enough to count he readily becomes lost as an instrument of that association.

 

He does so

1. in the interests of maintaining his leading position in, or rather over, his mass association

2. he does so because he comes to see himself not as a mere delegate, instructed or not, of the mass association he represents, but as a member of 'an elite' composed of such men as himself

3. these facts, in turn, lead to the big gap between the terms in which issues are debated and resolved among members of this elite, and the terms in which they are presented to the members of the various mass associations

For the decisions that are made must take into account those who are important-other elites - but they must be sold to the mass memberships.

The gap between speaker and listener, between power and public, leads less to any iron law of oligarchy than to the law of spokesmanship: as the pressure group expands, its leaders come to organize the opinions they 'represent.'

 

So elections, as we have seen, become contests between two giant and unwieldy parties, neither of which the individual can truly feel that he influences, and neither of which is capable of winning psychologically impressive or politically decisive majorities. And, in all this, the parties are of the same general form as other mass associations.²

When we say that man in the mass is without any sense of political belonging, we have in mind a political fact rather than merely a style of feeling. We have in mind (I.) a certain way of belonging (II.) to a certain land of organization.

I. The way of belonging here implied rests upon a belief in the purposes and in the leaders of an organization, and thus enables men and women freely to be at home within it To belong in this way is to make the human association a psychological center of one's self, to take into our conscience, deliberately and freely, its rules of conduct and its purposes, which we thus shape and which in turn shape us. We do not have this kind of belonging to any political organization.

II. The kind of organization we have in mind is a voluntary association which has three decisive characteristics: first, it is a context in which reasonable opinions may be formulated; second, it is an agency by which reasonable activities may be undertaken; and third, it is a powerful enough unit, in comparison with other organizations of power, to make a difference.

It is because they do not find available associations at once psychologically meaningful and historically effective that men often feel uneasy in their political and economic loyalties.

 

The effective units of power are now the huge corporation, the inaccessible government, the grim military establishment. Between these, on the one hand, and the family and the small community on the other, we find no intermediate associations in which men feel secure and with which they feel powerful.

 

There is little live political struggle. Instead, there is administration from above, and the political vacuum below. The primary publics are now either so small as to be swamped, and hence give up; or so large as to be merely another feature of the generally distant structure of power, and hence inaccessible.

Public opinion exists when people who are not in the government of a country claim the right to express political opinions freely and publicly, and the right that these opinions should influence or determine the policies, personnel, and actions of their government.3 In this formal sense there has been and there is a definite public opinion in the United States.

 

And yet, with modern developments this formal right - when it does still exist as a right  - does not mean what it once did. The older world of voluntary organization was as different from the world of the mass organization, as was Tom Paine's world of pamphleteering from the world of the mass media.

Since the French Revolution, conservative thinkers have Viewed With Alarm the rise of the public, which they called the masses, or something to that effect. 'The populace is sovereign, and the tide of barbarism mounts,' wrote Gustave Le Bon.

 

The divine right of the masses is about to replace the divine right of kings,' and already 'the destinies of nations are elaborated at present in the heart of the masses, and no longer in the councils of princes.' ⁴

 

During the twentieth century, liberal and even socialist thinkers have followed suit, with more explicit reference to what we have called the society of masses. From Le Bon to Emil Lederer and Ortega y Gasset, they have held that the influence of the mass in unfortunately increasing.

But surely those who have supposed the masses to be all powerful, or at least well on their way to triumph, are wrong. In our time, as Chakhotin knew, the influence of autonomous collectivities within political life is in fact diminishing.⁵

 

Furthermore, such influence as they do have is guided; they must now be seen not as publics acting autonomously, but as masses manipulated at focal points into crowds of demonstrators. For as publics become masses, masses sometimes become crowds; and, in crowds, the psychical rape by the mass media is supplemented up-close by the harsh and sudden harangue. Then the people in the crowd disperse again - as atomized and submissive masses.
 

In all modern societies, the autonomous associations standing between the various classes and the state tend to lose their effectiveness as vehicles of reasoned opinion and instruments for the rational exertion of political will. Such associations can be deliberately broken up and thus turned into passive instruments of rule, or they can more slowly wither away from lack of use in the face of centralized means of power.

 

But whether they are destroyed in a week, or wither in a generation, such associations are replaced in virtually every sphere of life by centralized organizations, and it is such organizations with all their new means of power that take charge of the terrorized or - as the case may be - merely intimidated, society of masses.
 

5 - The institutional trends that make for a society of masses are to a considerable extent a matter of impersonal drift, but the remnants of the public are also exposed to more 'personal' and intentional forces.

 

With the broadening of the base of politics within the context of a folk-lore of democratic decision-making, and with the increased means of mass persuasion that are available, the public of public opinion has become the object of intensive efforts to control, manage, manipulate, and increasingly intimidate. In political, military, economic realms, power becomes, in varying degrees, uneasy before the suspected opinions of masses, and, accordingly, opinion-making becomes an accepted technique of power-holding and power-getting.

 

The minority electorate of the propertied and the educated is replaced by the total suffrage - and intensive campaigns for the vote. The small eighteenth-century professional army is replaced by the mass army of conscripts - and by the problems of nationalist morale. The small shop is replaced by the mass-production industry - and the national advertisement. As the scale of institutions has become larger and more centralized, so has the range and intensity of the opinion-makers' efforts.

 

The means of opinion-making, in fact, have paralleled in range and efficiency the other institutions of greater scale that cradle the modern society of masses.

 

Accordingly, in addition to their enlarged and centralized means of administration, exploitation, and violence, the modern elite have had placed within their grasp historically unique instruments of psychic management and manipulation, which include universal compulsory education as well as the media of mass communication.

Early observers believed that the increase in the range and volume of the formal means of communication would enlarge and animate the primary public. In such optimistic views - written before radio and television and movies - the formal media are understood as simply multiplying the scope and pace of personal discussion.

 

Modern conditions, Charles Cooley wrote, 'enlarge indefinitely the competition of ideas, and whatever has owed its persistence merely to lack of comparison is likely to go, for that which is really congenial to the choosing mind will be all the more cherished and increased.'6 Still excited by the break-up of the conventional consensus of the local community, he saw the new means of communication as furthering the conversational dynamic of classic democracy, and with it the growth of rational and free individuality.

No one really knows all the functions of the mass media, for in their entirety these functions are probably so pervasive and so subtle that they cannot be caught by the means of social research now available.

 

But we do now have reason to believe that these media have helped less to enlarge and animate the discussions of primary publics than to transform them into a set of media markets in mass-like society. I do not refer merely to the higher ratio of deliverers of opinion to receivers and to the decreased chance to answer back; nor do I refer merely to the violent banalization and stereotyping of our very sense organs in terms of which these media now compete for 'attention.'

 

I have in mind a sort of psychological illiteracy that is facilitated by the media, and that is expressed in several ways:

I. Very little of what we think we know of the social realities of the world have we found out first-hand. Most of 'the pictures in our heads' we have gained from these media - even to the point where we often do not really believe what we see before us until we read about it in the paper or hear about it on the radio.⁷

 

The media not only give us information; they guide our very experiences. Our standards of credulity, our standards of reality, tend to be set by these media rather than by our own fragmentary experience.

Accordingly, even if the individual has direct, personal experience of events, it is not really direct and primary: it is organized in stereotypes. It takes long and skillful training to so uproot such stereotypes that an individual sees things freshly, in an unstereotyped manner.

 

One might suppose, for example, that if all the people went through a depression they would all 'experience it,' and in terms of this experience, that they would all debunk or reject or at least refract what the media say about it. But experience of such a structural shift has to be organized and interpreted if it is to count in the making of opinion.

The kind of experience, in short, that might serve as a basis for resistance to mass media is not an experience of raw events, but the experience of meanings. The fleck of interpretation must be there in the experience if we are to use the word experience seriously. And the capacity for such experience is socially implanted. The individual does not trust his own experience, as I have said, until it is confirmed by others or by the media.

 

Usually such direct exposure is not accepted if it disturbs loyalties and beliefs that the individual already holds. To be accepted, it must relieve or justify the feelings that often lie in the back of his mind as key features of his ideological loyalties.

Stereotypes of loyalty underlie beliefs and feelings about given symbols and emblems; they are the very ways in which men see the social world and in terms of which men make up their specific opinions and views of events. They are the results of previous experience, which affect present and future experience. It goes without saying that men are often unaware of these loyalties, that often they could not formulate them explicitly.

 

Yet such general stereotypes make for the acceptance or the rejection of specific opinions not so much by the force of logical consistency as by their emotional affinity and by the way in which they relieve anxieties. To accept opinions in their terms is to gain the good solid feeling of being correct without having to think. When ideological stereotypes and specific opinions are linked in this way, there is a lowering of the kind of anxiety which arises when loyalty and belief are not in accord.

 

Such ideologies lead to a willingness to accept a given line of belief; then there is no need, emotionally or rationally, to overcome resistance to given items in that line; cumulative selections of specific opinions and feelings become the pre-organized attitudes and emotions that shape the opinion-life of the person.

These deeper beliefs and feelings are a sort of lens through which men experience their worlds, they strongly condition acceptance or rejection of specific opinions, and they set men's orientation toward prevailing authorities.

 

Three decades ago, Walter Lippmann saw such prior convictions as biases: they kept men from defining reality in an adequate way. They are still biases. But today they can often be seen as 'good biases'; inadequate and misleading as they often are, they are less so than the crackpot realism of the higher authorities and opinion-makers. They are the lower common sense and as such a factor of resistance.

 

But we must recognize, especially when the pace of change is so deep and fast, that common sense is more often common than sense. And, above all, we must recognize that 'the common sense' of our children is going to be less the result of any firm social tradition than of the stereotypes carried by the mass media to which they are now so fully exposed.

 

They are the first generation to be so exposed.
 

II. So long as the media are not entirely monopolized, the individual can play one medium off against another; he can compare them, and hence resist what any one of them puts out. The more genuine competition there is among the media, the more resistance the individual might be able to command.

 

But how much is this now the case? Do people compare reports on public events or policies, playing one medium's content off against another's?

The answer is: generally no, very few do:

(1) We know that people tend strongly to select those media which carry contents with which they already agree. There is a land of selection of new opinions on the basis of prior opinions. No one seems to search out such counter-statements as may be found in alternative media offerings. Given radio programs and magazines and newspapers often get a rather consistent public, and thus reinforce their messages in the minds of that public

(2) This idea of playing one medium off against another assumes that the media really have varying contents. It assumes genuine competition, which is not widely true. The media display an apparent variety and competition, but on closer view they seem to compete more in terms of variations on a few standardized themes than of clashing issues.

The freedom to raise issues effectively seems more and more to be confined to those few interests that have ready and continual access to these media.
 

III. The media have not only filtered into our experience of external realities, they have also entered into our very experience of our own selves.

 

They have provided us with new identities and new aspirations of what we should like to be, and what we should like to appear to be. They have provided in the models of conduct they hold out to us a new and larger and more flexible set of appraisals of our very selves. In terms of the modern theory of the self,⁸ we may say that the media bring the reader, listener, viewer into the sight of larger, higher reference groups - groups, real or imagined, up-close or vicarious, personally known or distractedly glimpsed - which are looking glasses for his self-image.

 

They have multiplied the groups to which we look for confirmation of our self-image.

More than that:

1. the media tell the man in the mass who he is - they give him identity

2. they tell him what he wants to be -  they give him aspirations

3. they tell him how to get that way -  they give him technique

4. they tell him how to feel that he is that way even when he is not - they give him escape

The gaps between the identity and aspiration lead to technique and/or to escape.

