Postscripts on the Elections There Was a Sound of Revelry BY Night

...We have the word of fashion writers and gossip columnists that Mr...

...Competent psychiatrists, for example, are the targets of a good deal of anger and they school themselves to react impersonally...

...That interpretation of Mr...

...But this is sometimes a constricting approach...

...Stevenson provided it...

...Living in the midst of our relentlessly expanding business society, he cannot help it...

...In essence, "I like Ike" was a sentence which was neither jubilant nor affirmative, but wistful...

...Eisenhower's inability to stand up for a friend or a supporter, and his unwillingness to arouse the hostility of a foe, are qualities which he and the shallow-rooted Consumer have very much in common...

...But a mandate in the dictionary sense is "an instruction as to policy," and if words are to be used accurately, a mandate is just what Mr...

...It explains why it was only the people who voted for Mr...

...It is therefore by no means absurd to wonder whether Mr...

...Since Madison Avenue, though somewhat deficient in social vision, is by no means a collection of retarded children, we may take it for granted that Mr...

...But one thing that is a certitude, and not a possibility, is that a Consumer dynasty is forming in the wings...

...Eisenhower been the target of merciless appraisals, it would not have been possible for the Consumer to fuse with him so completely...

...It explains the Republicans' election eve television program, which was an incredible bacchanal for a chief of state, but just what the doctor ordered for a Consumer...

...But if you're here, I must be real...

...The social phenomenon which goes by that name has to be understood in terms of the Consumer...

...It is possible that the image of Mr...

...What Mr...

...Actually, the Consumer is other things besides being a Con sumer...

...Thus it was that while the liberal columnists discussed at some length Mr...

...Stevenson who resented the President's delega...

...Eisenhower's first term, the more articulate members of the opposition contented themselves with condescending to him as an untutored "man of good will...

...The unflattering allusions to the Consumer, hereinbefore contained, have of course had to be over simplified...

...A genuine, bona fide conciliator is a man who knows something about anger...

...But no real exchange is possible between a mirror and the person who looks in it...

...There is nothing more they can do for each other...

...Nixon will be, not the American Consumer, but the American Consumer's Younger Brother—the crazy kid who may once have gone a bit wrong, but who has since straightened out and become a credit to the family...

...Eisenhower look better to the opposition than he really was—especially at first...

...According to present plans, the occasion will be celebrated with furs, diamonds, gowns by famous designers and every conceivable luxury short of Adlai Stevenson walking in chains behind the Eisenhower chariot...

...Eisenhower's real personality structure...

...Eisenhower's inaugural festivities may be more of a milestone than is generally recognized...

...The human being as Consumer is above all else a man who likes to stay out of trouble, and had Mr...

...There has been no real exchange between Mr...

...Eisenhower's appeal is the circumstance that he is a father image in the minds of many voters...

...He is a man of no will...

...It explains why Mr...

...The Consumer could identify with the President, because Mr...

...For a minute there, I was scared...

...In this view, it was not a paterfamilias that many of those citizens were voting for...

...There is general agreement that a substantial element in Mr...

...Many sociologists, some of them quite widely read, have written about the Consumer—that colorless, rudderless, rootless American whose life consists of very little more than the obedient using up of all the multitudinous products turned out by a business society...

...Eisenhower's Inaugural Ball may not prove to be the last consumptive blooming of an over-extended celebrity...

...What they also have in common is a considerable anxiety to have these deficiencies interpreted, not as deficiencies, but as the ingredients of winsomeness and charm...

...Eisenhower's appeal which sees it, not as some inexplicable mystique, but as the President and the Consumer reassuring each other, explains many things...

...IT is one of the imbalances of American life that we spend too much time on Presidential elections before they take place and too little time on them after they are over...

...Like an orchid, it subsists on air...

...The first is Mr...

...To see Mr...

...Indeed, if a father image was involved in the last election, then Mr...

...Eisenhower and his Consumer-followers...

...Eisenhower's personality structure...

