America as a "Mass Society"

...The typical explanation is that the multiplicity of governmental bodies represent a diversity of regions, interests and social classes such that all must compromise their demands in the interest of the public at large: an automatic balance of social forces impinging on politics...

...and to play upon those attitudes, through mass media techniques adapted from commercial merchandising practice, so as to direct them in the support of the powerholders' wants...

...Checks and balances, separation of powers, federalism, and similar cliches of American political thought, which were once thought to have as their primary function the fragmentation of governmental power, are now at least as widely used to support the proposition that no single class, no single group outside the governement, can wield any substantial power over the government and the political decisions of the society...

...Yet a counsel of despair is not being voiced either...

...The Farm Bureau Federation (big) receives more cordial treatment from Congress and President than does the Farmers Union (smaller) . The American Medical Association and the National Association of Real Estate Boards (organized) versus the consumers of medicine and housing (unorganized) have not been even matches either...

...and the tradition of a strongly opinionated, provocative editorial has given way to a page of platitudes which says nothing and is read by no one...

...Truman, on the other hand, was a first-rate provoker of public controversy, but did little to educate the public to the pros and cons of the issues he raised...

...As the size and financial resources of organizations have increased, the power of their top men has grown correspondingly, since power is typically institutional rather than personal in origin...

...In the long run, more jobs may be created than abolished...

...And what of this prosperity we have had since World War II...

...the relative proportions of earnings used for capital improvements, dividends, product improvement, and wage increases...

...Our whole culture is so committed to the trickle down theory of economic development favored by those at the top that not only do the various producer interests share a community of purpose in the political arena, but much of the public mistakenly assumes itself to be part of the in-group...

...Witness the current financial crisis of privately endowed colleges...

...the re-location of plants which may be the sole economic activity in a community...

...This writer believes the second of the two alternatives to hold the lion's share of truth, and the remainder of this article will be an effort to speculate on the nature and significance of the reasons why this campaign has mainly been a campaign of silence...

...By way of illustration, consider General Motors' announcement during the 1954 "rolling readjustment" of a billion dollar expansion program...

...What is perhaps an even more disturbing aspect of these groups is the extent to which they are able to by-pass the explicit political system in making decisions which have a wide impact on that society...

...Learning that school construction was lagging for lack of local funds, he called a White House Conference on Education—which told him that school construction was lagging for lack of local funds...

...Public servants (both elective and civil service) , teachers, small businessmen and many salaried professionals, farmers, Negroes, textile workers and pensioners, among others, have sometimes suffered...

...Although politicians have always been amateur psychologists and no political system has ever been an exercise of pure reason, there is an element in the situation today which makes the "engineering of consent" more effective and more dangerous than before...

...To improve the existing system of medical pre-payment insurance he proposed a re-insurance scheme that few understood and fewer wanted...

...This is but the most recent example of the public relations approach to politics, an approach that is rapidly supplanting the description of problems and discussion of real issues as the standard content of poli tical campaigns...

...Most urban families have appliances and gadgets beyond the wildest dreams of twenty-five years ago...

...The capital gains tax and the expense account have become the answer of union and corporate executives to the income tax, and a rather effective answer they have been...

...If the apparent lack of substantive issues means that the major difference between the parties lies in the names of the candidates and not in their attitudes toward the use of government in solving social problems, then one or a combination of two conclusions must follow...

...The many real problems involved in an effort to offer the wage worker some semblance of the income enjoyed by the salaried employee are being treated as strictly a matter for corporate managers and unions to settle by private bargaining...

...It gives the color of public policy and the sanction of government to decisions made by one class...

...And this is strongly reinforced by the fact that the lower status segments of the population are much less organized than the upper, organization being the key to political effectiveness in a mass democracy...

...this they do not dare become...

...In discussing the political effects of large-scale organization, we should not neglect the internal structure of such institutions...

...add the authoritarian implications of large-scale organization...

...In administrative organizations (as opposed to legislative units) we may hypothesize that the larger and more complex the organization, the greater is the degree to which power will be centralized at the top on hierarchic principles...

