Danger Signals in the American Political System
Wheeler, Harvey
A sound political system must facilitate the resolution of potential political conflicts or crises. Where such resolutions are inhibited the threatened political crisis may be compared to the...
...Mass media editorial decision-making is virtually the opposite of that once characteristic of the personalized journalism of small towns...
...It is this condition that is increasingly bemoaned in literature on the helplessness of the lonely crowd, the bleakness of living conditions for the "mass man" and the "organization man...
...Income will not gratify expectations...
...Rather, the potentials of bureaucratic culture are full of the hardly believable promise of a literal realization of traditionally "utopian" cultural goals for the first time in human history...
...However, our corrective economic technologies are so well developed that the primary economic threat is not our lack of economic knowledge but rather political developments which prevent appropriate corrective economic technologies fretn being employed...
...A public allegation of heinous crime or belief may have an opposite effect in the two cases, for the stability of established personal reputations was the small town condition and the absence of any possibility of establishing a personal reputation is the metropolitan bureaucratic condition...
...However, there have grown up disturbing conditions in our two-party system itself which actually aggravate rather than ameliorate the disturbing tendencies described earlier...
...But here it must be noted that although war "solves" a market depression, it intensifies an administrative depression...
...With remarkable unanimity bureaucratic classes have decided to pay for their property while they use it, instead of going through the older middle-class pattern of saving before buying...
...To do so is both archaic and unsound...
...Dismal as this picture is, it does not warrant the currently fashionable discrediting of the entire bureaucratic system...
...In the journalistic eyes of the metropolitan editor or the salaried editor of a suburban "shopper" there are few visible personal reputations...
...8. The unit family size is small, usually not more than four in all...
...In the past such build-it-yourself articles were primarily directed to manual workers...
...And although this has brought with it a painful wrench in the beginning it also contains within it the seeds of a great liberation...
...For although we speak of the democratic ideal of a "free market in ideas," there is no way that social scientists can focus their professional analytical capacity on the problem of identifying and evaluating the innumerable associations and creeds which appeal for mass support...
...For, what the army does is to place an American in an entirely different auto morality...
...Indeed, it may even develop special tendencies leading in the opposite direction...
...Another, perhaps a bookkeeper, will make arrangements to drive a taxi after hours "to understand better the city and its people...
...And although it may not fit actual conditions of bureaucratic culture any better than the liberal model fitted middle class society, it should be clear that little is to be gained from tenaciously projecting the liberal model into bureaucratic conditions...
...A pretty handsome payment for our time, we think...
...It is not an old-fashioned market depression, characterized by unemployment, but rather a netiti style administrative depression, characterized by full employment and powerlessness resulting in discriminatory income payments...
...In every American small town there are stories in their pasts of strange community loyalties in which some pillar of local virtues and proprieties has been vindicated locally though seemingly guilty of great crime in the eyes of outsiders...
...These politically powerless bureaucratic classes are precisely those for whom contemporary developments have converted all problems into political problems...
...I should like here to consider some problems raised by this notion of an "administered" depression...
...If it were possible to pose the question of an alternative political culture with a changed public morality to support it and adjust it to our other-directed culture, an astonishing amount of latent political disaffection with the existing American political system might be revealed...
...It was how to insure individuals, helplessly atomized, against the impurities or poisons which would otherwise creep into the products of powerful, impersonal, profit-seeking manufacturers...
...The new middle (bureaucratic) classes have characteristically high economic and cultural aspirations...
...Although we may hope that the most pressing problems of life in bureaucratic culture will be resolved before they reach the rapidly industrializing underdeveloped areas, there seems little reason to doubt that these problems will spread to them as well, for they are being forced to industrialize at bureaucratic levels...
...The essential job requirement is to produce coordination and synthesis...
...When crisis discredited the old business culture and its values, an entirely new "replacement" culture seemed to have been lying invisible, culturally underground, ready to be tried-even though few had detected its presence and even though both parties had rejected its implications...
...We still try to picture our bureaucratized culture as if it were the simple laissez-faire competitive arena of small bicycle shops and baseinenttinkering inventors...
...The result is a major conflict between political capabilities and Kish political needs...
...Economists tell us that the economy is so geared to this pattern-so dependent upon the loaned-up bureaucratic classes-that were there to be a change to earlier thrift habits a full scale old-fashioned depression would result...