 

That is probably the basic psychological formula of the mass media today. But, as a formula, it is not attuned to the development of the human being. It is the formula of a pseudo-world which the media invent and sustain.
 

IV. As they now generally prevail, the mass media, especially television, often encroach upon the small-scale discussion, and destroy the chance for the reasonable and leisurely and human interchange of opinion.

 

They are an important cause of the destruction of privacy in its full human meaning. That is an important reason why they not only fail as an educational force, but are a malign force: they do not articulate for the viewer or listener the broader sources of his private tensions and anxieties, his inarticulate resentments and half-formed hopes.

 

They neither enable the individual to transcend his narrow milieu nor clarify its private meaning.

The media provide much information and news about what is happening in the world, but they do not often enable the listener or the viewer truly to connect his daily life with these larger realities. They do not connect the information they provide on public issues with the troubles felt by the individual.

 

They do not increase rational insight into tensions, either those in the individual or those of the society which are reflected in the individual. On the contrary, they distract him and obscure his chance to understand himself or his world, by fastening his attention upon artificial frenzies that are resolved within the program framework, usually by violent action or by what is called humor. In short, for the viewer they are not really resolved at all.

 

The chief distracting tension of the media is between the wanting and the not having of commodities or of women held to be good looking. There is almost always the general tone of animated distraction, of suspended agitation, but it is going nowhere and it has nowhere to go.

But the media, as now organized and operated, are even more than a major cause of the transformation of America into a mass society. They are also among the most important of those increased means of power now at the disposal of elites of wealth and power; moreover, some of the higher agents of these media are themselves either among the elites or very important among their servants.

Alongside or just below the elite, there is the propagandist, the publicity expert, the public-relations man, who would control the very formation of public opinion in order to be able to include it as one more pacified item in calculations of effective power, increased prestige, more secure wealth.

 

Over the last quarter of a century, the attitudes of these manipulators toward their task have gone through a sort of dialectic:

In the beginning, there is great faith in what the mass media can do. Words win wars or sell soap; they move people, they restrain people.

'Only cost,' the advertising man of the 'twenties proclaims, limits the delivery of public opinion in any direction on any topic.' ⁹

The opinion-maker's belief in the media as mass persuaders almost amounts to magic - but he can believe mass communications omnipotent only so long as the public is trustful. It does not remain trustful.

 

The mass media say so very many and such competitively exaggerated things; they banalize their message and they cancel one another out. The 'propaganda phobia,' in reaction to wartime lies and postwar disenchantment, does not help matters, even though memory is both short and subject to official distortion. This distrust of the magic of media is translated into a slogan among the opinion managers.

 

Across their banners they write: 'Mass Persuasion Is Not Enough.'

Frustrated, they reason; and reasoning, they come to accept the principle of social context. To change opinion and activity, they say to one another, we must pay close attention to the full context and lives of the people to be managed. Along with mass persuasion, we must somehow use personal influence; we must reach people in their life context and through other people, their daily associates, those whom they trust: we must get at them by some kind of 'personal' persuasion.

 

We must not show our hand directly; rather than merely advise or command, we must manipulate.

Now this live and immediate social context in which people live and which exerts a steady expectation upon them is of course what we have called the primary public. Anyone who has seen the inside of an advertising agency or public-relations office knows that the primary public is still the great unsolved problem of the opinion-makers.

 

Negatively, their recognition of the influence of social context upon opinion and public activity implies that the articulate public resists and refracts the communications of the mass media. Positively, this recognition implies that the public is not composed of isolated individuals, but rather of persons who not only have prior opinions that must be reckoned with, but who continually influence each other in complex and intimate, in direct and continual ways.

In their attempts to neutralize or to turn to their own use the articulate public, the opinion-makers try to make it a relay network for their views. If the opinion-makers have so much power that they can act directly and openly upon the primary publics, they may become authoritative; but, if they do not have such power and hence have to operate indirectly and without visibility, they will assume the stance of manipulators.

Authority is power that is explicit and more or less 'voluntarily' obeyed; manipulation is the 'secret' exercise of power, unknown to those who axe influenced. In the model of the classic democratic society, manipulation is not a problem, because formal authority resides in the public itself and in its representatives who are made or broken by the public. In the completely authoritarian society, manipulation is not a problem, because authority is openly identified with the ruling institutions and their agents, who may use authority explicitly and nakedly.

 

They do not, in the extreme case, have to gain or retain power by hiding its exercise.

Manipulation becomes a problem wherever men have power that is concentrated and willful but do not have authority, or when, for any reason, they do not wish to use their power openly. Then the powerful seek to rule without showing their powerful-ness. They want to rule, as it were, secretly, without publicized legitimation.

 

It is in this mixed case - as in the intermediate reality of the American today - that manipulation is a prime way of exercising power. Small circles of men are making decisions which they need to have at least authorized by indifferent or recalcitrant people over whom they do not exercise explicit authority.

 

So the small circle tries to manipulate these people into willing acceptance or cheerful support of their decisions or opinions - or at least to the rejection of possible counter-opinions.

Authority formally resides 'in the people,' but the power of initiation is in fact held by small circles of men. That is why the standard strategy of manipulation is to make it appear that the people, or at least a large group of them, 'really made the decision.' That is why even when the authority is available, men with access to it may still prefer the secret, quieter ways of manipulation.

But are not the people now more educated? Why not emphasize the spread of education rather than the increased effects of the mass media? The answer, in brief, is that mass education, in many respects, has become - another mass medium.

The prime task of public education, as it came widely to be understood in this country, was political: to make the citizen more knowledgeable and thus better able to think and to judge of public affairs. In time, the function of education shifted from the political to the economic: to train people for better-paying jobs and thus to get ahead.

 

This is especially true of the high-school movement, which has met the business demands for white-collar skills at the public's expense. In large part education has become merely vocational; in so far as its political task is concerned, in many schools, that has been reduced to a routine training of nationalist loyalties.

The training of skills that are of more or less direct use in the vocational life is an important task to perform, but ought not to be mistaken for liberal education: job advancement, no matter on what levels, is not the same as self-development, although the two are now systematically confused.¹⁰

 

Among 'skills,' some are more and some are less relevant to the aims of liberal - that is to say, liberating - education. Skills and values cannot be so easily separated as the academic search for supposedly neutral skills causes us to assume. And especially not when we speak seriously of liberal education.

 

Of course, there is a scale, with skills at one end and values at the other, but it is the middle range of this scale, which one might call sensibilities, that are of most relevance to the classic public.

To train someone to operate a lathe or to read and write is pretty much education of skill; to evoke from people an understanding of what they really want out of their lives or to debate with them stoic, Christian and humanist ways of living, is pretty much a clear-cut education of values. But to assist in the birth among a group of people of those cultural and political and technical sensibilities which would make them genuine members of a genuinely liberal public, this is at once a training in skills and an education of values.

 

It includes a sort of therapy in the ancient sense of clarifying one's knowledge of one's self; it includes the imparting of all those skills of controversy with one's self, which we call thinking; and with others, which we call debate. And the end product of such liberal education of sensibilities is simply the self-educating, self-cultivating man or woman.

The knowledgeable man in the genuine public is able to turn his personal troubles into social issues, to see their relevance for his community and his community's relevance for them. He understands that what he thinks and feels as personal troubles are very often not only that but problems shared by others and indeed not subject to solution by any one individual but only by modifications of the structure of the groups in which he lives and sometimes the structure of the entire society.

Men in masses are gripped by personal troubles, but they are not aware of their true meaning and source. Men in public confront issues, and they are aware of their terms. It is the task of the liberal institution, as of the liberally educated man, continually to translate troubles into issues and issues into the terms of their human meaning for the individual. In the absence of deep and wide political debate, schools for adults and adolescents could perhaps become hospitable frameworks for just such debate.

 

In a community of publics the task of liberal education would be: to keep the public from being overwhelmed; to help produce the disciplined and informed mind that cannot be overwhelmed; to help develop the bold and sensible individual that cannot be sunk by the burdens of mass life.

 

But educational practice has not made knowledge directly relevant to the human need of the troubled person of the twentieth century or to the social practices of the citizen. This citizen cannot now see the roots of his own biases and frustrations, nor think clearly about himself, nor for that matter about anything else. He does not see the frustration of idea, of intellect, by the present organization of society, and he is not able to meet the tasks now confronting 'the intelligent citizen.'

Educational institutions have not done these things and, except in rare instances, they are not doing them. They have become mere elevators of occupational and social ascent, and, on all levels, they have become politically timid.

 

Moreover, in the hands of 'professional educators,' many schools have come to operate on an ideology of 'life adjustment' that encourages happy acceptance of mass ways of life rather than the struggle for individual and public transcendence.*

 

* If the schools are doing their job,' A. E. Bestor has written, 'we should expect educators to point to the significant and indisputable achievement in raising the intellectual level of the nation - measured perhaps by larger per capita circulation of books and serious magazines, by definitely improved taste in movies and radio programs, by higher standards of political debate, by increased respect for freedom of speech and of thought, by marked decline in such evidences of mental retardation as the incessant reading of comic books by adults.' ¹¹

There is not much doubt that modern regressive educators have adapted their notions of educational content and practice to the idea of the mass.

 

They do not effectively proclaim standards of cultural level and intellectual rigor; rather they often deal in the trivia of vocational tricks and 'adjustment to life' - meaning the slack life of masses.

 

'Democratic schools' often mean the furtherance of intellectual mediocrity, vocational training, nationalistic loyalties, and little else.
 

 

6 - The structural trends of modem society and the manipulative character of its communication technique come to a point of coincidence in the mass society, which is largely a metropolitan society.

 

The growth of the metropolis, segregating men and women into narrowed routines and environments, causes them to lose any firm sense of their integrity as a public. The members of publics in smaller communities know each other more or less fully, because they meet in the several aspects of the total life routine.

 

The members of masses in a metropolitan society know one another only as fractions in specialized milieux: the man who fixes the car, the girl who serves your lunch, the saleslady, the women who take care of your child at school during the day. Prejudgment and stereotype flourish when people meet in such ways. The human reality of others does not, cannot, come through.

People, we know, tend to select those formal media which confirm what they already believe and enjoy. In a parallel way, they tend in the metropolitan segregation to come into live touch with those whose opinions are similar to theirs. Others they tend to treat unseriously. In the metropolitan society they develop, in their defense, a blase manner that reaches deeper than a manner.

 

They do not, accordingly, experience genuine clashes of viewpoint, genuine issues. And when they do, they tend to consider it mere rudeness.

Sunk in their routines, they do not transcend, even by discussion, much less by action, their more or less narrow lives. They do not gain a view of the structure of their society and of their role as a public within it. The city is a structure composed of such little environments, and the people in them tend to be detached from one another.

 

The 'stimulating variety' of the city does not stimulate the men and women of 'the bedroom belt,' the one-class suburbs, who can go through life knowing only their own kind. If they do reach for one another, they do so only through stereotypes and prejudiced images of the creatures of other milieux. Each is trapped by his confining circle; each is cut off from easily identifiable groups. It is for people in such narrow milieux that the mass media can create a pseudo-world beyond, and a pseudo-world within themselves as well.

Publics live in milieux but they can transcend them - individually by intellectual effort; socially by public action. By reflection and debate and by organized action, a community of publics comes to feel itself and comes in fact to be active at points of structural relevance.

But members of a mass exist in milieux and cannot get out of them, either by mind or by activity, except - in the extreme case-under 'the organized spontaneity' of the bureaucrat on a motorcycle. We have not yet reached the extreme case, but observing metropolitan man in the American mass we can surely see the psychological preparations for it.