...Is it not possible that even the desire, let alone the ability, to share in political decision making may atrophy through the continued impact of simply receiving decisions made from above in one's economic activities...

...and they lack the old aristocracy's tradition of public responsibility...

...then the apathy of voters and the failure of the political system to stimulate discussion of substantial issues become increasingly understandable...

...their roles are adjusted to the corporation, not the uses of the corporation to the goals of the members...

...But it is also because I believe there are some things happening about which we should be disturbed...

...Much of our educational, medical and social welfare costs as a nation were once borne by wealthy individuals, especially those whose wealth was pre-industrial and whose personal style of life included a sense of social obligation borrowed from continental traditions...

...New power...

...It seems to be a curiously selective phenomenon...

...The first is that the American people are so uniformly content that there simply does not exist a sufficient degree of popular disagreement to sustain a political debate between the parties...

...Public housing has as usual been paid little more than lip service...

...When their interest is to shut off debate, to impose an unreal uniformity of opinion and foreclose challenges to their stewardship by declaring all problems solved, as seems to have been the case since World War II, then the result will be what we have this year: a politics of silence, a campaign without issues...

...Greater productivity, we are told in the pseudo-liberal rhetoric of business, means an upward leveling of incomes...

...The role specialization of large-scale organizational life may also have undemocratic consequences to the extent that it means increased psychic isolation and increased class stratification based upon occupational stratification...

...Bigness fakes over In the production of goods, in sports, in transportation, in pre-chosen reading from book clubs and in network T-Viewing, and in political action—in most of the activities of modern America—ours is an age of large-scale organization...

...2) The increasing scope of large-scale, hierarchic organizations...

...today all but a small segment of the population are merely consumers...

...No one seemed to be bothered by the attempt to delude the public regard ing the enlarged scope of military power in political affairs...

...What is usually ignored in explications of this "power, power, who has the power" game is the substantial identity of interest among the supposedly competing groups...

...3) Ideologies and new centers of power...

...But ideology dies hard, particularly when (almost by definition) widespread recognition of its lack of correspondence to reality would be the end of its usefulness as a defense of privileged position...

...Government promotion of corporate power, maldistribution of income, inadequate medical and educational facilities, a haphazard introduction of automation and guaranteed annual wage plans without public participation in the decisions, the dubious aspects of uneven and unstable prosperity, and a bipartisanship of massive fear in our foreign policy—these are a few of the issues that could make the campaign a vital, absorbing and meaningful exercise of democracy...

...but most of them are up to their ears in debt and frantic from trying to live up to the dreamworld of advertising...

...Texas oil men are enjoying it tremendously...

...Eisenhower's "markedly non-political posture" may reflect and suit what William S. White of the New York Times reports to be the coun try's "preoccupation with comfort and commodities to a degree that many politicians believe has not been paralleled in this century...

...Wright Mills' term for men whose values have been shaped by nongovernmental activities, primarily economic) . What we are closer to today than ever before (and it should horrify the sincere free enterprisers, if there are any left) is a form of "state socialism" (or state capitalism) _possessing a large monolithic potential with few of its democratic and equalitarian potentialities realized at all...

...Because the announcement inspired confidence and reassured fellow industrialists of the "basic soundness" of the economy, it was widely heralded as economic statesmanship of a high order...

...Only effectiveness mattered...

...Today it is hard to recall that in 1945 debate was widespread and vigorous over the moral justification of the first A-bomb...

...and the provisions made for retirement of employees, for the social costs of automation, and for the character of within-the-plant life, particularly as regards the degree of employee participation in decisions...

...In the nineteenth century many men were producers as well as consumers of opinion on public affairs...

...To the tune of thirty-five billion dollars per year prosperity rests upon expenditures for massive destruction...

...Republicans and Southern Democrats saw to its death, with little urging to the contrary from the President, who was then convalescing from the ileitis attack...

...old Ideology The rise of large-scale private organizations has created a new class of power wielders...

...in the short run, why worry: managers and union leaders won't lose their jobs, only rank and file workers...

...Period...

...Why the silence...