...The mere presence of the forms of a two-party system is of no special virtue in itself unless there is some practical approach to this ideal...
...This is one of the most serious sources of distortion in many current types of opinion polling, for again and again people who are polled about their specific preferences in cars and candidates are really responding to questions about "the American way...
...Since 1955 America has been a depression-haunted nation fearful of repetition of 1929...
...I am referring to something more than the big-business aspects of the Eisenhower Administration, for the recent movement of Wall Street personnel into high political positions was inaugurated by F.D.R...
...The result was a condition of what may be called endemic "administrative depression" for these disfavored classes...
...Two of their chief goals, health and educational standards, bear on them with special weight...
...These security-sensitive doctrines, suffused with religiosity, have served well the needs of the Cold War period...
...in an other-directed culture, and is asked if he likes it...
...And more certainly, the injured party does not "exist" as a person in the eyes of the editorial staff...
...Underlying the theory of democracy in a two-party system is the assumption that two concrete results will be produced: (1) The party out of power is assumed to have the desire and the competence to reveal the major injustices and failings of the party in power, accepting at the same time the obligation to offer a superior alternative...
...These conditions are "abstracted" and will not be found perfectly operative anywhere...
...For it makes him think of an alternative cultural system with its own different and distinctive "auto morality...
...4. Residence in the huge satellite suburbs of standardized housing often involving large transportation and time payments in travel to work...
...This disequilibriumpolitical impotence when all problems have been politicizedis another serious failing in the way our political system operates...
...Weber was the first specifically to isolate bureaucratization in its modern Western form and to forsee many aspects of its general cultural significance...
...Crude, misguided and injurious as it has been, McCarthyism has nonetheless drawn attention to a serious and permanent feature of life in a bureaucratic culture...
...When compared to the dominant business mores of the twenties they are seen to have been outcasts and left-overs from the dom_nant post-World War I pattern...
...This came to be reinforced with a pervading sense of indignant realism which delved beneath the surface pretenses of everything in the dominant business culture: its commercial practices, its constitutional rulings, its social manners, its profitcentered ideal, and its symbolic leaders...
...Another device for the evasion of the effects of the administrative depression is resort to self-help schemes...
...A pressing problem, reflected in the informal conversation of the bureaucratic classes, is how to find an "acceptable" auxiliary occupation...
...The arcadian conditions which provided sufficiently intimate personal knowledge to allow deep human faith and tolerance among its members has no foundation for development in suburbia...
...This process of bureaucratization produced the characteristic population stratum we know as the "new middle classes" or more accurately,, the "bureaucratic classes...
...Homes, autos, washers, dryers, television sets, freezers and even college diplomas are held on loans...
...Even more obsolete is our lingering political picture of Washington pressure groups as if they were innumerable counteracting interest groups that check and balance each other, producing a series of give-and-take compromises that add up to the general public interest...
...Political scientists have suggested that this also happens in politics because the process through which parties appeal to various electoral interests is very similar to the way the Ford and Chevrolet companies appeal to automobile buyers...
...For there have been several times in our past, particularly during times of crisis, when new systems of political morality have been introduced abruptly, even though there had been little forewarning of a potential political rejection or disaffection in the people...
...Perhaps a similar skepticism is valid concerning our duocratic party system...
...Our political parties have bec: ome the agents of non-violent transition only after a crisis has occurred...
...Each had its separate system of goals and values...
...Implicit in the conditions of life in a bureaucratic culture is the conversion of all problems into political problems...
...The governmental problem of the administrative depression is how to distribute parity incomes to politically powerless people...
...Perhaps most difficult of all is the task of throwing off the crit'cisms of the classical left: those of David Riesman's nostalgic liberalism, Orwell's old-fashioned socialism, and C. Wright Mills' nostalgic anarchism...
...In both cases forthright solution of the problem comes a cropper of great vested interests...
...A sound political system must facilitate the resolution of potential political conflicts or crises...
...THE "OPEN cueruRE" of the New Deal's liberal welfare state was made up of elements which had developed as isolated social deviations and aberrations...
...Nonetheless, predictions of our imminent disaster are no more inherently inevitable than were analytically similar ones by Karl Marx about a different society...
...and scientism, together with radical rationalistic tendencies...