We may think of it in this way: When a handful of men do not have jobs, and do not seek work, we look for the causes in their immediate situation and character. But when twelve million men are unemployed, then we cannot believe that all of them suddenly 'got lazy' and turned out to be 'no good.'

 

Economists call this 'structural unemployment' - meaning, for one thing, that the men involved cannot themselves control their job chances. Structural unemployment does not originate in one factory or in one town, nor is it due to anything that one factory or one town does or fails to do. Moreover, there is little or nothing that one ordinary man in one factory in one town can do about it when it sweeps over his personal milieu.

Now, this distinction, between social structure and personal milieu, is one of the most important available in the sociological studies. It offers us a ready understanding of the position of 'the public' in America today. In every major area of life, the loss of a sense of structure and the submergence into powerless milieux is the cardinal fact.

 

In the military it is most obvious, for here the roles men play are strictly confining; only the command posts at the top afford a view of the structure of the whole, and moreover, this view is a closely guarded official secret. In the division of labor too, the jobs men enact in the economic hierarchies are also more or less narrow milieux and the positions from which a view of the production process as a whole can be had are centralized, as men are alienated not only from the product and the tools of their labor, but from any understanding of the structure and the processes of production.

 

In the political order, in the fragmentation of the lower and in the distracting proliferation of the middle-level organization, men cannot see the whole, cannot see the top, and cannot state the issues that will in fact determine the whole structure in which they live and their place within it.

This loss of any structural view or position is the decisive meaning of the lament over the loss of community. In the great city, the division of milieux and of segregating routines reaches the point of closest contact with the individual and the family, for, although the city is not the unit of prime decision, even the city cannot be seen as a total structure by most of its citizens.

On the one hand, there is the increased scale and centralization of the structure of decision; and, on the other, the increasingly narrow sorting out of men into milieux. From both sides, there is the increased dependence upon the formal media of communication, including those of education itself.

 

But the man in the mass does not gain a transcending view from these media; instead he gets his experience stereotyped, and then he gets sunk further by that experience. He cannot detach himself in order to observe, much less to evaluate, what he is experiencing, much less what he is not experiencing. Rather than that internal discussion we call reflection, he is accompanied through his life-experience with a sort of unconscious, echoing monologue. He has no projects of his own: he fulfills the routines that exist He does not transcend whatever he is at any moment, because he does not, he cannot, transcend his daily milieux.

 

He is not truly aware of his own daily experience and of its actual standards: he drifts, he fulfills habits, his behavior a result of a planless mixture of the confused standards and the uncriticized expectations that he has taken over from others whom he no longer really knows or trusts, if indeed he ever really did.

He takes things for granted, he makes the best of them, he tries to look ahead - a year or two perhaps, or even longer if he has children or a mortgage - but he does not seriously ask, What do I want? How can I get it? A vague optimism suffuses and sustains him, broken occasionally by little miseries and disappointments that are soon buried. He is smug, from the standpoint of those who think something might be the matter with the mass style of life in the metropolitan frenzy where self-making is an externally busy branch of industry.

 

By what standards does he judge himself and his efforts? What is really important to him? Where are the models of excellence for this man?

He loses his independence, and more importantly, he loses the desire to be independent: in fact, he does not have hold of the idea of being an independent individual with his own mind and his own worked-out way of life. It is not that he likes or does not like this life; it is that the question does not come up sharp and clear so he is not bitter and he is not sweet about conditions and events. He thinks he wants merely to get his share of what is around with as little trouble as he can and with as much fun as possible.

Such order and movement as his life possesses is in conformity with external routines; otherwise his day-to-day experience is a vague chaos - although he often does not know it because, strictly speaking, he does not truly possess or observe his own experience. He does not formulate his desires; they are insinuated into him.

 

And, in the mass, he loses the self-confidence of the human being  - if indeed he has ever had it. For life in a society of masses implants insecurity and furthers impotence; it makes men uneasy and vaguely anxious; it isolates the individual from the solid group; it destroys firm group standards. Acting without goals, the man in the mass just feels pointless.

The idea of a mass society suggests the idea of an elite of power. The idea of the public, in contrast, suggests the liberal tradition of a society without any power elite, or at any rate with shifting elites of no sovereign consequence. For, if a genuine public is sovereign, it needs no master; but the masses, in their full development, are sovereign only in some plebiscitarian moment of adulation to an elite as authoritative celebrity. The political structure of a democratic state requires the public; and, the democratic man, in his rhetoric, must assert that this public is the very seat of sovereignty.

But now, given all those forces that have enlarged and centralized the political order and made modern societies less political and more administrative; given the transformation of the old middle classes into something which perhaps should not even be called middle class; given all the mass communications that do not truly communicate; given all the metropolitan segregation that is not community; given the absence of voluntary associations that really connect the public at large with the centers of power -  what is happening is the decline of a set of publics that is sovereign only in the most formal and rhetorical sense.

 

Moreover, in many countries the remnants of such publics as remain are now being frightened out of existence. They lose their will for rationally considered decision and action because they do not possess the instruments for such decision and action; they lose their sense of political belonging because they do not belong; they lose their political will because they see no way to realize it.

The top of modern American society is increasingly unified, and often seems willfully coordinated: at the top there has emerged an elite of power. The middle levels are a drifting set of stalemated, balancing forces: the middle does not link the bottom with the top.

 

The bottom of this society is politically fragmented, and even as a passive fact, increasingly powerless: at the bottom there is emerging a mass society.

Back to Contents

 

 

 

14 - The Conservative Mood

IF we are to suppose that modern America ought to be a democratic society, we must look to the intellectual community for knowledge of the power elite and of their decisions.

 

For democracy implies that those who bear the consequences of decisions have enough knowledge - not to speak of power - to hold the decision-makers accountable. Everyone must depend upon knowledge provided by others, for no man can know by his own experience more than a small portion of the social worlds that now affect him. Most of our experience is indirect and, as we have seen, subject to much distortion. The opinion-makers of every age have provided images of the elite of their time and place.

 

Like the realities they are supposed to represent, these images change; in our own immediate time, in fact, many old images have been revised and many new ones invented.

Of late, this work has occurred less as an effort to know reality better than to serve a strangely conservative mood that has come to prevail among the image-makers. The images they now offer us are not those of an elite in irresponsible command of unprecedented means of power and manipulation, but of a scatter of reasonable men overwhelmed by events and doing their best in a difficult situation.

 

The mood out of which these images have arisen serves less to justify the real power of the real elite, or the intelligence of its decisions, than to sustain their spokesmen. The images we are expected to take most seriously are either irrelevant to the facts of power and of the power elite or they are simply private fantasies serving more as emotional cushions for small coteries of comfortable writers, paid and unpaid, than as a diagram of all those forces which in our time come to such obvious climax in the American power elite.

Yet scholars, knowingly and unknowingly, have been seeking suitable ideas about this elite. They have not found them and they have not managed to create them. What they have found is an absence of mind and of morality in the public life of our times, and what they have managed to create is a mere elaboration of their own conservative mood.

 

It is a mood quite appropriate to men living in a material boom, a nationalist celebration, a political vacuum. At its heart there is a knowledge of powerlessness without poignancy, and a feeling of pseudo-power based on mere smugness.

 

By its softening of the political will, this mood enables men to accept public depravity without any private sense of outrage, and to give up the central goal of western humanism, so strongly felt in nineteenth-century American experience: the presumptuous control by reason of man's fate.
 

1 - Those who grope for ideologies with which to explain their conservative mood would anchor this mood - as well as themselves  - in some solid tradition. They feel that they have somehow been tricked by liberalism, progressivism, radicalism, and they are a little frightened. What many of them want, it would seem, is a society of classic conservatism.

Conservatism in its classic form is of course traditionalism become self-conscious and elaborated, argumentative and rationalized.1 It also involves some 'natural aristocracy.' Sooner or later all those who relax the grand tension of human rationality must take up the neo-Burkeian defense of a traditional elite, for in the end, such an elite is the major premise of a genuinely conservative ideology.

The more explicit - and hence the less successful - attempts to find or to invent a traditional elite for America today seem upon examination to be merely hopeful assertions, and as little relevant to modern realities as they are usable guides to political conduct.

 

The conservative - Mr. Russell Kirk tells us - believes that,

1. 'Divine intent rules society,' man being incapable of grasping by his reason the great forces that prevail. Accordingly, change must be slow, for 'Providence is the proper instrument for change,' and the test of a statesman is his 'cognizance of the real tendency of Providential social forces.'

2. The conservative has an affection for 'the variety and mystery of traditional life,' perhaps most of all because he believes that 'tradition and sound prejudice' check man's presumptuous will and archaic impulse.

3. Moreover, 'Society longs for leadership,' and the conservative holds that there are 'natural distinctions' among men which form a natural order of classes and powers.²

Tradition is sacred; through it the real social tendencies of Providence are displayed; therefore, tradition must be our guide. Whatever is traditional represents the accumulated wisdom of the ages, and more: it exists by 'divine intent.'

Naturally we must ask how we are to know which traditions are instruments of Providence? Which of the events and changes all around us are by divine intent? At what moment did the highly conscious contrivances of the Founding Fathers become traditional and thus sanctified? And must one believe that society in the United States - before the progressive movement and before the New Deal reforms - represented anything akin to what the classic conservative would call orders and classes based on 'natural distinctions'?

 

If not, then what and where is the model which the classic conservative would have us cherish? And do those who now man the political and economic institutions of the United States represent the Providential intent which is sought? And how are we to know if they do or do not?

The conservative defends the irrationality of tradition against the powers of human reason; he denies the legitimacy of man's attempt individually to control his own fate and collectively to build his own world. How then can he bring in reason as a means of choosing among traditions and men, as a means of deciding which changes are Providential and which are evil forces?

 

He cannot provide any rational guide in our choice of which leaders grasp Providence and act it out and which are reformers and levelers. There is within this view no guide-line to help us decide which contenders for this natural distinction are genuine.

And yet the answer, although not always clear, is always there: if we do not destroy the natural order of classes and the hierarchy of powers, we shall have superiors and leaders to tell us. If we uphold these natural distinctions, and in fact resuscitate older ones, the leaders will decide. In the end, the classic conservative is left with this single principle: the principle of gratefully accepting the leadership of some set of men whom he considers a sanctified elite. If such men were there for all to recognize, then the conservative could at least be socially clear.

 

Then the yearning for a classic tradition and a conservative hierarchy could be satisfied. For they would be visibly anchored in the authority of an aristocracy, and this aristocracy would be tangible to the senses as the very model of private conduct and public decision.

It is just here that American publicists of the conservative mood have become embarrassed and confused. Their embarrassment is in part due to a fear of confronting the all-pervading liberal rhetoric; their confusion is mainly due to two simple facts about the American upper classes in general, and the higher circles of power in particular:

Those who are on high are not suitable as models of conservative excellence. Nor do they themselves uphold any ideology truly suitable for public use.

The very rich in America have been culturally among the very poor; the only kinds of experience for which they have been models are the material ones of money-getting and money-keeping.

 

Material success is their sole basis of authority. One might, of course, be nostalgic for the old families and their last resorts, but such images are not generally supposed to count for much, being more of a tinsel past than of the serious present. Alongside the old rich and supplanting them are the synthetic celebrities of national glamour who often make a virtue out of cultural poverty and political illiteracy. By their very nature the professional celebrities are transient figures of the mass means of distraction rather than people who carry the prestige of authority because they embody the continuity of tradition.