...One of the major points of the analogy is the extension of the assumption of economic competition to the realm of politics...

...Large-scale organization means directly increased need for coordination to be imposed on the parts if an integrated whole is to result...

...That is, a manufacturing concern is expected to have but one goal: the production of goods for profit...

...Consequently, they don't take a hand in private provision for social needs and they resent taxation for social purposes...

...The worker and the boss knew each other and each other's work in the two-man carriage shop...

...They have achieved the limited goals they set for themseles in the 'Thirties, and while they are not quite satisfied with the results, within the existing framework of ideas and institutions they know not what to do next...

...To say that it hasn't happened yet may not be a complete rebuttal, since we are still living on the cultural capital of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when a man's political independence was encouraged by his economic independence as family farmer, journeyman craftsman, or independent businessman...

...Among the types of decisions which by virtue of their impact on the community may be termed "political" are: the rate of plant expansion expenditures in the nation as a whole...

...And the real problems and real struggles for power will be ever more obscured...

...Because they have not turned their attention to the new problem of mass democracy: how to restore citizen participation and control over an increasingly complex society, a society in which the traditional two-way communication between publics and governments have become a oneway private road travelled only by propaganda...

...Democracy may need daily practice to maintain the personality structure it requires...

...The politicians of both parties (particularly the holders of national office) , the political pundits of the press, and those private individuals and organizations who have ready access to the mass media are the persons who must pose the problems and the alternatives if political debate is to get off the ground...

...It has surmounted many obstacles in the past two centuries and there is no a priori reason why other obstacles may not also be overcome as they arise, so that the individual may be restored to the position of control over his own destiny that is the supreme goal of democratic politics...

...This goal is "given" in the very act of establishing the organization...

...The political powerholders are now able, through polling, to diagnose the attitudes of the public with an accuracy hitherto unattainable...

...We are therefore still in the stage of discovering the extent and significance of private power derived from large-scale organizations and of political functions being exercised by economic institutions...

...Imperfect competition In ideas Early in July, Secretary of Defense Wilson ordered several thousand military officers in the Washington area to wear civilian clothes on the job...

...The Presidency is the strategic point in the political system for educating the public to an awareness and consideration of issues...

...If that isn't a sufficient basis for a lively political struggle, what is it...

...A supposedly naturally beneficent system and a built-in excuse for occasions when it does not work combine to foreclose much potential criticism...

...We have just been speaking of what happens within the political arena as a result of the growth of power groups, whose power is hidden by a fog of ideological rhetoric...

...Another issue that seems to have escaped the attention of our political crusaders is the serious maldistribution of income still existing in the United States...

...Liberalism's program for economic reform has consisted of imposing a public interest ethic onto a self-interested set of economic institutions...

...But I do think it is undeniable that an unintended consequence of the new economics is to hide the regional, occupational and class divergences that may be contained within what is unquestionably a high over-all figure...

...See Stanley Kelley's Professional Public Relations and Political Power for some exasperating case studies...

...Whether the dependent, paternalistic, authoritarian life of modern economic institutions is compatible with independent, self-reliant, democratic political institutions may still be an open question, but it is surely a question...

...In the automobile plant of today the worker may not even understand what others on the same rank level are doing, how the operation he performs contributes to a tangible result, or what the Big Boss looks like...

...It's the first chance they have had to enjoy the "American standard of living" which they have been trained by national advertising to expect...

...an example can be found in a recent (and in all other respects excellent) book on the genesis of the Marshall Plan in which the author describes the strategy sessions at which the proper "pitch" for "selling" the plan to the public was decided upon, and implies his approval of the result, since it worked...

...For as liberals they may share in the power of the existing system...

...The result is that, unlike the classic democratic community in which public discussion precedes and affects official decisions, our society is becoming one in which "discussion" is a euphemism for public reiteration of propaganda disseminated through mass media...

...The progressive income tax and steady inflation have done much to decrease the ability of this group to provide social needs through private philanthropy...

...Granting that the identity is not universal and that a good deal of competition does occur on the level of splitting up the spoils, it seems to be true nevertheless that most of the organized interest groups are producer-oriented...