...Well sounding National Tax Equality Leagues were formed as fronts for businessmen who wanted to tax cooperatives out of existence and humanitarian sounding groups of all sorts were formed by the Communist Party for its own private purposes...
...Although each transition found organization later through a political party, in each case the two-party duocracy ignored the isolated cultural elements which were later to win out...
...Yet it was not until the appearance of the war against fascism that the unemployment problem was really "solved" through the conversion of the old liberal state into a garrison state...
...Descriptions of built-it-your self houses, boats and home furnishings abound in the white-collar jour nals...
...All were found to be masks for an underlying morass of dishonesty, corruption, decay, and inteIlectual bankruptcy...
...Yet they are precisely the classes whose actual conditions are most frustrating because of the disparity between goals and means...
...For few things are more obvious today than the conclusion that American institutions will presently undergo tremendous dislocations and reorganizations of a more fundamental nature than anything since the seventeenth century...
...If an opinion poll had been, taken in 1931 it would have undoubtedly proved, from the depths of the early depression, that a liberal New Deal welfare state was impossible...
...The American political system today betrays some alarming danger signals...
...If this "depression" status has not already liquidated savings, it is only because the individual is too young to have experienced the golden days of white-collar savings accounts back in the "parity period" of 1939-46...
...Their meanings could be analyzed and tabulated only through the aid of psychology...
...There everyone knew each other intimately and could recite involuted genealogies running back three generations...
...And although the actual conditions of the new bureaucratic middle classes have by no means reached the deep administrative depression of the bureaucratic classes of Igsoc, Orwell made no secret of the fact that he thought he was writing about 1948...
...3. Fixed salary as the characteristic income payment, rendering its recipient highly inflation-sensitive...
...For in politics as in economics, when a few large organizations have a monopoly position, competition between them may produce similarity rather than distinctiveness...
...Political as well as economic power groups have grown so large and so monopolistic that Washington has become the jousting ground for the monolithic politico-economic members of a great "political ologopoly" benevolently described by Professor John K. Galbraith...
...The only possible source of protection against large national, or even international, pharmaceutical houses was the federal government...
...The social and educational consequences of this shift are only slowly forcing themselves on our awareness...
...The direction and the quality of the economic forces which strike them may usefully be described through the notion of an "administrative depression...
...They must learn to admire the "functional" architectural spartanism of stripped flat houses...
...give us pause...
...There may be decisions about libel suits which enter into editorial calculations on how to display an allegation, but here again the important point is that such calculations are entirely depersonalized and have no concern for the person of the accused as such...
...They must learn to like increasingly synthesized commodities and foods...
...It is, as we have seen, precisely these bureaucratic classes which are currently most discriminated against in our balance-of-power compensatory economy...
...5. High occupational turnover (promotions often require job-transfers), resulting in employment and residential communities composed of highly mobile bureaucratic transients...
...We are no more justified in accepting uncritically disparagement from people like Ortega y Gasset, speaking of a mythical aristocratic culture which never existed, than we are in accepting the castigation of Frederick von Hayek, speaking of a mythical bourgeois culture of classical economic theory which never existed either...
...A FURTHER IRONY is that our "planned" full employment economy could only develop in conjunction with the process of bureaucratization which has come to characterize both contemporary industry and government...
...IT HAS LONG BEEN a commonplace of economics that the welfare state has been an improvement of the condition of the lower classes at the expense of the middle class...
...Following World War II the reaction to this situation was for the wife to go to work or to hold her pre-marital job after marriage-a painful reversal of a dominant middle class conviction concerning the proper role of the mother-housewife...
...Yet it is not so fanciful as we might at first suppose...
...For in a bureaucratic culture sources of desequilibrium previously economic are converted into political forms...
...To alleviate the pinch, depressed families always resort to cottage industries...
...This has actually been a persistent characteristic of American politics since the birth of the republic and foreign observers since and including de Tocqueville have often commented that the names of our parties signify little more than "different labels on empty bottles...
...The only agency able to do this is the state...
...There is no market evaluation process for ideas and associations...
...For it was designed to regulate the "purity" of the financial instruments which circulate from vast bureaucratized markets and financial houses into the otherwise helpless hands of private investors-so, at least, was its conception...
...Yet we built our own ranch-type bungalow out of our spare time in 18 months saving $8,000.00...
...Today this seems even more disturbing than before...