 

And of the new rich, the big rich of Texas are too unsophisticated, and the corporate rich too much involved in what we shall call the higher immorality. As for the chief executives of the corporations, ideologies - conservative or otherwise - are much too fancy for them: besides, their hired men can and do talk easily in the liberal patter - why then should they take on the burden of conservative principles?

 

Furthermore, is it not virtually a condition of success in the American political economy that one learn to use, and use frequently, the liberal rhetoric which is the common denominator of all proper and successful spokesmanship?³

There are, accordingly, no highly placed social figures whom conservative scholars might celebrate as models of excellence, who stand in contrast with the liberal confusion they would deplore, and who are ready, able, and eager to adopt new conservative creeds. There are no pre-capitalist, pre-liberal elites which they can draw upon, even in fond remembrance; they cannot, as European writers have been able to do, contrast such holdovers from feudalism, however modified, with the vulgarity of the successful of capitalist society.

Consequently, the greatest problem of the spokesmen for an American conservatism is simply to locate the set of people whose interests the conservative ideology would serve, and who, in turn, would accept it. Classic conservativism has required the spell of tradition among such surviving elements of pre-industrial societies as an aristocracy of noble men, a peasantry, a petty-bourgeoisie with guild inheritances; and these are precisely what America has never had.

 

For in America, the bourgeoisie has been predominant from its beginnings - in class, in status, and in power. In America, there has not been and there can be no conservative ideology of the classic type.

The high and the mighty in America espouse no acceptable conservative ideas and actually abhor conservative rhetoric. In so far as one can find a clue to the basic impulse of conservative spokesmen, it is the attempt to sacrifice politics as an autonomous sphere of men's will to the free and arbitrary dominance of corporate institutions and their key personnel.

 

They have no connection with those fountainheads of modern conservative thought with which many American intellectuals have been so hopefully seeking to associate them. Neither Burke nor Locke is the source of such ideology as the American elite have found truly congenial. Their ideological source is Horatio Alger.⁴

 

The maxims of work-and-win, of strive-and-succeed have sustained them in their noble game of grab. They have not elaborated such awareness of their newer power into any conscious ideology. They have not had to confront any opposition based upon ideas that stand in challenging contrast to the liberal rhetoric which they too employ as standard public relations. Perhaps it is easiest to be 'conservative' when there is no true sense of the conservative present as one alternative to what the future might be. If one cannot say that American conservatism, as represented by men of wealth and power, is unconsciousness, certainly conservatives are often happily unconscious.

Accordingly, even less than the radical writers of the 'thirties have conservative writers of the 'forties and 'fifties been in close touch with the leaders or policy-makers they would influence or justify.⁵

 

On the right and in the center, public relations fills any need for 'ideology,' and public relations are something you hire. Just now, the elite of wealth and power do not feel in need of any ideology, much less an ideology of classic conservatism.

Yet, despite this, one may go ahead and defend the American elite and the upper classes in general and the system within which they are successful. This is no longer so popular among writers who are neither hired publicists nor academic hacks, although every little tendency or chance to follow it is promptly seized upon by those who are.

 

Moreover, notions of trusteeship are still well received, especially among the chief executives of the corporate world, and every week by poll and by chart it is conclusively proved that the American economy is the very best in the world. Such an explicit defense, however, does not satisfy those who yearn for classic conservatism; to be useful, such defense must make out the elite as dynamic and hence no anchor for tradition.

 

On the contrary, the capitalist elite must always be composed of self-making men who smash tradition to rise to the top by strictly personal accomplishments.
 

2 - If classic conservatism, anchored in a recognized elite, is not quite possible today in America, that does not mean that scholars with conservative yearnings have not found other ways to realize themselves. In their need for an aristocracy, they often become grandly vague about the aristocrat.

 

Generalizing the notion, they make it moral rather than socially firm and specific. In the name of 'genuine democracy' or 'liberal conservatism' they stretch the meaning of aristocracy - the 'natural aristocracy' has nothing to do with existing social orders, classes, or hierarchies of power; the aristocracy becomes a scatter of morally superior persons rather than a socially recognizable class. Such notions are now quite popular, for they satisfy the conservative mood without requiring allegiance to the current crop of 'aristocrats.'

 

So it is with Ortega y Gasset and so it is with Peter Viereck. The latter, for example, writes that it is not 'the aristocratic class' that is valuable but 'the aristocratic spirit' - which, with its decorum and noblesse oblige, is 'open to all, regardless of class.'6 Some have tried to find a way to hold onto such a view, almost secretly, not stating it directly, but holding it as a latent assumption while talking about, not the elite, but 'the mass.'

 

That, however, is dangerous, for again, it goes against the liberal rhetoric which requires a continual flattery of the citizens.

Generalizing the aristocratic ethos and emptying it of social content are not really satisfactory because they provide no widely accepted criteria for judging who is elite and who is not. A self-selecting elite can be no anchor. Moreover, such a generalization does not have to do with the existing facts of power and hence is politically irrelevant.

Both outright defense of those who are ascendant within the status quo, and defense of an imaginary aristocratic ethos, in fact, end up not with an elite that is fixed in tradition and hierarchy, but with a dynamic and ever-changing elite continually struggling to the top in an expanding society.

 

There is simply no socially, much less politically, recognized traditional elite and there is no tradition that can be imaginatively elaborated around such an elite. Moreover, whatever else it may be, tradition is something one cannot create; one can only uphold it when it exists. There is today no magic spell of unbroken tradition upon which modern society is or can be steadily based.

 

Accordingly, greatness cannot be confused with mere duration, nor the competition of values decided by an endurance contest.

 

3 - But the conservative mood is strong, almost as strong as the pervasive liberal rhetoric, and there is a way to satisfy them both. One refuses to recognize and confront the top as it is, and one refuses to imagine a more defensible one.

 

One simply denies that there is any elite or even any upper class, or at any rate asserts that in so far as such exist they do not really count in the American way of life. If this can be held firmly to be the case, then one can indulge the conservative mood without having to associate it with the actual elite or with any imaginary aristocracy.

When they write of the upper classes, conservatives of the painless school of liberalism often confuse wishful image with reality.

 

Either they tend to relegate the elite to the past or they diversify its elements in the present. In the nineteenth century, leaning into the future, liberals relegated the elite to the past; in the twentieth century, being heavy with the insistent present, they have considered elites to be diversified to the point of powerlessness.*

 

* I have already presented and analyzed this romantic pluralism. See above ELEVEN: The Theory of Balance.

 

So far as power is concerned, nobody really makes the decisions; let us fall back upon official and formal images of representative government. So far as wealth or high income is concerned, that is after all without decisive consequence, although perhaps it does affect the tone of society at large. Besides, everybody in America is rich nowadays.

 

This unserious liberalism is the nerve-center of the present-day conservative mood.

Perhaps nothing is of more importance, both as cause and as effect, to the conservative mood than the rhetorical victory and the intellectual and political collapse of American liberalism. It is of course obvious that the kind of liberalism' that prevailed in the 'thirties has lost the political initiative in the postwar era. In the economic boom and the military terror of this era, a small group of political primitives, on the middle levels of power, have exploited the new American jitters, emptied domestic politics of rational content, and decisively lowered the level of public sensibility.

 

They have attacked the policies of the New and Fair Deals; tried to rewrite the history of these administrations; and impugned the very biographies of those who took part in them.

 

They have done all this in a manner that reveals clearly their appeal to the rankling status resentment of those newly prosperous classes which, having achieved considerable wealth during and after World War II, have not received the prestige or gained the power they have felt to be their due.**

 

** See above, TWO: Local Society.

The petty right have appealed less to the economically discontented than to the status frustrated. They have done so by attacking the symbols, the men, and the institutions of established prestige.⁷

 

At the very beginning of their push, they almost succeeded in destroying one of the inner citadels of the old upper class - the Foreign Service - and at one high point of their drive, their leading member, having told off an army general, enabled a nation-wide public to witness the Secretary of the Army, who was also a man of older family wealth, being disgraced in a public brawl with unestablished nihilists.

They have brought to wide attention a new conception of national loyalty, as loyalty to individual gangs who placed themselves above the established legitimations of the state and invited its personnel to do likewise. They have made clear the central place now achieved in the governmental process by secret police and secret 'investigations,' to the point where observant men speak realistically of a shadow cabinet based in considerable part upon new ways of power which include the wire tap, the private eye, the use and threat of blackmail. They have dramatized the hollowing out of sensibility among a population which for a generation has been steadily and increasingly subjected to the shrill trivialization of the mass means of entertainment and distraction.

 

They have brought into public view the higher immorality as well as the mindlessness of selected upper and middle circles. And they have revealed a decayed and frightened liberalism weakly defending itself from the insecure and ruthless fury of political gangsters.

As the liberalism-of-the-'thirties sat in its postwar hearing, liberals became aware, from time to time, of how near they were to the edge of mindlessness. The status edifice of established bourgeois society was under attack, but since in America there is nothing from the past above that edifice, and since those of once liberal and left persuasion see nothing in the future below it, they have become terribly frightened by the viciousness of the attack, and their political lives have been narrowed to the sharp edge of defensive anxiety.

Postwar liberalism has been organizationally impoverished: the prewar years of liberalism-in-power devitalized independent liberal groups, drying up the grass roots, making older leaders dependent upon the federal center and not training new leaders round the country. The New Deal left no liberal organization to carry on any liberal program; rather than a new party, its instrument was a loose coalition inside an old one, which quickly fell apart so far as liberal ideas are concerned.

 

Moreover, the New Deal used up the heritage of liberal ideas, made them banal as it put them into law; turned liberalism into a set of administrative routines to defend rather than a program to fight for.⁸

In their moral fright, postwar liberals have not defended any left or even any militantly liberal position: their defensive posture has, first of all, led them to celebrate the 'civil liberties,' in contrast with their absence from Soviet Russia.

 

In fact, many have been so busy celebrating the civil liberties that they have had less time to defend them; and, more importantly, most have been so busy defending civil liberties that they have had neither the time nor the inclination to use them.

'In the old days,' Archibald Mac-Leish remarked at the end of the 'forties, freedom 'was something you used... [it] has now become something you save - something you put away and protect like your other possessions - like a deed or a bond in a bank.' ⁹

It is much safer to celebrate civil liberties than to defend them; it is much safer to defend them as a formal right than to use them in a politically effective way.

 

Even those who would most willingly subvert these liberties usually do so in their very name. It is easier still to defend someone else's right to have used them years ago than to have something yourself to say now and to say it now forcibly. The defense of civil liberties - even of their practice a decade ago - has become the major concern of many liberal and once leftward scholars. All of which is a safe way of diverting intellectual effort from the sphere of political reflection and demand.

The defensive posture of the postwar liberals has also involved them in the very nervous center of elite and plebeian anxieties about the position of America in the world today. At the root of these anxieties is not simply international tension and the terrible, helpless feeling of many that there is no alternative to another war.

 

There is also a specific worry with which many Americans are seriously concerned. The United States is now engaged with other nations, in particular Russia, in a full-scale competition for cultural prestige based on nationality. In this competition, at issue are American music, literature, and art and, in a somewhat higher meaning than is usually given the term, The American Way of Life.

 

The economic, military and political power of the United States greatly exceeds its cultural spell. What America has abroad is power; what it does not have at home or abroad is cultural prestige. This fact has led many liberals into the new American celebration,10 which rests not only upon their felt need to defend themselves in nationalist terms against the petty right but also upon the urgent compulsion to uphold the cultural prestige of America abroad.

But the defensive posture and the organizational impoverishment are not the full story of what has happened to make American liberalism painless to the rich and the powerful.