...Why have ileitis and the price of hogs so completely monopolized the debate thus far...

...The published reports of the edict asserted that Wilson's purpose was to play down the conspicuous role now being played in national policy making by the military...

...The Missing Issues In terms of the political system's consequences for the distribution of wealth and power, perhaps the issue of greatest immediate concern should be the increasing amalgamation of economic and political power centers under the excuse of a permanent semi-war economy and the impetus of an Administration "sympathetic to the needs of business...

...In his present powerless, dependent position, and lulled by abundance, what stimulus has the individual to participate in or care about the political affairs of the nation...

...What is interesting here is that he saw no need to comment on the process, which was one in which the appeals that could be made were discussed largely apart from their correspondence to fact...

...Given substantial evidence that a conflict of interests exists over the distribution of income, or that the Western alliance is falling apart at the seams, public relations technique calls for denial of the conflict, expressions of natural harmony, and boastful statements that great advances are being made in our diplomatic efforts...

...The man who never became President, Norman Thomas, has done more than either of the above to prod the nation on in the job of strengthening and extending democracy...

...This sort of approach to informing the public, which has become standard operating procedure in recent years, suggests that E. H. Carr was not exaggerating when he wrote that The spectacle of an efficient elite maintaining its authority and asserting its will over the mass by the rationally calculated use of irrational methods of persuasion is the most disturbing nightmare of mass democracy...

...AP, UP and INS have largely replaced individual reporters for most newspapers...

...Politically, too, organization counts...

...The persistent capture of the instruments of public interest regulation by the intended regulatees does not seem to have persuaded them that something more is required...

...One of the few notable achievements of the current year has been the extension by Congress of the social security system to the totally disabled, a move totally disapproved by the Administration...

...now the expected standard of living (including college education for his children) requires that the man carry two jobs or that his wife also work...

...Is it an unmixed blessing...

...Where is the voice of liberalism...

...By-products of prosperity Among the more widely held assumptions of the free enterprise creed is the dogma that the system creates prosperity, but that poverty—a rare occurrence anyway—is always the fault of the individual, never of the system...

...One reason why our national "plant" is running down while private plant construction hits new peaks each quarter may lie in the changed social positions of certain groups...

...I do not mean to imply a plot to portray a rosy picture—at least not on the part of professional economists who use national income analysis because it is strategic for certain types of problems...

...The one issue that seems most important this year to politicians and public alike is the President's Health...

...To consider the possibility that those institutions and values themselves should be challenged would make liberals into radicals...

...As we suggested in describing the issues that could be raised, but haven't been, the prosperity we have been discussing is not universally or evenly distributed...

...Had we recognized the new forms of power as they arose, we could now be in the stage of institutionalizing new means of social control to bring the twentieth century power groups into the system of political accountability...

...Perhaps liberalism will again become a fighting force, but not until it recognizes that the sources of power and the instruments of power are constantly changing, and that new analysis of the power problem, and new solutions, are called for...

...This is partly because, as someone has remarked, it seems useful to afflict the comfortable, especially when so many are trying to comfort the afflicted with delusions of well-being...

...When decisions as crucial as this to the general welfare are made outside of the democratic processes by which the citizen is supposed at least to share in shaping his own destiny, then the political system becomes less significant than the economic institutions of the society...

...These tendencies are reinforced by the increased use of "political outsiders" (C...

...the individual may need a style of life and a set of institutions that are not now present in order to make a successful transition from nineteenth century individual democracy to mass democracy of the twentieth century...

...But it is equally possible that there might be less of such preoccupation if the President chose to stress the challenges of democracy instead of the accomplishments of the economic system...

...The other possibility is that all is not sweetness and light but that for a variety of reasons the existing disagreements are not being handled by the political system, are not being raised to the surface of our rather murky and obscurantist campaign...

...Of course the same percentage is a larger dollar amount now...

...Both the newly rich and the fairly well-off (compared with before the New Deal) unionized workers of heavy industry are using their unaccustomed wealth for private goals...