...c. Everything that is "consumed" (food, clothing, furniture, housing, education, amusement and opinions) is produced by huge bureaucratic structures...
...auto preferences when placed in this new auto morality is enough to make one doubt that Americans are getting just the car they want and would not stand for anything else...
...The American party system during the '20s, '30s and '50s functioned in a coercively non-partisan fashion, for in no case did the duocratic party system nurture new experiments or solutions to growing problems...
...The first point is that Wall Street has moved to Washington...
...The inhabitants of a bureaucratic culture appear to share several conditions: 1. Employment in huge organizations administered by distant impersonal authorities...
...McCarthyism was a special form of bureaucratic vigilantism...
...The largest and most rapidly growing segments of our population (preoccupational adults in professional and military tra'ning, superannuated pensioners, the bureaucratically-employed classes, marginal farmers and other income groups and marginal ethnic groups) all stand to lose no matter what happens in the shifting struggles above them...
...Implicit in McCarthyism has been the "pure food and drug act approach" applied to associations and creeds...
...The problem of the administrative depression arises initially from the fact that not all segments of our population are able to exert political pressure with -anything like an equivalence of force...
...Those who ponder the differences between the elections of 1944 and 1951 will recall that whereas the United States entered the anti-fascist war with many millions unemployed, it entered the Korean anti-communist war with full employment and incipient administrative depression...
...It is possible to consider America during the twenties, thirties, and fifties as making up, not one culture, but three...
...In two-party theory it should be the function of the out of power Democrats to explore these problems and help foster the synthesis of the growing components of an arising humanitarian bureaucratic culture...
...It is possible to make these same points regarding the "new conservative" culture of the 1950s and the way in which it rejects all the dominant goals and values of the liberal welfare state, substituting opposites in the'r stead...
...And should conditions get worse before they get better there is little doubt that the bureaucratic classes would be most seriously hit...
...For there is nothing about either bureaucratization or rational planning which make either of them inherently inequitable or would make ether of them tend to undercut the cultural revolution visible today...
...It also appears to validate the imperfectly competitive system...
...They must wear more standardized clothing...
...The unhappy conclusion must be that there are in America today the latent ingredients of a potential "political depression...
...The reason derives quite clearly from the above description of the characteristics of life in a bureaucratic culture...
...The professional babysitter was almost unknown in the traditional American small town for there was always a family member available for such tasks...
...However, the same person who wanted little change in Fords and Chevrolets might well give an opposite answer to the new type of question...
...Intimacy of personal relationships was such that certain types of social injury brought marvelous swift retribution...
...However, the death of its founder should not blind us to the fact that McCarthyism arose because, when our constitutional democracy became bureaucratized, its associational and participational freedoms which had been designed for an individualistic culture, made possible under changed conditions the flourishing of political frontism of all types...
...The people answering these polls would be in large number the same people who would have answered with comparable "conservatism" during the twenties and during the thirties...
...The most important economic decisions now take place in Washington...
...In addition, everyone may be presumed to be familiar with George Orwell's mythical state of Ingsoc...
...2) It is assumed that party competition will motivate the voting public to participate in the electoral process, exercising a sufficient level of discriminating judgment to insure the progressive elimination of error and sin and the victory of truth and virtue...
...For the liberal model was an ethic...
...Compare the situation of bureaucratic man with the traditional picture of life in any American small town...
...It was almost as if on the day before 1932 the country had been led by a generation of Hardings, Carnegies, Babbitts and Gatsbys, and on the day after the election by a generation of Lanny Budds, Henry Wallaces, Alger Hisses, Harry Hopkins, and Sidney Hillmans...
...Along the same lines, we may convert the economic notion of duopoly into the political notion of duocracy (the rule of two) and it will serve as a very useful description for the problems of government in our twoparty "duocratic" system...
...Normally we would look to our party system to correct all these condit: ons of imbalance...
...IT MAY BE ARGUED, of course, that in politics as in economics the reason this has developed is that the two parties are so excellent at estimating the political tastes of the electorate...
...Yet in the preceding sections we have seen considerable evidence suggesting that if Americans were asked questions about potential changes in their system of "political morality" surprising responses might appear in that realm also...
...Competition for the power to govern," the President of the American Political Science Association has written, "is not the less intense because the parties estimate the market closely...