 

Over the past half century, liberalism has been undergoing a moral and intellectual decline of serious proportion. As a proclamation of ideals, classic liberalism, like classic socialism, remains part of the secular tradition of the western society. But as a rhetoric, liberalism's key terms have become the common denominators of the political vocabulary; in this rhetorical victory, in which the most divergent positions are all proclaimed and defended in the same liberal terms, liberalism has been stretched beyond any usefulness as a way of defining issues and stating policies.

The great range and variety of life in America does not include a great range and variety of political statement, much less of political alternative. In their rhetoric, spokesmen of all interests share much more than they differ. Although only the liberals are captured by it, all of them use the liberal rhetoric.

 

The stereotype of America as essentially a progressive and even a radical country finds its anchorage only in its technological sphere,* and in strange ways, in the fashions of its entertainment and amusement industries.

 

 

* I do not mean to imply that the United States does lead in technological ingenuity; in fact, I believe that its products generally do not compare in design or in quality with those of Germany and England.

If, as a rhetoric, liberalism has become a mask of all political positions, as a theory of society it has become irrelevant, and in its optative mood, misleading. No revision of liberalism as a theory of the mechanics of modern social change has overcome the trademark of the nineteenth century that is stamped upon it. Liberalism as a social theory rests on the notion of a society in automatic balance.¹¹

 

 

These have been so 'dynamic' and 'radical' that they have led to the characteristic American trait of animated distraction.

 

These two surface areas of life have often been misinterpreted, at home and abroad, as America the dynamic and progressive, instead of what is the fact: America is a conservative country without any conservative ideology. The intellectual slackness of its political life is such that it does very well with the liberal rhetoric.

The idea of the great balance, in all its various forms, is now the prevailing common-sense view of public affairs. It is also the theory of power held by most academic social scientists; and it is the resting place of the conservative mood, as sustained by the liberal intelligentsia. This mood cannot be articulated as classic conservatism; it cannot rest upon a pre-capitalist, much less upon a pre-industrial, base; and it cannot employ the image of a society in which authority is legitimated by traditionalism as interpreted by a recognized aristocracy.

As an intellectual articulation, the conservative mood is merely a reformulation of classic liberalism in the entirely unclassical age of the twentieth century; it is the image of a society in which authority is at a minimum because it is guided by the autonomous forces of the magic market.

 

The 'providence' of classic conservatism becomes liberalism's generalization of the 'unseen hand' of the market, for, in secular guise, Providence refers to a faith that the unintended consequences of many wills form a pattern, and that this pattern ought to be allowed to work itself out.

 

Accordingly, it can be said that there is no elite, that there is no ruling class, that there are no powerful centers which need defense. Instead of justifying the power of an elite by portraying it favorably, one denies that any set of men, any class, any organization has any really consequential power. American liberalism is thus readily made to sustain the conservative mood.

 

It is, in fact, because of the dominance of such liberal terms and assumptions that no need is felt by the elite of power and wealth for an explicitly conservative ideology.

 

* See above, ELEVEN: The Theory of Balance.

 

4 - The greatest appeal of romantic pluralism* to those of conservative yearning is that it makes unnecessary any explicit justification of the men who are ostensibly in charge of public affairs.

 

For if they are all in balance, each of them really quite impotent, then no one set of higher circles and no manageable set of institutional arrangements can be held accountable for the events and decisions of our time. Therefore, all serious political effort is really a delusion which sensible men may observe with interest but which they certainly do not allow to engage them morally.

That is the political meaning of the conservative mood of today; in the end, it is an irresponsible style of pretentious smugness. Curiously enough, for a conservative mood, it is not a snobbery linked with nostalgia, but, on the contrary, with what is just one-step-ahead-of-the-very-latest-thing, which is to say that it is a snobbery based not on tradition but on fashion and fad.¹²

 

Those involved are not thinking for a nation, or even about a nation; they are thinking of and for themselves. In self-selected coteries, they confirm one another's mood, which thus becomes snobbishly closed - and quite out of the main stream of the practice of decision and the reality of power.

One may thus suppose, quite correctly, that the conservative mood is a playful little fashion toyed with in a period of material prosperity by a few comfortable writers. Certainly it is not a serious effort to work out a coherent view of the world in which we live and the demands we might make upon it as political men - conservative, liberal or radical. Neither an intellectual community nor a set of liberal publics is providing the terms of those issues and conflicts, decisions and policies that make up the history of our time.

 

The combination of the liberal rhetoric and the conservative mood, in fact, has obfuscated hard issues and made possible historical development without benefit of idea. The prevalence of this mood and this rhetoric means that thought, in any wide meaning of the term, has become largely irrelevant to such politics as have been visible, and that in postwar America mind has been divorced from reality.

The petty conservatives, of course, have no more won political power than administrative liberals have retained it. While these two camps have been engaged in wordy battle on the middle levels of power, on the upper levels, less noisy and more sophisticated conservatives have assumed political power.

 

Accordingly, in their imbroglio with the noisy right, liberal and once-left forces have in effect defended these established conservatives, even as they have been absorbed by conflict with their own leftward pasts, and have lost any point of effective defense against the outrageous accusations of the petty right.

 

The elite of corporation, army, and state have benefited politically and economically and militarily by the antics of the petty right, who have become, often unwittingly,  their political shocktroops.

It is in this context of material prosperity, with the demagogic right setting the tone of public sensibility; the more sophisticated conservatives silently achieving established power in a largely undebated victory; with liberal ideas made official in the 'thirties, now stolen and banalized by alien use; with liberal hopes carefully adjusted to mere rhetoric by thirty years of rhetorical victory; with radicalism deflated and radical hope stoned to death by thirty years of defeat - it is in this context that the conservative mood has set in among the observant scholars. Among them there is no demand and no dissent, and no opposition to the monstrous decisions that are being made without deep or widespread debate, in fact with no debate at all.

 

There is no opposition to the undemocratically impudent manner in which policies of high military and civilian authority are simply turned out as facts accomplished. There is no opposition to public mindlessness in all its forms nor to all those forces and men that would further it.

 

But above all -  among the men of knowledge there is little or no opposition to the divorce of knowledge from power, of sensibilities from men of power, no opposition to the divorce of mind from reality.*

 

* See below, FIFTEEN: The Higher Immorality.

 

Contemporary men of power, accordingly, are able to command without any ideological cloak, political decisions occur without benefit of political discussion or political ideas, and the higher circles of America have come to be the embodiment of the American system of organized irresponsibility.

 

5 - It should not be supposed that such few and small publics as still exist, or even the American masses, share the conservative mood of the intellectuals. But neither should it be supposed that they have firmly in mind adequate images of the American elite. Their images are ambiguous; they are mainly in terms of status and wealth rather than of power; and they are quite moral in a politically petty way.

Moral distrust of the high and mighty is of course an old American custom. Sometimes, as during the 'thirties, it is primarily of the corporate rich - then called economic royalists; sometimes, as between wars, of admirals and generals; and, all the time it is, at least a little bit, of the politicians.

One must, of course, discount the wonderful make-believe and easy accusation of campaign oratory. And yet, the rather persistent attention paid to such matters as 'corruption' in business and government expresses a widespread concern with public morality and personal integrity in high places, and signifies that it has been an underlying worry in almost every area of American life.

These areas include military and political as well as directly economic institutions; they include the elite as the heads of these major institutions as well as the elite as a set of private individuals.

 

Many little disclosures, spurring the moral worry of those still capable of such concern, have indicated how widespread public immorality might be.*

* A few years ago at West Point - center of the higher military life in America - some of the carefully selected young men were caught cheating to get by examinations. In other schools of higher learning college men have played dishonest basketball at the moneyed requests of crooked gamblers. In New York City, girls from quite respectable homes have been bought, for a few hundred dollars, by holidaying corporate executives from playboys of very rich families in the business of procuring. In Washington, as well as in other major cities, men in high places have accepted bribes and yielded to pull. By September 1954, some 1400 cases of windfall profits, appropriated during the later 'forties, had been turned up: corporations that had built for or invested in the Federal Housing Administration's rental housing got mortgages for more than the cost of the building, pocketing the difference, which came to hundreds of millions.13 Government officials and business contractors, as well as party girls - three for $400 - and paid-for fishing trips were part of the operating procedure. During the fate war, of course, anyone with smart money and the right connections could have all the black-market meat and gasoline he cared for. And in one recent Presidential campaign, public distrust reached a shrill and cynical tone, when, in an unprecedented gesture, each of the leading candidates for the highest offices in the land felt it necessary to make public an accounting of his personal income.
 

In illegal enterprises, the small investment with the quick, fantastic return flourishes.

 

Dozens of such industries flourish in the boomtown flush of the post-Korean crime increase. The world bankers have formed an association to fight the rise of embezzlement: 'Put bluntly,' reports The New York Times, 'more people are stealing more money from banks.'14 Narcotics and hijacking, embezzlements and counterfeiting, tax cheating and shoplifting - all have paid off handsomely.

Put bluntly, crime, if organized on a proper business-like basis, pays. American gangsters, we now know, are the specialized personnel of nationwide businesses, having syndicated connections with one another and with local public authorities.

 

But more important than the fact that illegal businesses are now well-organized industries is the fact that the 'hoods' of the 'twenties have in the 'forties and 'fifties become businessmen who own hotels and distilleries, resorts and trucking companies. Among such members of the fraternity of success, to have a police record means merely that you did not know the right people.¹⁵

Organized crime in the underworld raises to an extreme the individualistic philosophy of predatory success, the indifference to the public weal, the fetish of the profit motive and of the laissez-faire state.

 

As an integral part of American culture, the,

'underworld... serves to meet demands for goods and services which are defined as illegitimate, but for which there is nevertheless a strong demand from respectable people... It is implicit in our economic, political, legal and social organization... It is in this sense that we have the criminals we deserve.' ¹⁶

For the New Jersey banker, Harold G. Hoffman, crime paid.

 

He became mayor, Congressman, Governor of his state; only upon his death in 1954 was it discovered that for over a decade he had gotten away with $300,000 of state funds and in addition, in the morality play of state politics, had been deep in a network of corruption involving respected banks, insurance companies and highly placed individuals.

 

Army Px's have sold 'such unmilitary items as mink coats and expensive jewelry' at prices well below retail levels. Charities have been discovered to be rackets for private profit. Eighteen persons and seven corporations were indicted in February 1954 on charges of defrauding the government in surplus ship deals, among them Julius C. Holmes, former Minister in the United States embassy in London and special assistant to the Secretary of State.

 

Czars of local labor unions have enriched themselves by extortion and shakedown, by bribery and the union welfare fund. Respected administrators of private hospitals have bought aspirin in wholesale lots for $9.83, selling it to patients for $600. Major General Roderick Allen in March 1954 caused $1,200 of army money to be spent on a dog house for his Siberian Huskies. Those who read business manuals, in addition to newspapers, know that, by 1954, some 214 internal revenue employees and friends of the middle 'forties had been indicted, 100 convicted - including the head tax-collector of the Federal government.¹⁷

 

And all over the country, upper-middle and upper-class tax dodgers personally treat each spring as an invitation to a game of ingenious lying and skillful deception. Revelations from the upper depths reached some sort of climax during the spring of 1954 when the Secretary of the Army and his assistants tangled with a Senator and his assistants: the McCarthy-Army hearings, as we have already noted, stripped from high officials and a number of Senators all dignity and status.

 

All the official masks were ripped off and two sets of top circles were shown to be prime examples of the petty immorality, the substantial charges of both appearing as quite true.