...Why are liberals floundering in the exterior darkness...

...For a people with a traditionally moralistic approach to international politics, it is a sad commentary on the state of the nation that the only reminder of the moral issues involved in nuclear warfare has come in an Army paper disputing the strategic concepts of the Air Force...

...Among the most crucial are automation and the guaranteed annual wage...

...These are the true mass media which are transforming public opinion into mass opinion...

...It is not one to be discussed and modified by the members...

...The development of group-power centers has thus been accompanied by a lessening of power among the people at large...

...But tying such a system to the govern ment, so that these same managers are able to regulate the economic policies of the very institution that is supposed to enforce a publicly debated conception of responsibility upon the productive agencies of the society, is much more dangerous...

...The same in fact is true of labor unions, despite their formally more democratic structure...

...among the small town weeklies, many are identical products of centrally produced boiler plate in all but a few pages...

...Electoral mandates, even when they can reasonably be said to exist, more often than not give way to group vetoes in the attempt to realize them: the groups are organized...

...It is regrettable, but I think true, that not only the businessman who accentuates production of consumer goods for profit, but the laborer and the white collar worker who produce for wages must share the blame for the debilitating effects of prosperity...

...Economically, the dominance of large-scale organization is easily demonstrated if one contrasts the increasing profitability of Big Industry with the decreasing profits and increasing bankruptcy rate of small manufacturers...

...In the concepts of "trusteeship" and "welfare capitalism" advanced by the Fortune school of enlightened (i.e., public relations conscious) businessmen we have another illustration of the way in which our rhetoric encourages the irresponsible exercise of unrecognized power...

...So well accepted has this process become that its successful application to a policy one approves is cause for congratulation by sophisticated and quite ethical observers...

...Yet none other has been seriously discussed...

...Most public discussion of the state of the economy today employs concepts of gross national product and national income...

...For it is through these concepts that corporate leaders are taking over political functions and welding political power without admitting to public scrutiny of their judgments...

...Labor union leaders, corporate managers, farm bloc leaders, publishers of major newspapers and newspaper chains, and the elite of the mass entertainment media comprise this group...

...the right to a job...

...Apparently the private-public utilities have more influence than the children...

...On the other hand, it is interesting to note that his convalescence did not preclude the Administration from applying very urgent and successful pressure on the Senate to prevent a public dam at Hell's Canyon, just two weeks after the school aid bill was abandoned without a fight...

...The bargaining conception of American politics, best developed by Robert Dahl, is probably the most sophisticated version of this theory...

...Before plunging into our analysis of the political system's ills as of 1956, however, let us take a brief and merely suggestive inventory of the issues that could be raised this year if anyone wanted to rock the boat...

...The order was rescinded as quickly as issued, but on the grounds that the President sympathized with the officers concerned over the expense of double wardrobes...

...the electorate is not...

...But if it has been covered in the campaign of 1956, it has been covered the wrong way: with a lid to keep it quiet...

...It might be said that American political ideas are largely analogies drawn from classical economic theory...

...Neither situation is calculated to improve family life or reduce the divorce and juvenile delinquency rates...

...See C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite for elaboration of the public vs...

...If GM's lead had been followed in that direction, we might have had a major depression resulting from the decision made by one industrial concern...

...If economists dealt more in the components and group differentials within the overall figures, if they measured the economy in terms of, say, relative changes in income classes or the bankruptcy rate in small business, a different picture would be presented...

...And the consequence of hanging onto our anachronistic ideologies has been the rather successful process of delusion through which we continue to deny that any group other than the central organs of government does or even can constitute a dangerous repository of power...

...In this situation, what may look on the surface like great diversification and an ideal set-up for competition of political values turns out to be a monolithic system in which those on top meet no effective check from below...

...The President himself has acted...

...As radicals they would be destined to a long and uncomfortable period of agitation from outside...

...Our prosperity has given us no sense of security: unlike Porgy, we got plenty of somethin' and we're scared someone's going to rob us while we're out a-makin' more...

...it is only the Presidency that receives close scrutiny in the nation's press...