...The apparent truth seems to be that new political parties and movements are virtually impossible today, for Americans are getting just the kind of politics they want and would reject anything else...
...6. Suburbia is nobody's hometown...
...Sharp distinctions are not a prerequisite for violent partisanship...
...To this quite different type of question, the answers might be conversational rather than concise...
...When all supplementary devices fail, the next resort is to double job-holding...
...Yet it is no more inevitable that this peculiar disequilibrium will grow progressively worse than it was inevitable in the nineteenth century that the market depression would grow progressively worse...
...Personalized loyalties were all one had to go on in the traditional small town and they were often upheld in the face of formal evidence of great but distant evil...
...I'or we do nave some direct evidence on this very question...
...Traditionally a great deal of gardening, food preserving, residence maintenance, clothing production and repair, and a full assortment of exchange services, characterized the small town family...
...No such political poll has been taken but quite similar polls have been taken about Fords and Chevrolets and in them the vast majority of the people actually do reject radically different designs...
...If this is so, the similarity between the two parties does not mean that the voters are deprived of distinct electoral choices but merely that what they do want is almost perfectly represented through duocratic party competition...
...The bureaucratic "model" is precisely the opposite of the liberal "model...
...The sources of this revolution are not concealed, but are everywhere visible in developing nuclear and photosynthetic energy sources, in expanding capacity to synthesize, in enormously expanded ability to control and manage through electronic systems and statistical methods, and in the spread of bureaucratic forms to all types of organization...
...Though the intent is to find out whether the individual would like to have some hypothetical improvements or changes, he is really being asked a different question...
...The reorganization of G.I...
...What this means is that in their own quiet intellectual way our bureaucratic classes are suffering from the distresses of a depression...
...But the same problem in a metropolis leaves bureaucratic man with no personal recourse...
...This newer development, established under the Democrats, has become greatly extended by the new-model Republicans under their managerial General, and growing segments of the population have suffered bureaucratic enfeudation...
...They are unconsciously "rigged...
...Just like his functions, his loyalties have also been depersonalized and converted into abstract loyalties...
...A condition of endemic administrative depression bears down with increasing discrimination against the Iargest and most rapidly growing segment of the population...
...As with a market culture, the only way we can be sure a bureaucratic culture will produce conditions of equilibrium is by making it do so, rationally and politically...
...But we know from their moderationminded leaders that they, Landon-like, are virtually undistinguishable from the more fortunate Republicans, except for being perhaps a little more conservative on civil rights matters and a little less capable of ass milating the post-Stalin changes in Russia...
...This condition of terroristic personal helplessness, illustrated in the consumption of drugs and opinions, is generally characteristic of the bureaucratic classes, dependent upon great bureaucratized organizations for every want...
...It was the only instrument sufficiently large and powerful in its own right to be an effectively countervailing force in the protective interests of the individual...
...In the market depression enough public jobs were created to keep the unemployment crisis from spilling over into a wider social crisis...
...One obvious answer is to liquidate property holdings...
...For the best of these are available only to the very rich, while the large real improvement in health and education of the poor (necessary to fit them for adequate functioning in bureaucratized industry) is paid for largely by middle-income groups...
...No polit'cal organization prepared its way...
...Among the thousands living in suburbia the result is a propertyless population which "rents" everything it uses...
...Where such resolutions are inhibited the threatened political crisis may be compared to the conditions which may lead to an economic crisis if not corrected...
...The inevitable result was a Pure Food and Drug Act, which wrote into law the essential facts of the conditions of life which were to become general throughout bureaucratic culture...
...World Series partisanship and Ford-Chevrolet partisanship-among the most violent in our culture-would appear to most uninvolved observers to be disputes about negligible differences...
...The German sociologist Max Weber is the Adam Smith of our era...
...This would be especially true if the twentieth century found it impossible to resolve rationally the disequilibriums which the nineteenth century adjusted relatively well...
...It will not tolerate liberal evil-which is atheism, together with secularist atheist tendencies...
...It is important to remember that Franklin Roosevelt did not become a New Dealer until after he began his term of office...
...Suppose someone feels he has been unfairly injured by a small town editor...
...These criticisms share on thing with those of their nominal opponents, Ortega and Hayek: they disparage bureaucratic culture by comparing its conditions of life with the model man idealized by previous cultural systems, not with the actual life conditions of those earlier systems...