What element of the higher circles - what would-be element-has such immorality not touched? Perhaps all those cases that come briefly to public attention are but marginal-or, at any rate, those that were caught. But then, there is the feeling that the bigger you are, the less likely you are to be caught. There is the feeling that all the petty cases seem to signify something grander, that they go deeper and that their roots are now well organized in the higher and middle American ways of life.

 

But among the mass distractions this feeling soon passes harmlessly away. For the American distrust of the high and mighty is a distrust without doctrine and without political focus; it is a distrust felt by the mass public as a series of more or less cynically expected disclosures. Corruption and immoralities, petty and grand, are facts about the higher circles, often even characteristic facts about many of them. But the immoral tone of American society today also involves the lack of public sensibility when confronted with these facts.

 

Effective moral indignation is not evoked by the corrupt public life of our time; the old middle-class moralities have been replaced in America by the higher immorality.

The exploiting plutocrat and the corrupted machine of the 'nineties were replaced in public imagery by the uncultivated philistine and provincial of the 'twenties, who, in turn, were replaced by the economic royalists and their cohorts of the 'thirties. All these were negative images; the first of urban greed as seen through an indignant and rural moral optic; the second of mindless Babbitry as seen by urban strata for whom moral principles have been replaced by big-city ways; and the third, somewhat less clearly, of the old plutocrat turned more systematic and impersonal.

But the corporate rich of the 'forties and 'fifties, in their economic and in their political aspects - there are no such stereotypes of them; they are rather cynically accepted, and even secretly admired by members of the mass society.

 

No negative stereotype has been widely formed of the corporate rich and the political outsider; and if one or two should crop up in popular imagery, they are soon vanquished by the 'forward-looking,' energetic, clean-cut American boy as executive.

Given the state of the mass society, we should not expect anything else.

 

Most of its members are distracted by status, by the disclosures of pettier immortalities, and by that Machiavellianism-for the-little-man that is the death of political insurgency. Perhaps it might be different were the intellectual community not so full of the conservative mood, not so comfortably timid, not so absorbed by the new gentility of many of its members.

 

But given these conditions of mass society and intellectual community, we can readily understand why the power elite of America has no ideology and feels the need of none, why its rule is naked of ideas, its manipulation without attempted justification.

 

It is this mindlessness of the powerful that is the true higher immorality of our time; for, with it, there is associated the organized irresponsibility that is today the most important characteristic of the American system of corporate power.
 

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15 - The Higher Immorality

THE higher immorality can neither be narrowed to the political sphere nor understood as primarily a matter of corrupt men in fundamentally sound institutions.

 

Political corruption is one aspect of a more general immorality; the level of moral sensibility that now prevails is not merely a matter of corrupt men.¹ The higher immorality is a systematic feature of the American elite; its general acceptance is an essential feature of the mass society. Of course, there may be corrupt men in sound institutions, but when institutions are corrupting many of the men who live and work in them are necessarily corrupted. In the corporate era, economic relations become impersonal - and the executive feels less personal responsibility.

 

Within the corporate worlds of business, war-making and politics, the private conscience is attenuated - and the higher immorality is institutionalized. It is not merely a question of a corrupt administration in corporation, army, or state; it is a feature of the corporate rich, as a capitalist stratum, deeply intertwined with the politics of the military state.

 

From this point of view, the most important question, for instance, about the campaign funds of ambitious young politicians is not whether the politicians are morally insensitive, but whether or not any young man in American politics, who has come so far and so fast, could very well have done so today without possessing or acquiring a somewhat blunted moral sensibility. Many of the problems of 'white-collar crime' and of relaxed public morality, of high-priced vice and of fading personal integrity, are problems of structural immorality.

 

They are not merely the problem of the small character twisted by the bad milieu. And many people are at least vaguely aware that this is so. As news of higher immoralities breaks, they often say, 'Well, another one got caught today,' thereby implying that the cases disclosed are not odd events involving occasional characters but symptoms of a widespread condition. There is good probative evidence that they are right.

 

But what is the underlying condition of which all these instances are symptoms?
 

1 - The moral uneasiness of our time results from the fact that older values and codes of uprightness no longer grip the men and women of the corporate era, nor have they been replaced by new values and codes which would lend moral meaning and sanction to the corporate routines they must now follow.

 

It is not that the mass public has explicitly rejected received codes; it is rather that to many of the members these codes have become hollow. No moral terms of acceptance are available, but neither are any moral terms of rejection. As individuals they are morally defenseless; as groups, they are politically indifferent. It is this generalized lack of commitment that is meant when it is said that 'the public' is morally confused.

But, of course, not only 'the public' is morally confused in this way.

'The tragedy of official Washington,' James Reston has commented, 'is that it is confounded at every turn by the hangover of old political habits and outworn institutions but is no longer nourished by the ancient faith on which it was founded. It clings to the bad things and casts away the permanent. It professes belief but does not believe. It knows the old words but has forgotten the melody. It is engaged in an ideological war without being able to define its own ideology. It condemns the materialism of an atheistic enemy, but glorifies its own materialism.' ²

In economic and political institutions the corporate rich now wield enormous power, but they have never had to win the moral consent of those over whom they hold this power.

 

Every such naked interest, every new, unsanctioned power of corporation, farm bloc, labor union, and governmental agency that has risen in the past two generations has been clothed with morally loaded slogans. For what is not done in the name of the public interest?

As these slogans wear out, new ones are industriously made up, also to be banalized in due course. And all the while, recurrent economic and military crises spread fears, hesitations, and anxieties which give new urgency to the busy search for moral justifications and decorous excuses.

'Crisis' is a bankrupted term, because so many men in high places have evoked it in order to cover up their extraordinary policies and deeds; as a matter of fact, it is precisely the absence of crises that is a cardinal feature of the higher immorality.

 

For genuine crises involve situations in which men at large are presented with genuine alternatives, the moral meanings of which are clearly opened to public debate. The higher immorality, the general weakening of older values and the organization of irresponsibility have not involved any public crises; on the contrary, they have been matters of a creeping indifference and a silent hollowing out.

The images that generally prevail of the higher circles are the images of the elite seen as celebrities. In discussing the professional celebrities, I noted that the instituted elites of power do not monopolize the bright focus of national acclaim. They share it nationally with the frivolous or the sultry creatures of the world of celebrity, which thus serves as a dazzling blind of their true power. In the sense that the volume of publicity and acclaim is mainly and continuously upon those professional celebrities, it is not upon the power elite.

 

So the social visibility of that elite is lowered by the status distraction, or rather public vision of them is through the celebrity who amuses and entertains - or disgusts, as the case may be.

The absence of any firm moral order of belief makes men in the mass all the more open to the manipulation and distraction of the world of the celebrities. In due course, such a 'turnover' of appeals and codes and values as they are subjected to leads them to distrust and cynicism, to a sort of Machiavellianism-for-the-little-man. Thus they vicariously enjoy the prerogatives of the corporate rich, the nocturnal antics of the celebrity, and the sad-happy life of the very rich.

But with all this, there is still one old American value that has not markedly declined:

the value of money and of the things money can buy - these, even in inflated times, seem as solid and enduring as stainless steel. I've been rich and I've been poor,' Sophie Tucker has said, 'and believe me, rich is best.' ³

As many other values are weakened, the question for Americans becomes not 'Is there anything that money, used with intelligence, will not buy?' but,

'How many of the things that money will not buy are valued and desired more than what money will buy?'

Money is the one unambiguous criterion of success, and such success is still the sovereign American value.

Whenever the standards of the moneyed life prevail, the man with money, no matter how he got it, will eventually be respected. A million dollars, it is said, covers a multitude of sins. It is not only that men want money; it is that their very standards are pecuniary. In a society in which the money-maker has had no serious rival for repute and honor, the word 'practical' comes to mean useful for private gain, and 'common sense,' the sense to get ahead financially.

 

The pursuit of the moneyed life is the commanding value, in relation to which the influence of other values has declined, so men easily become morally ruthless in the pursuit of easy money and fast estate-building.

A great deal of American corruption - although not all of it-is simply a part of the old effort to get rich and then to become richer. But today the context in which the old drive must operate has changed. When both economic and political institutions were small and scattered - as in the simpler models of classical economics and Jeffersonian democracy - no man had it in his power to bestow or to receive great favors.

 

But when political institutions and economic opportunities are at once concentrated and linked, then public office can be used for private gain.

Governmental agencies contain no more of the higher immorality than do business corporations. Political men can grant financial favors only when there are economic men ready and willing to take them. And economic men can seek political favors only when there are political agents who can bestow such favors. The publicity spotlight, of course, shines brighter upon the transactions of the men in government, for which there is good reason. Expectations being higher, publics are more easily disappointed by public officials.

 

Businessmen are supposed to be out for themselves, and if they successfully skate on legally thin ice, Americans generally honor them for having gotten away with it. But in a civilization so thoroughly business-penetrated as America, the rules of business are carried over into government - especially when so many businessmen have gone into government. How many executives would really fight for a law requiring a careful and public accounting of all executive contracts and 'expense accounts'?

 

High income taxes have resulted in a network of collusion between big firm and higher employee. There are many ingenious ways to cheat the spirit of the tax laws, as we have seen, and the standards of consumption of many high-priced men are determined more by complicated expense accounts than by simple take-home pay. Like prohibition, the laws of income taxes and the regulations of wartime exist without the support of firm business convention. It is merely illegal to cheat them, but it is smart to get away with it.

 

Laws without supporting moral conventions invite crime, but much more importantly, they spur the growth of an expedient, amoral attitude.

A society that is in its higher circles and on its middle levels widely believed to be a network of smart rackets does not produce men with an inner moral sense; a society that is merely expedient does not produce men of conscience. A society that narrows the meaning of 'success' to the big money and in its terms condemns failure as the chief vice, raising money to the plane of absolute value, will produce the sharp operator and the shady deal.

 

Blessed are the cynical, for only they have what it takes to succeed.
 

2 - In the corporate world, in the political directorate, and increasingly in the ascendant military, the heads of the big hierarchies and power machines are seen not only as men who have succeeded, but as wielders of the patronage of success. They interpret and they apply to individuals the criteria of success.

 

Those immediately below them are usually members of their clique, of their clientele, sound men as they themselves are sound. But the hierarchies are intricately related to one another, and inside each clique are some whose loyalties are to other cliques. There are personal loyalties as well as official ones, personal as well as impersonal criteria for advancement.

 

As we trace the career of the individual member of various higher circles, we are also tracing the history of his loyalties, for the first and overshadowing fact about the higher circles, from the standpoint of what it takes to succeed within them, is that they are based upon self-co-optation. The second fact about these hierarchies of success is that they do not form one monolithic structure; they are a complex set of variously related and often antagonistic cliques.

 

The third fact we must recognize is that, in any such world, younger men who would succeed attempt to relate themselves to those in charge of their selection as successes.

Accordingly, the American literature of practical aspiration -  which carries the great fetish of success - has undergone a significant shift in its advice about 'what it takes to succeed.' The sober, personal virtues of will power and honesty, of high-mindedness and the constitutional inability to say 'yes' to The Easy Road of women, tobacco, and wine - this later nineteenth-century image has given way to 'the most important single factor, the effective personality,' which 'commands attention by charm,' and 'radiates self-confidence.'

 

In this 'new way of life,' one must smile often and be a good listener, talk in terms of the other man's interests and make the other feel important - and one must do all this sincerely. Personal relations, in short, have become part of 'public relations,' a sacrifice of selfhood on a personality market, to the sole end of individual success in the corporate way of life.⁴

 

Being justified by superior merit and hard work, but being founded on co-optation by a clique, often on quite other grounds, the elite careerist must continually persuade others and himself as well that he is the opposite of what he actually is.

