The Lonely Crowd

by David Riesman

  Q. Do you hear anything that makes you glad? A. No.

  Q. What kind of people do you think are interested in politics?

  A. Oh … I believe more rich folks. Poor class would be too, but they don’t have no chance.

  Q. Do you think wars can be avoided?

  A. No. The Bible says the Romans will fight. (Something like that—I didn’t quite get it.) I believe there will always be wars (said almost with satisfaction, as you’d say “There’ll always be an England”). Generation after generation—the Bible tells you that.

  Q. Do you think we can do something to avoid depressions?

  A. I think you can work and try to have something—but some times will be hard and some times better. And if you have a little something it’s better but you can get along somehow….

  Q. Do you think the people in Washington know better than other people whether there’ll be a war?

  A. Only God in Heaven knows. Man don’t know. We just hope….

  Q. Do you think that on the whole the United States is a democracy?

  A. I’ll say one thing, she is a blessed country. Out of all the countries of the world, she is blessed.

  Characteristic of the tradition-directed indifferent is an attitude that politics is someone else’s job; with the interviewee above, politics is for her husband, the rich, and very likely the club of the white man. The depth and tenacity of these proxy conventions are such that the political indifferent of this type, though excluded from direct political participation, has no cause to feel at sea. Having no sense of personal responsibility for the political sphere, such a person seeks no power over, and therefore seldom feels frustrated or guilty about, politics. Indeed, beyond the ministrations of the “wise, the good, and the rich”—to use Fisher Ames’s words—responsibility for the political is not man’s, but God’s.

  NEW STYLE

  So much for the increasingly rare indifferents whose political style is compatible with a tradition-directed character, lowly class position, poverty, and lack of political education. Much more important are the indifferents who, no longer tradition-directed, have acquired the elementary political tools of literacy, a certain amount of organizational competence, and a certain awareness of the uses that may be made of political activity. To be sure, when we study the efforts to bring political education and organization to those who live either in rural or in urban slum areas, it often appears that the conditions of their life do not train them in the political motivations or techniques (such simple techniques, for instance, as the easy use of the telephone) that are taken for granted in some politically conscious and active sections of the middle class. Yet in the course of the last century the spread of education, the shortening and easing of working hours, the rise of unions and other more or less formal associations, the increase in experience with government forms and routines, seem to have increased the ability, if not the desire, of the poorer citizens to maneuver in the political sphere.

  Nevertheless, these people are, in the main, indifferent to politics, although their indifference is not the classic, quiescent indifference of the tradition-directed. It is to a large degree the indifference of people who know enough about politics to reject it, enough about political information to refuse it, enough about their political responsibilities as citizens to evade them. Some of these new-style indifferents we may classify as inner-directed or other-directed people who happen not to have adopted a political style more characteristic for their type. Otherwise, they are people who are on the move, characterologically and socially, from one character type and social situation to another: uprooted tradition-directed people not yet acculturated to inner-direction, inner-directed people not yet acculturated to other-direction, and all shades between.

  This is speculative, of course. External factors in the present political scene are often sufficient to explain a similar indifference in all classes and all character types. It is clear that an individual may withdraw completely from politics because the scene looks so hopeful that no action seems necessary. One might argue that American life can be sufficiently satisfying, even for many in lower-income ranks, to justify indifference to political efforts at improvement: in this light, as Americans are rich enough and comfortable enough to afford more food, more telephones, more trips than most people, in their security they can afford more political indifference. Contrariwise, a person may withdraw completely from politics because the scene looks so confused that no action seems adequate or so hopeless that no action looks promising; and these, too, are the feelings of many Americans. A failure to act politically or to inform oneself, motivated in any of these ways, does not mean that the individual’s indifference has anything to do with his character. However, a person’s habitual failure over a long period of time to make any overt response to political stimuli may contribute to, or in fact constitute, a withdrawal of affect, and this can spread from politics to other spheres as well as vice versa, with consequences for character formation.

  To illustrate the problem, I will draw on a group of interviews conducted (by Martin and Margy Meyerson) in a small county-seat town in Vermont, where the older generation seems to be heavily inner-directed, and the younger generation is becoming increasingly other-directed. The old people in this community express feelings of responsibility for politics. Despite their lack of actual participation, they feel their relatedness to government, though it is often expressed only in grievance and guilt feelings. Thus, they say they ought to take part in politics. In referring to events they use the pronoun “I”: “I” think, “I” want, “I” hate, and so on. They talk as if it were up to them to judge what happens in politics and, to the limit of their gifts and available energies, to guide it.

  The young people of the town, on the other hand, while they have greater education and the elementary political tools, feel that political doings are no business of theirs. They have less grievance and less guilt. Both kinds of feelings, which might relate them to politics, even though inadequately, have been withdrawn. Instead, they take whatever government gives them, including the draft, with an almost total passivity.3 Their references to politics are almost devoid of the pronoun “I”; sometimes the reference is to a group “we” and mostly to a group “they.” More “socialized,” more cooperative than their parents, they do not react as individuals to what happens to them. They have passed from the indignation of their elders to indifference. This, plainly, is not the indifference of the tradition-directed person. Perhaps it is the indifference of those caught between inner-direction and other-direction.