...And an old-fashioned market-oriented economic crisis is far from improbable, especially if capital gains taxes are revised to facilitate large scale shifts of capital into bonds and cash holdings...
...These and the other disagreeable features of Ingsoc seemed to bear down most cruelly on the large intellectualized bureaucratic classes...
...During the twenties, the two parties differed little over the best methods of achieving and perfecting an ideal businessminded culture, and even long after the depression this was retained by both parties in a virtually "bipartisan" fashion...
...Even the shopping centers are staffed with a mobile bureaucratic cadre employed by bureaucratized chains...
...The harrowing conditions of marginal existence in Ingsoc were the result not of the fortuitously chaotic operation of a market system but of a deliberately oppressive policy followed by the state...
...As in the case of a hypothetical change in the American's auto morality, we have some direct evidence on this question of the stability of American political morality...
...And despite his robber-baron bombast, Harry Truman accelerated this trend...
...Even if it were accurate to follow Galbraith's neo-classical portrayal of a countervailing equilibrium in Washington's political market place of power giants, troubles would remain because of the huge segment of the population which cannot hope for representation or protection from any of these high contending powers...
...However, it is necessary for men in a bureaucratic culture to realize that the political system, as a system, must allow for the operation of appropriate compensatory and corrective forces...
...There is no reason to assume that this will automatically better itself...
...Perhaps this is not a good example...
...With confidence borne of mass approval, the new homogeneous conservative culture mobilizes its adherents against all the evils it displaced...
...For if one were to have taken a general poll of American voters at any time during the recent past it is probably true that the vast majority of people would have rejected any radically different political proposals...
...The model for bureaucratic man is not an ethic, for it is depersonalized in this aspect as well...
...PERSONALIZED LOYALTIES are impossible in a bureaucratic culture...
...However, it is possible that a two-party system may fail to achieve this ideal...
...Not only the rapidly growing popularity of foreign cars, but more important, the lasting and fabulous preference developed for the Jeep by the American G.I...
...Function has been substituted for person in almost every imaginable endeavor...
...Consider this type of question: "Would you like to see conditions change so that cheaper, smaller, more economical, safer, and less powerful cars were competitive leaders and were strongly approved of by people in general...
...If another economic depression does occur in America it will be caused less by irrational economic forces than by irrational political forces...
...Those discriminated against in an administrative depression do not necessarily lose their jobs...
...The truly amazing thing was the way all these isolated cultural rejects of the twenties fitted themselves together as integral components of a fairly homogeneous alternative culture quickly after 1932...
...That is, he approves of his cultural system as he knows it...
...One of the features of life in the bureaucratized culture he portrayed was a pervasive deterioration of facilities and equipment and a plague of sub-standard products produced and distributed by depersonalized bureaucracies beyond any consumer influence or individual recourse...
...Bureaucratic culture appears to be the appropriate designation for the social system characteristic of post-industrial society in the United States, England, Germany, Russia and Japan...
...They must continually readjust their standards of living to fit the diminished distribution of valuables allotted to them by the distant bureaucratized system...
...However, the deceptive factor is that conditions may worsen to almost disaster levels under full employment and prosperity...
...2. Job functions depersonalized so far as possible and highly routinized...
...Now an article begins: "Ralph and I had never heard of a 'string level' and had never used a saw...
...It said not only what behavior was required of liberal man, but also why that behavior was good and virtuous...
...This has actually happened in the American political system...
...But it is precisely the bureaucratic classes which are politically helpless and unrepresented vis a vis the bureaucratic elite described by C. Wright Mills...
...These related pictures are both archaic...
...This appears to be incontestable proof of their satisfaction with the uniformly similar product offered to them...
...But if it were possible to ask a different type of question and make it meaningful, then perhaps quite different responses would appear...
...Yet they can expect little favor from a duocratic party system whose operation aggravates these already existing political problems at the same time it sets itself against preparing for the disruptive political implications of the technological revolution now in the offing...
...And what they describe is a society which is itself almost fully abstracted and depersonalized...
...In maintaining constant vigil against this great threatening "enemy" the new conservatism of the fifties, like some pathological epic of a "Prometheus Self-bound," is determinedly setting about the business of hardening all our categories and inhibiting the possibilities of rational cultural self-preservation...