It is the proud claim of the higher circles in America that their members are entirely self-made. That is their self-image and their well-publicized myth. Popular proof of this is based on anecdotes; its scholarly proof is supposed to rest upon statistical rituals whereby it is shown that varying proportions of the men at the top are sons of men of lower rank. We have already seen the proportions of given elite circles composed of the men who have risen.

 

But what is more important than the proportions of the sons of wage workers among these higher circles is the criteria of admission to them, and the question of who applies these criteria. We cannot from upward mobility infer higher merit. Even if the rough figures that now generally hold were reversed, and 90 per cent of the elite were sons of wage workers - but the criteria of co-optation by the elite remained what they now are - we could not from that mobility necessarily infer merit.

 

Only if the criteria of the top positions were meritorious, and only if they were self-applied, as in a purely entrepreneurial manner, could we smuggle merit into such statistics - from any statistics - of mobility. The idea that the self-made man is somehow 'good' and that the family-made man is not good makes moral sense only when the career is independent, when one is on one's own as an entrepreneur. It would also make sense in a strict bureaucracy where examinations control advancement.

 

It makes little sense in the system of corporate co-optation.

There is, in psychological fact, no such thing as a self-made man. No man makes himself, least of all the members of the American elite. In a world of corporate hierarchies, men are selected by those above them in the hierarchy in accordance with whatever criteria they use. In connection with the corporations of America, we have seen the current criteria.

 

 Men shape themselves to fit them, and are thus made by the criteria, the social premiums that prevail. If there is no such thing as a self-made man, there is such a thing as a self-used man, and there are many such men among the American elite.

Under such conditions of success, there is no virtue in starting out poor and becoming rich. Only where the ways of becoming rich are such as to require virtue or to lead to virtue does personal enrichment imply virtue. In a system of co-optation from above, whether you began rich or poor seems less relevant in revealing what kind of man you are when you have arrived than in revealing the principles of those in charge of selecting the ones who succeed.

All this is sensed by enough people below the higher circles to lead to cynical views of the lack of connection between merit and mobility, between virtue and success. It is a sense of the immorality of accomplishment, and it is revealed in the prevalence of such views as: 'it's all just another racket,' and 'it's not what you know but who you know.'

 

Considerable numbers of people now accept the immorality of accomplishment as a going fact.

Some observers are led by their sense of the immorality of accomplishment to the ideology, obliquely set forth by academic social science, of human relations in industry;⁵ still others to the solace of mind provided by the newer literature of resignation, of peace of mind, which in some quietened circles replaces the old literature of frenzied aspiration, of how to get ahead.

 

But, regardless of the particular style of reaction, the sense of the immorality of accomplishment often feeds into that level of public sensibility which we have called the higher immorality. The old self-made man's is a tarnished image, and no other image of success has taken its once bright place.

 

Success itself, as the American model of excellence, declines as it becomes one more feature of the higher immorality.
 

3 - Moral distrust of the American elite - as well as the fact of organized irresponsibility - rests upon the higher immorality, but also upon vague feelings about the higher ignorance.

 

Once upon a time in the United States, men of affairs were also men of sensibility: to a considerable extent the elite of power and the elite of culture coincided, and where they did not coincide they often overlapped as circles.

 

Within the compass of a knowledgeable and effective public, knowledge and power were in effective touch; and more than that, this public decided much that was decided.

'Nothing is more revealing,' James Reston has written, 'than to read the debate in the House of Representatives in the Eighteen Thirties on Greece's fight with Turkey for independence and the Greek-Turkish debate in the Congress in 1947. The first is dignified and eloquent, the argument marching from principle through illustration to conclusion; the second is a dreary garble of debating points, full of irrelevancies and bad history.' ⁶

George Washington in 1783 relaxed with Voltaire's 'letters' and Locke's 'On Human Understanding'; Eisenhower read cowboy tales and detective stories.⁷

 

For such men as now typically arrive in the higher political, economic and military circles, the briefing and the memorandum seem to have pretty well replaced not only the serious book, but the newspaper as well. Given the immorality of accomplishment, this is perhaps as it must be, but what is somewhat disconcerting about it is that they are below the level on which they might feel a little bit ashamed of the uncultivated style of their relaxation and of their mental fare, and that no self-cultivated public is in a position by its reactions to educate them to such uneasiness.

By the middle of the twentieth century, the American elite have become an entirely different breed of men from those who could on any reasonable grounds be considered a cultural elite, or even for that matter cultivated men of sensibility. Knowledge and power are not truly united inside the ruling circles; and when men of knowledge do come to a point of contact with the circles of powerful men, they come not as peers but as hired men.

 

The elite of power, wealth, and celebrity do not nave even a passing acquaintance with the elite of culture, knowledge and sensibility; they are not in touch with them - although the ostentatious fringes of the two worlds sometimes overlap in the world of the celebrity.

Most men are encouraged to assume that, in general, the most powerful and the wealthiest are also the most knowledgeable or, as they might say, 'the smartest.'

 

Such ideas are propped up by many little slogans about those who 'teach because they can't do,' and about 'if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?'*

 

 

* Bernard Baruch, an adviser to Presidents, has recently remarked, 'I think economists as [a] rule... take for granted they know a lot of things. If they really knew so much, they would have all the money and we would have none.' And again he reasons: 'These men [economists] can take facts and figures and bring them together, but their predictions are not worth any more than ours. If they were, they would have all the money and we would not have anything.'8

 

 

But all that such wisecracks mean is that those who use them assume that power and wealth are sovereign values for all men and especially for men 'who are smart.'

 

They assume also that knowledge always pays off in such ways, or surely ought to, and that the test of genuine knowledge is just such pay-offs. The powerful and the wealthy must be the men of most knowledge, otherwise how could they be where they are? But to say that those who succeed to power must be 'smart,' is to say that power is knowledge. To say that those who succeed to wealth must he smart, is to say that wealth is knowledge.

The prevalence of such assumptions does reveal something that is true: that ordinary men, even today, are prone to explain and to justify power and wealth in terms of knowledge or ability. Such assumptions also reveal something of what has happened to the kind of experience that knowledge has come to be. Knowledge is no longer widely felt as an ideal; it is seen as an instrument.

 

In a society of power and wealth, knowledge is valued as an instrument of power and wealth, and also, of course, as an ornament in conversation.

What knowledge does to a man (in clarifying what he is, and setting him free) - that is the personal ideal of knowledge. What knowledge does to a civilization (in revealing its human meaning, and setting it free) - that is the social ideal of knowledge. But today, the personal and the social ideals of knowledge have coincided in what knowledge does for the smart guy - it gets him ahead; and for the wise nation - it lends cultural prestige, sanctifying power with authority.

Knowledge seldom lends power to the man of knowledge. But the supposed, and secret, knowledge of some men-on-the-make, and their very free use thereof, has consequence for other men who have not the power of defense.

 

Knowledge, of course, is neither good nor bad, nor is its use good or bad.

'Bad men increase in knowledge as fast as good men,' John Adams wrote, 'and science, arts, taste, sense and letters, are employed for the purpose of injustice as well as for virtue.' ⁹

That was in 1790; today we have good reason to know that it is so.

The problem of knowledge and power is, and always has been, the problem of the relations of men of knowledge with men of power. Suppose we were to select the one hundred most powerful men, from all fields of power, in America today and line them up. And then, suppose we selected the one hundred most knowledgeable men, from all fields of social knowledge, and lined them up. How many men would be in both our line-ups?

 

Of course our selection would depend upon what we mean by power and what we mean by knowledge - especially what we mean by knowledge. But, if we mean what the words seem to mean, surely we would find few if any men in America today who were in both groups, and surely we could find many more at the time the nation was founded than we could find today.

 

For, in the eighteenth century, even in this colonial outpost, men of power pursued learning, and men of learning were often in positions of power. In these respects we have, I believe, suffered grievous decline.¹⁰

There is little union in the same persons of knowledge and power; but persons of power do surround themselves with men of some knowledge, or at least with men who are experienced in shrewd dealings. The man of knowledge has not become a philosopher king; but he has often become a consultant, and moreover a consultant to a man who is neither king-like nor philosophical. It is, of course, true that the chairman of the pulp writers section of the Authors' League helped a leading senator 'polish up the speeches he delivered in the 1952 senatorial campaign.' ¹¹

 

But it is not natural in the course of their careers for men of knowledge to meet with those of power. The links between university and government are weak, and when they do occur, the man of knowledge appears as an 'expert' which usually means as a hired technician. Like most others in this society, the man of knowledge is himself dependent for his livelihood upon the job, which nowadays is a prime sanction of thought control. Where getting ahead requires the good opinions of more powerful others, their judgments become prime objects of concern.

 

Accordingly, in so far as intellectuals serve power directly - in a job hierarchy - they often do so unfreely.

The democratic man assumes the existence of a public, and in his rhetoric asserts that this public is the very seat of sovereignty. Two things are needed in a democracy: articulate and knowledgeable publics, and political leaders who if not men of reason are at least reasonably responsible to such knowledgeable publics as exist.

 

Only where publics and leaders are responsive and responsible, are human affairs in democratic order, and only when knowledge has public relevance is this order possible. Only when mind has an autonomous basis, independent of power, but powerfully related to it, can mind exert its force in the shaping of human affairs. This is democratically possible only when there exists a free and knowledgeable public, to which men of knowledge may address themselves, and to which men of power are truly responsible. Such a public and such men - either of power or of knowledge - do not now prevail, and accordingly, knowledge does not now have democratic relevance in America.

The characteristic member of the higher circles today is an intellectual mediocrity, sometimes a conscientious one, but still a mediocrity. His intelligence is revealed only by his occasional realization that he is not up to the decisions he sometimes feels called upon to confront. But usually he keeps such feelings private, his public utterances being pious and sentimental, grim and brave, cheerful and empty in their universal generality.

 

He is open only to abbreviated and vulgarized, predigested and slanted ideas. He is a commander of the age of the phone call, the memo, and the briefing.

By the mindlessness and mediocrity of men of affairs, I do not, of course, mean that these men are not sometimes intelligent -  although that is by no means automatically the case. It is not, however, primarily a matter of the distribution of 'intelligence' - as if intelligence were a homogeneous something of which there may be more or less.

 

It is rather a matter of the type of intelligence, of the quality of mind that is selected and formed. It is a matter of the evaluation of substantive rationality as the chief value in a man's life and character and conduct. That evaluation is what is lacking in the American power elite. In its place there are 'weight' and 'judgment' which count for much more in their celebrated success than any subtlety of mind or force of intellect.

All around and just below the weighty man of affairs are his technical lieutenants of power who have been assigned the role of knowledge and even of speech: his public relations men, his ghost, his administrative assistants, his secretaries. And do not forget The Committees. With the increased means of decision, there is a crisis of understanding among the political directorate of the United States, and accordingly, there is often a commanding indecision.

The lack of knowledge as an experience among the elite ties in with the malign ascendancy of the expert, not only as fact but as legitimation. When questioned recently about a criticism of defense policies made by the leader of the opposition party, the Secretary of Defense replied, 'Do you think he is an expert in the matter?'

 

When pressed further by reporters he asserted that the 'military chiefs think it is sound, and I think it is sound,' and later, when asked about specific cases, added: 'In some cases, all you can do is ask the Lord.'12 With such a large role so arrogantly given to God and to experts, what room is there for political leadership?