...Finnegan's precept in mind when, on the day after the election, it ran a piece with a splashy headline reading, "Eisenhower, The Leader, Trained Nixon Carefully For Leadership...

...Hence Mr...

...Ever since last November, the liberals and the uncaptured Democrats have been stunned and partially immobilized—not because they lost the election, but because they lost it by so much...

...In a troubled way, they saluted—usually without any personal knowledge of it—his military glory...

...But—and it is the all-important proviso — the seductive, irresistible mirror-image must not be allowed to intervene between him and that kind of leadership...

...James Finnegan, Adlai Stevenson's manager, has said that elections are won two or three years before the voters actually go to the polls...

...Eisenhower has never asked the Consumer to do anything more than vote for him, and the Consumer is now legally inhibited from ever voting for him again...

...The observer whose interest is psychological rather than political is already toying with the idea that the inaugural festivities may be, for Mr...

...Viewed this way, then, the voters who were attracted by Mr...

...Eisenhower's being a leader, it was precisely because he is not a leader that he acquired what has since been referred to as a man date...

...Even the most militant liberal has a little bit of the Consumer in him...

...Eisenhower's second inaugural may very well have a significance somewhat transcending ordinary newsworthiness...

...He is not without complexity, nor is he totally impervious to competent leadership...

...These, of course, are only hypotheses...

...Eisenhower's second inaugural, like his first, is going to be the reverse of ascetic...

...tion of power to anonymous assistants...

...What has been called that is merely the President and the Consumer facing each other and saying, "Whew...

...Eisenhower, in himself, is less deeply involved in it than might be supposed...

...There will be a slight, but refreshing variation...

...When the Eisenhower image is seen in this different perspective, then it was not Mr...

...Eisenhower likes to think of himself as a conciliator, but there is a world of difference between the professional conciliator and the amateur...

...Nixon is not scheduled to duplicate his Chief's role of American Consumer...

...But there are, of course, overlappings...

...A less amusing, but much more curious aspect of those four years was the fact that most of the spokesmen for the opposition handled the President as if he were radioactive...

...Eisenhower's reaction to anger is approximately the reaction of an old-fashioned spinster to sex...

...One pathetically amusing aspect of Mr...

...So far, a rather arbitrary distinction has been made between two contrasting personality structures—between the Consumer, on the one hand, and, on the other, the presumably more energetic and self-confident voters who responded to Mr...

...He does not handle anger...

...Eisenhower, like all Consumers, is not a man of good will...

...Like the Consumer, he is not actively malevolent...

...But Mr...

...Nixon as the newspaper of record is apparently organized in his behalf—we may live to see Young Brother elected to the White House on some such Consumer platform as that the Democrats sank the Lusitania...

...The liberals, geared to Hamlet, whirred around in neutral when confronted with Abie's Irish Rose...

...It is not beyond credence that the relation between the President and the Consumer has reached a sort of natural terminus...

...THE NEW SOCIOLOGY has given us both the vocabulary and the equipment to dissect such cloudy phrases as "the Eisenhower magic...

...A new line of demarcation is tak ing shape, and it might be roughly described as a division between Con sumers and non-Consumers—between fleeing virgins, on the one hand and people who are more active and more sure of themselves, on the other...

...To the sociologist or the cultural anthropologist, however, the celebration of Mr...

...And if the world stands still long enough, this conspicuous consumption will be reported in considerable detail, as having what is called "human interest...

...During Mr...

...he flees from it—which accounts for the fact that in the last four years American policy, both at home and abroad, has been above everything else virginal...

...Eisenhower, in the minds of the voters who returned him to office in 1956, was not the image of a father, but the image of the typical American Consumer—complete with golf, cipherwife, cowboy stories and all...

...It was themselves they were endorsing—their own confusion, superficiality, amorphous good intentions and evasiveness of responsibility magnified as on a huge screen in the personality of the President...

...Whether the so-called Eisenhower image dims and loses some of its force in the months ahead depends also, to a certain extent, on the behavior of the liberals...