...He lives in an imperfectly competitive market system (duopoly, oligopoly, etc...
...For the editor may not even "exist" as a person responsible for the decision to print a given item...
...communism, together with left-wing communistic tendencies...
...The lesson is clear...
...They suggest that the similarity between Fords and Chevrolets is not necessarily an evidence of a lack of competition, but rather of its exceptional success...
...But, of course, the reply is that such polls ask the wrong question...
...We hear of someone "helping out" after hours and weekends at the shop of a friend or relative...
...And indeed it is true that the effects of the countervailing power struggle between today's politico-economic power blocs operate in such a way as to discriminate against the powerless and disorganized population blocs...
...as World War II approached...
...The family was a sprawling "plant" extremely immobile, consisting of grandparents, uncles and aunts, cousins and assorted unmarried adults...
...Perhaps, however, the answer would still be "no...
...One of the first reactions to this came in regard to the drug industry...
...We are not justified in assuming positive affection for present political ideas and institutional forms merely because voters continue to vote traditionally, and to answer polls traditionally...
...As such it shared the socially pathological tendencies of all vigilantism...
...And as with all previous periods, opinion polls taken to day would undoubtedly reveal overwhelming mass acceptance of our security culture...
...That is, bureaucratic man is not able to control by his own individual effort anything necessary to his life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness...
...It is easy to trace their isolated spawning: social-welfare humanitarianism in the urban slums, lowerclass organization in the nascent labor unions, pragmatism and positivism in the newly developing social sciences, and secularism everywhere, especially in the Churches...
...In addition the earlier sections have suggested that there are many other signs of disturbance and disequilibrium growing underneath today's conservative culture...
...Editorial decisions about printing allegations against depersonalized names are determined through calculations about its effect on mass circulation...
...The problem is always thesame: how to acquire what cannot be "afforded," how to gratify frustrated expectations...
...A future economic depression would in effect be "administered," though perhaps unintentionally...
...Still, just as in 1848 it would have been possible for radical fears about capitalism to prove correct, so a century later it is theoretically possible for the fears of our latter day critics to he proven correct...
...Naturally, he answers "yes...
...Bureaucratic man is confronted with strong situational and functional coercions...
...For in our most recent political epochs, the business-oriented period of the twenties, the welfare-oriented period of the thirties, and the securityoriented period of the forties and fifties, both parties adhered to the same basic values and sought the same basic goals in a virtually "bipartisan" fashion even though they often differed in detail about the best means of achieving those goals...
...For the meaning of existence under conditions such that no one controls anything he consumes is that his only control may be achieved through countervailing organizations, themselves large enough, powerful enough and bureaucratized enough to provide protection from the impersonal and otherwise uncontrollable purveyors of needs...
...Compare the editors of two types of newspapers, a small town weekly and an urban daily with huge suburban circulation...
...Their choice of profession was in large part a consequence of these higher status and prestige evaluations...
...No political organization had seen this possibility beforehand...
...He calls the editor...
...In families where the wife is already employed, other alternatives must be explored...
...Economists often call this "imperfect competition," and use the terms "oligopoly" and "duopoly" to describe the situations in which a few, or only two, great firms largely control the market...
...The business, the welfare and the security systems of these different periods can he distinguished from each other with precision...
...As they are already fully employed, their critically depressed condition comes from having no hierarchical power organization of their own to squeeze out for them "parity salary support programs...
...For all these groups "bureaucratized" order spells despotism just as the older "market" order spelled despotism for those it threw out of jobs...
...7. The relative educational status is very high, and rising...
...The governmental problem in the old market depression was how to distribute jobs to economically powerless people...
...A related illustration was found in the creation of •agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission...
...Politically they are like the medieval French peasant who sullenly tilled his plot uninvolved in the redistribution of fortunes brought about by baronial wars surging about him...
...they simply fail to keep pace...
...But while the number of investment hankers, corporation attorneys and industrial magnates installed in the highest posts was impressive, more significant was the institutional result of a decade of war and cold war whereby the entire culture became bureaucratized, centralized and militarized to the point of bringing extensive changes in the situation of our social classes and in the way rewards get distributed to them...
...His reaction is personal and direct...
...It says only what functions must be performed and not that those functions are inherently virtuous...
Vol. 4 • July 1957 • No. 3