 

Much less for public debate of what is after all every bit as much a political and a moral as a military issue. But then, from before Pearl Harbor, the trend has been the abdication of debate and the collapse of opposition under the easy slogan of bi-partisanship.

Beyond the lack of intellectual cultivation by political personnel and advisory circle, the absence of publicly relevant mind has come to mean that powerful decisions and important policies are not made in such a way as to be justified or attacked; in short, debated in any intellectual form. Moreover, the attempt to so justify them is often not even made. Public relations displace reasoned argument; manipulation and undebated decisions of power replace democratic authority.

 

More and more, since the nineteenth century, as administration has replaced politics, the decisions of importance do not carry even the panoply of reasonable discussion, but are made by God, by experts, and by men like Mr. Wilson.

More and more the area of the official secret expands, as well as the area of the secret listening in on those who might divulge in public what the public, not being composed of experts with Q clearance, is not to know. The entire sequence of decisions concerning the production and the use of atomic weaponry has been made without any genuine public debate, and the facts needed to engage in that debate intelligently have been officially hidden, distorted, and even lied about.

 

As the decisions become more fateful, not only for Americans but literally for mankind, the sources of information are closed up, and the relevant facts needed for decision (even the decisions made!) are, as politically convenient 'official secrets,' withheld from the heavily laden channels of information.

In those channels, meanwhile, political rhetoric seems to slide lower and lower down the scale of cultivation and sensibility. The height of such mindless communications to masses, or what are thought to be masses, is probably the demagogic assumption that suspicion and accusation, if repeated often enough, somehow equal proof of guilt - just as repeated claims about toothpaste or brands of cigarettes are assumed to equal facts.

 

The greatest kind of propaganda with which America is beset, the greatest at least in terms of volume and loudness, is commercial propaganda for soap and cigarettes and automobiles; it is to such things, or rather to Their Names, that this society most frequently sings its loudest praises.

 

What is important about this is that by implication and omission, by emphasis and sometimes by flat statement, this astounding volume of propaganda for commodities is often untruthful and misleading; and is addressed more often to the belly or to the groin than to the head or to the heart. Public communications from those who make powerful decisions, or who would have us vote them into such decision-making places, more and more take on those qualities of mindlessness and myth which commercial propaganda and advertising have come to exemplify.

In America today, men of affairs are not so much dogmatic as they are mindless. Dogma has usually meant some more or less elaborated justification of ideas and values, and thus has had some features (however inflexible and closed) of mind, of intellect, of reason. Nowadays what we are up against is precisely the absence of mind of any sort as a public force; what we are up against is a disinterest in and a fear of knowledge that might have liberating public relevance.

 

What this makes possible are decisions having no rational justifications which the intellect could confront and engage in debate.

It is not the barbarous irrationality of dour political primitives that is the American danger; it is the respected judgments of Secretaries of State, the earnest platitudes of Presidents, the fearful self-righteousness of sincere young American politicians from sunny California. These men have replaced mind with platitude, and the dogmas by which they are legitimated are so widely accepted that no counter-balance of mind prevails against them. Such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own; in the name of practicality they have projected a Utopian image of capitalism.

 

They have replaced the responsible interpretation of events with the disguise of events by a maze of public relations; respect for public debate with unshrewd notions of psychological warfare; intellectual ability with agility of the sound, mediocre judgment; the capacity to elaborate alternatives and gauge their consequences with the executive stance.

 

4 - Despite - perhaps because of - the ostracism of mind from public affairs, the immorality of accomplishment, and the general prevalence of organized irresponsibility, the men of the higher circles benefit from the total power of the institutional domains over which they rule.

 

For the power of these institutions, actual or potential, is ascribed to them as the ostensible decision-makers. Their positions and their activities, and even their persons, are hallowed by these ascriptions; and, around all the high places of power, there is a penumbra of prestige in which the political directorate, the corporate rich, the admirals and generals are bathed.

 

The elite of a society, however modest its individual member, embodies the prestige of the society's power.*

 

 

* John Adams wrote in the late eighteenth century: 'When you rise to the first ranks, and consider the first men; a nobility who are known and respected at least, perhaps habitually esteemed and beloved by a nation; Princes and Kings, on whom the eyes of all men are fixed, and whose every motion is regarded, the consequences of wounding their feelings are dreadful, because the feelings of an whole nation, and sometimes of many nations, are wounded at the same time. If the smallest variation is made in their situation, relatively to each other; if one who was inferior is raised to be superior, unless it be by fixed laws, whose evident policy and necessity may take away disgrace, nothing but war, carnage and vengeance has ever been the usual consequence of it...'13

 

 

Moreover, few individuals in positions of such authority can long resist the temptation to base their self-images, at least in part, upon the sounding board of the collectivity which they head.

 

Acting as the representative of his nation, his corporation, his army, in due course, he comes to consider himself and what he says and believes as expressive of the historically accumulated glory of the great institutions with which he comes to identify himself. When he speaks in the name of his country or its cause, its past glory also echoes in his ears.

Status, no longer rooted primarily in local communities, follows the big hierarchies, which are on a national scale. Status follows the big money, even if it has a touch of the gangster about it. Status follows power, even if it be without background.

 

Below, in the mass society, old moral and traditional barriers to status break down and Americans look for standards of excellence among the circles above them, in terms of which to model themselves and judge their self-esteem. Yet nowadays, it seems easier for Americans to recognize such representative men in the past than in the present.

 

Whether this is due to a real historical difference or merely to the political ease and expediency of hindsight is very difficult to tell.*

 

 

* In every intellectual period, some one discipline or school of thought becomes a sort of common denominator. The common denominator of the conservative mood in America today is American history. This is the time of the American historian. All nationalist celebration tends, of course, to be put in historical terms, but the celebrators do not wish to be relevant merely to the understanding of history as past event. Their purpose is the celebration of the present.

(1) One reason why the American ideology is so historically oriented is that of all the scholarly community it is the historians who are most likely to create such public assumptions. For, of all the scholarly writers, the historians have been the ones with the literate tradition. Other 'social scientists' are more likely to be unacquainted with English usage and moreover, they do not write about large topics of public concern.

(2) The 'good' historians, in fulfilling the public role of the higher journalists, the historians with the public attention and the Sunday acclaim, are the historians who are the quickest to re-interpret the American past with relevance to the current mood, and in turn, the cleverest at picking out of the past, just now, those characters and events that most easily make for optimism and lyric upsurge.

(3) In truth, and without nostalgia, we ought to realize that the American past is a wonderful source for myths about the American present. That past, at times, did indeed embody quite a way of life; the United States has been extraordinarily fortunate in its time of origin and early development; the present is complicated, and, especially to a trained historian, quite undocumented. The general American ideology accordingly tends to be of history and by historians.¹⁴

 

 

At any rate it is a fact that in the political assignments of prestige there is little disparagement of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, but much disagreement about current figures.

 

Representative men seem more easily recognizable after they have died; contemporary political leaders are merely politicians; they may be big or little, but they are not great, and increasingly they are seen in terms of the higher immorality.

Now again status follows power, and older types of exemplary figures have been replaced by the fraternity of the successful -  the professional executives who have become the political elite, and who are now the official representative men. It remains to be seen whether they will become representative men in the images and aspirations of the mass public, or whether they will endure any longer than the displaced liberals of the 'thirties.

 

Their images are controversial, deeply involved in the immorality of accomplishment and the higher immorality in general. Increasingly, literate Americans feel that there is something synthetic about them. Their style and the conditions under which they become 'big' lend themselves too readily to the suspicion of the build-up; the shadows of the ghost writer and the make-up man loom too large; the slickness of the fabrication is too apparent.

We should, of course, bear in mind that men of the higher circles may or may not seek to impose themselves as representative upon the underlying population, and that relevant public sectors of the population may or may not accept their images. An elite may try to impose its claims upon the mass public, but this public may not cash them in.

 

On the contrary, it may be indifferent or even debunk their values, caricature their image, laugh at their claim to be representative men.

In his discussion of models of national character, Walter Bagehot does not go into such possibilities;¹⁵ but it is clear that for our contemporaries we must consider them, since precisely this reaction has led to a sometimes frenzied and always expensive practice of what is known as 'public relations.' Those who have both power and status are perhaps best off when they do not actively have to seek acclaim. The truly proud old families will not seek it; the professional celebrities are specialists in seeking it actively.

 

Increasingly, the political, economic, and military elite - as we have seen - compete with the celebrities and seek to borrow their status. Perhaps those who have unprecedented power without the aura of status, will always seek it, even if uneasily, among those who have publicity without power.

For the mass public, there is the status distraction of the celebrity, as well as the economic distraction of war prosperity; for the liberal intellectual, who does look to the political arena, there is the political distraction of the sovereign localities and of the middle levels of power, which sustain the illusion that America is still a self-balancing society. If the mass media focus on the professional celebrities, the liberal intellectuals, especially the academic social scientists among them, focus upon the noisy middle levels.

 

Professional celebrities and middle-level politicians are the most visible figures of the system; in fact, together they tend to monopolize the communicated or public scene that is visible to the members of the mass society, and thus to obscure and to distract attention from the power elite.

The higher circles in America today contain, on the one hand, the laughing, erotic, dazzling glamour of the professional celebrity, and, on the other, the prestige aura of power, of authority, of might and wealth. These two pinnacles are not unrelated. The power elite is not so noticeable as the celebrities, and often does not want to be; the 'power' of the professional celebrity is the power of distraction. America as a national public is indeed possessed of a strange set of idols.

 

The professionals, in the main, are either glossy little animals or frivolous clowns; the men of power, in the main, rarely seem to be models of representative men.

Such moral uneasiness as prevails among the American elite themselves is accordingly quite understandable. Its existence is amply confirmed by the more serious among those who have come to feel that they represent America abroad. There, the double-faced character of the American celebrity is reflected both by the types of Americans who travel to play or to work, and in the images many literate and articulate Europeans hold of 'Americans.' Public honor in America tends now to be either frivolous or grim; either altogether trivial or portentous of a greatly tightened-up system of prestige.

The American elite is not composed of representative men whose conduct and character constitute models for American imitation and aspiration. There is no set of men with whom members of the mass public can rightfully and gladly identify. In this fundamental sense, America is indeed without leaders. Yet such is the nature of the mass public's morally cynical and politically unspecified distrust that it is readily drained off without real political effect.

 

That this is so, after the men and events of the last thirty years, is further proof of the extreme difficulty of finding and of using in America today the political means of sanity for morally sane objectives.

America - a conservative country without any conservative ideology - appears now before the world a naked and arbitrary power, as, in the name of realism, its men of decision enforce their often crackpot definitions upon world reality. The second-rate mind is in command of the ponderously spoken platitude. In the liberal rhetoric, vagueness, and in the conservative mood, irrationality, are raised to principle. Public relations and the official secret, the trivializing campaign and the terrible fact clumsily accomplished, are replacing the reasoned debate of political ideas in the privately incorporated economy, the military ascendancy, and the political vacuum of modern America.

The men of the higher circles are not representative men; then-high position is not a result of moral virtue; their fabulous success is not firmly connected with meritorious ability.

 

Those who sit in the seats of the high and the mighty are selected and formed by the means of power, the sources of wealth, the mechanics of celebrity, which prevail in their society. They are not men selected and formed by a civil service that is linked with the world of knowledge and sensibility.

 

They are not men shaped by nationally responsible parties that debate openly and clearly the issues this nation now so unintelligently confronts. They are not men held in responsible check by a plurality of voluntary associations which connect debating publics with the pinnacles of decision.

 

Commanders of power unequaled in human history, they have succeeded within the American system of organized irresponsibility.

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