...The area of industrial relations, too, has its problems...

...The fields of health, education and welfare deserve some attention, too...

...mass dichotomy...

...And of course they have received it: haven't we a Department of H, E & W now...

...the judgment of employees' loyalty to the nation...

...Surely a "crash program" in preparation for a war we are told would be horrible beyond belief is not the only foreign policy strategy we could devise...

...The number of cities served by more than one daily newspaper has declined and is declining...

...But the existence of new sources of power does not in itself create our problem...

...A man used to be able to, support his wife and family...

...Will they perhaps some day demand that the program live up to its advance billing...

...It is on the Presidency that political attention focuses...

...The political institutions of democracy have successfully tamed to the uses of civilization many forms of power once equally formidable...

...These are important changes in the printed press, but the significance of that medium has declined in proportion as the newer media of service magazines, radio, television and films have grown...

...A bill was proposed...

...But this is hidden to some extent by a technical change: the rise of macro-analysis to the forefront of academic economics...

...The deeper ones I think are connected with four facets of our industrial civilization: 1) Continued prosperity and its reinforcement of competitive lais sez-faire myths surrounding the heritage of abundance...

...The public relations approach is the opposite of the problem-solving approach which a rational democratic process requires...

...It is this lag between the traditional scope of political accountability and the development of new centers of power that explains in good part the apparent lack, of relationship between the nation's major problems and the issues receiving political attention...

...some millions of Americans have yet to see the process work...

...And the unrepresented are by definition unable to force their choice of issues onto the political process...

...and, 4) Changes in the technology and control of the means of communication, which constitute the primary extra-governmental means for securing social power...

...Concentration of control, and a consequent drying up of vehicles for the expression of deviant minority opinion, has proceeded rapidly in the communications industry...

...The problem arises because of an ideological complication: that our rhetoric, political as well as economic, continues to assume the broad dispersion and decentralization of power in the society...

...The analysis presented above is in many ways a discouraging and disturbing one, at least to its author...

...The power of the coordinators who are necessarily at the top of the hierarchy, is increased by another characteristic of such organizations: they are single-function, permanent goal institutions...

...But simply to transfer power from private to public hands will not achieve what the liberals want so long as the public is persuaded that the demands of business are just...

...The pre dicted disruptive effects of the first are being totally ignored...

...To the extent that the public relations approach succeeds, the political process loses much of what little rationality it ever possessed...

...Despite what the wealthy furiously deride as "confiscatory taxation" the top fifth of income receivers in 1951 managed to hold onto 42 per cent of total wages and salaries while the bottom fifth received 3 per cent—the same share of national income it had received in 1939...

...Survival has become a precarious proposition for the individual enterpriser or independent professional man or the small organization, be it a manufacturing concern, a magazine or one-elephant circus...

...Recent liberalism's sole solution has been to make Big Government even bigger, as a counter-weight to private power...

...Add to this the psycho-social isolation induced by the complexity of urban living...

...The benefits of prosperity are said to outweigh any hesitancies we might have about the inequalities of distribution, the economic and psychic wastes of planned obsolescence and status competition, and the pursuit of a materially defined success goal which is held out to all but achievable only by a few...

...steel and auto workers have benefited somewhat...

...Democracy, if one takes the long view, is something new in the world...

...Because in many areas a few very large units have replaced many small ones, power is concen trated and maximized in oligopolistic systems where it was once dispersed and minimized...

...But what if GM had announced that it was shelving plant expansion plans until the economic clouds had blown away...

...Thus when we read that gross national product for the first quarter of 1956 was at annual rate of 400 billion dollars we are naturally impressed...

...Many answers can be suggested, some immediate and ephemeral, some structural and fundamental...

...In Congress and the clientele agencies of the Executive, the unorganized are the unrepresented...

...A tradition of economic autonomy which permits decisions directly affecting the level of economic activity (i.e., of joblessness, if one wants to he blunt) to be made privately and without public account ability on the mythical grounds that corporate managers have no power, is dangerous enough in itself...

...and the President and Vice-President are the only office holders elected by the entire nation...