...How did the liberals and unseduced Democrats—who are professionally not lacking in either human experience or native shrewdness— come to describe as benevolent what was merely inert and uninflected...

...Perhaps that drop or two of Consumer blood which is in all Americans made Mr...

...Eisenhower did not get...

...THERE WERE probably several reasons...

...He did, that is, if a father is conceived of as the one who educates, who imposes the necessary disciplines, who beckons onward toward growth and development and maturity...

...But he stands passively by while the Arabs raid the Israelis or Senator McCarthy masterminds a drive to wreck the careers and dismember the reputations of many people who really are men of good will...

...People who are in the market for magic at all, do not want that magic to be localized or part-time—particularly when it has been explicitly and implicitly heralded as unfailing...

...Many people have already written about the fact that the old groupings were shown by the 1956 election returns to have been extensively dissolved away...

...With Chaos and old Night the order of things abroad, it has become apparent to even the most wishful thinker that "the Eisenhower magic" stops at Sandy Hook...

...On the contrary, he liked it...

...Perhaps they were daunted by that Medusa word, I6 "magic...

...It explains why a man in fragile health and with no observable compulsion in the direction of hard work should have wanted to assume for another four years even the nominal responsibility for a great state in time of crisis...

...It is an alignment of contrasting personality structures, and Mr...

...But just how perdurable is a re lationship like the one between Mr...

...Eisenhower's competence, but his lack of competence that many of those millions of people voted for...

...Even his severest critics—whose name was not legion— never failed to temper their astringencies with the comment that Eisenhower is a man of good will...

...It is possible to educate public choice to higher things than Abie's Irish Rose—but not by condescension...

...Stevenson...

...Eisenhower as a parent figure...

...And yet the very fact that there is such a phrase as "the Eisenhower magic" shows that the political comments on Mr...

...Perhaps more, rather than less, eggheadism should be the order of the day...

...It would have taken superhuman perspicuity to have foreseen, before the election, what was immediately apparent after it—namely, that the old, familiar blocs like the Jewish vote and the labor vote and the Negro vote had been imperceptibly supplanted by a new dispensation...

...Eisenhower's real character— in spite of the fanfare about his wisdom and experience and maturity— got through to millions of people, and so far from being put off by it, they recognized it happily as being in almost exact conformity to their own...

...The third is that image as it was received by the audience...

...If magic is supposed to imply the presence of some unknowable quality, then there is no such thing as "the Eisenhower magic...

...Eisenhower as "a man of good will," they were guilty of unconscious condescension to the electorate...

...The fourth is the real character of that audience...

...Eisenhower's popularity could then be seen for what it is— nothing magical, nothing that has to be respected and admired, and certainly nothing that has to be treated gingerly...

...Eisenhower has been and still is the most uncustodial of men...

...Eisenhower did for the Consumer was to make the Presidency seem like a job that any not particularly talented white-collar worker could handle...

...What is certain is that there was a failure to distinguish between the ConsumerPresident's massive, astronomical popularity and the reality of Mr...

...Although they were both dazzled and shaken by his popularity, he seemed like such an overgrown Boy Scout that they could not, in their literate hearts, take him very seriously...

...Eisenhower and the Consumer comparable to the real exchange which has taken place between the electorate and some of our preceding Presidents...

...And the outside world having become indisputably no longer a place for virgins, the native shrewdness of the opposition may awake from its slumber...

...The second is the image of his personality as it was projected by mass communications—the image of leadership and responsibility...

...For the future, a great deal will depend upon whether the liberals can shake themselves free of the narrowly political way of looking at things and learn to recognize the underlying social currents of which politics is only the surface expression...

...Eisenhower and his followers, not as father and children, but as identical kinds of people worried about their own shadowiness is to understand at once the suffocating popularity of the phrase, "I like Ike...

...Every time the liberals publicly— whatever private opinions they may have had to the contrary—described Mr...

...The New York Times may have had Mr...

...What the one-party press accomplished, in building up a picture of leadership where no leadership existed, was to give the Consumer— on the unconscious level — a moral excuse for identifying with a man whose basic orientation is narcissistic...

...THIS is, of course, not to be interpreted as a confident prediction, but merely as an outlining of certain psychological possibilities...

...The new alignment, however, has as yet been only tentatively defined...

...If the liberals fail to scent out the Danse Macabre possibilities in the inaugural—if they are not, for instance, as forehandedly organized against Mr...

...Nevertheless, Mr...

...Eisenhower reduced his high office to the simplicity and the proportions of working for the Community Chest or the P. T. A. This is not to derogate either of those institutions—both of which fill a felt need—but merely to point up the difference between a local responsibility and an office upon whose conduct racial survival may hinge...

...On other occasions, the relationship between the President and the electorate has successfully weathered some rude shocks, ranging from personal scandal to declarations of war...

...Eisenhower's first term was the way in which Republican editors and commentators got out their bicycle pumps and tried to inject programs into a man as innocent of programming as the anopheles mosquito...

...It was because all the phrases about "liking Ike" were based, not on a reality, but on a hope, that they had such a monotonous and reiterative currency...

...It is not merely that you do not call a father "Ike...

...Eisenhower's popularity, what the Battle of Gettysburg was to the Confederacy—a high water mark that Evill be seen in retrospect to have been the turn of the tide...

...But Mr...

...Eisenhower's dexterity in picking up effective television mannerisms, what he actually said on television seemed to them so utterly unvital as not to deserve comment...

...Eisenhower did not attract their votes because they think of him as a father to them...

...but in their hearts they regarded him, with his third-grade syntax and his everlasting I-don't-knows, as not much more than a freshly bathed chimney sweep...

...The relationship between the Consumer and the President being one of mutual recognition and identification, it then becomes clear, paradoxically enough, that for all the talk about Mr...

...When they criticised him, they did it by inference— failing to realize that inferential criticism is wasted on a Consumer...

...He attracted—indeed, magnetized— their votes because he has the same surface cheerfulness, the too-easy permissiveness, the vagueness of standards and the basic inability to cope that they have themselves in their roles as parents...

...IN REAL life, there has always been something a little unsatisfactory about the idea of Mr...

...Washington correspondents— possibly through an understandable professional bias—tend to interpret everything in terms of politics...

...and he resembles in very few particulars those other father-image Presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt...

...The primary weapon, however, against shallowness and superficiality is not hidden condescension, but outspoken criticism—the kind of fearless and unshrinking commentary that withers myths and lays bare the clean, white bones of reality...

...THE OBSERVER whose interest is psychological rather than political will be reminded, by the glittering celebrations attendant upon the inaugural, of four unsparkling circumstances which were involved in the ConsumerPresident's return to office...

...But other writers—notably Wayne Morse, as early as 1952—have already pointed out that the line of demarcation between Democrats and Republicans is becoming blurred...

...The 1956 Presidentiad, to use Walt Whitman's word, went into the deep freeze even faster than usual because of Hungary and the Middle East...

...Similarly, many women sensed in the Republican candidate just the same glib, plausible, lightweight, feathery quality they have grown familiar with in the television stereotypes of fatherhood—in Ozzie and Harriet, for instance, or Father Knows Best...

...Eisenhower's popularity— voluminous as they have been— have not yet completely explained the President's triumphant return to office...

...Eisenhower would not—indeed, could not—campaign on the basis of issues...

...That relationship has no roots in problems shared or missions accomplished...

...The Consumer did not resent this determined abdication...

...It is also that politically Mr...

...Again, they may have been unconsciously afraid that if they said the Emperor had no clothes on, they would at best be proved ridiculously and irretrievably wrong and at worst stoned in the market place...

...But several things about both the past and the future come more clearly into focus if this idea is critically re-examined...

...Stevenson as a candidate were perhaps, in many cases, people who see themselves as more complex and more energetic than the passive, drifting consumer so grimly and admirably outlined in the books of C. Wright Mills...