  Whether their political style—even their character—will change when they in turn are the elder generation, no one can predict. Very likely, there may be a life cycle of political styles for the individual, in which relatedness is gained as well as lost as one grows older. Nevertheless, I am inclined to think that the new-style indifferents, passive and resigned today, will scarcely alter their political stance as they grow older—provided, of course, that general social conditions do not change appreciably. Their life experiences may bring them some degree of competence—if, for instance, they get involved with the Farm Bureau or union political leg work, but even their frustrations will be accepted, not resisted. We see here, if these speculations are correct, evidence of a long-range historical change in political style rather than evidence for the existence of a phase in the life cycle in which anyone might be indifferent.

  Indifferents, old style and new style, as I define them, probably account for more than a majority of the American population. They are not necessarily equivalent to the non-voters: these indifferents may perform quite a few political chores, for a price or under pressure. Nor are they devoid of political opinions. Indeed, if we accept the evidence of public opinion polls, it would seem that only some 10 per cent of the population refuses to be polled at all, while another 10 per cent or so gets into the “Don’t Know” column. From this, we might conclude that people in all regions and social classes have a sens
e of direct and easy influence on the forum of opinion and policy and that their willingness to have and state an opinion is a sign of political health. But closer examination of the attitudes that accompany the interviewing and polling process fails to support that judgment. Actually, these political opinions are connected neither with direct political self-interest nor with clear emotional ties to politics. They resemble, rather, the peer-group exchange of consumer preferences, though unlike the latter, the preferences are seldom taken into the political market and translated into purchases of political commodities. For the indifferents do not believe that, by virtue of anything they do, know, or believe, they can buy a political package that will substantially improve their lives. And so, subject to occasional manipulation, they tend to view politics in most of its large-scale forms as if they were spectators.

  Since, however, these new-style indifferents have some education and organizational competence and since they are neither morally committed to political principles nor emotionally related to political events, they are rather easily welded into cadres for political action—much as they are capable of being welded into a modern mechanized and specialized army. The old-style tradition-directed indifferents, on the other hand, have no such potential; at best, they are capable of sporadic and more or less spontaneous action. The new-style indifferents, however, are attached neither to their privacy, which would make politics intrusive, nor to their class groupings, which would make politics limited: rather, like the young Vermonters previously described, they are socialized, passive, and cooperative—not only in politics, of course. Their loyalty is at large, ready to be captured by any movement that can undercut their frequent cynicism or exploit it. In all these ways they place hardly any barriers, even those of their own tastes and feelings, between themselves and the politically organized community. The only barrier is their apathy.

  This apathy cuts two ways. It deprives them of the capacity for enthusiasm and for genuine political involvement, but it also helps protect them from falling for many of the fairy tales about politics that have mobilized people in the past for political adventures. And while the tradition-directed person can sometimes be roused, in his inexperience, into indignation and is even sometimes hungry for political indoctrination (as for literacy of any sort) the modern indifferent in this country has built up a fairly high and often fairly useful immunity to politics—though not to cynical attacks on “politics.”

  II. The Moralizers

  Sometimes people call me an idealist Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America is the only idealist nation in the world.

  Woodrow Wilson

  The typical style of the inner-directed person in nineteenth-century American politics is that of the moralizer. Since the inner-directed man is work driven and work oriented, his pro-foundest feelings wrapped up in work and the competence with which work is done, when he turns to politics he sees it as a field of work—and judges it accordingly. Presented with a political message, he sees a task in it, and, far from seeking to demonstrate his knowledge of its meaning in terms of personalities, he responds with emotional directness and often naÏvetÉ. (Of course not all inner-directed people are responsive to politics and not all who are, are moralizers.)

  One variant of the moralizer projects on the political scene his characterological tendency toward self-improvement: he wants to improve all men and institutions. The fringes of the Granger Movement harbored such types in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and perhaps the Cross of Gold speech marked a peak of enthusiastic moralizing of the “fisc.” But by the time the issue arose of American adherence to the League of Nations, Wilson was considered by many to be merely a moralizer, an idealist, unable to get his friends, his enemies, and perhaps himself to understand how aware he was of practical, manipulative problems. Another variant on the type expresses his moralizing capacity less by desire to achieve the possible good than to prevent the perpetual recurrence of evil. This interest in repressing the evil rather than in evoking the good is carried over from his own personal struggle. Evil defines itself for him with ease and clarity: for instance, a lack of seriousness toward work is sloth, a comfortable attitude toward pleasure is debauchery, a skeptical attitude about property is socialism.

  The inner-directed man, when he approaches politics, has a tendency to underestimate the values of easygoing looseness of political articulation. He does not look to politics for intellectual orientation in a confusing world, and generally he does not see it as a game to be watched for its human interest. Rather, he turns to politics to protect his vested interests, and whether these are of a “practical” or an “ideal” sort, he feels little ambivalence about them. Thus we might find in the same characterological and even political camp a tariff logroller and a prohibitionist or prison reformer, provided only that the former had some emotional charge behind his political pressure.

  As we saw in discussing the characterological struggle in the first chapter, it makes a great deal of difference whether a character type is on the increase or the wane. The moralizer-in-power is representative of a class (the “old” middle class) and of a character type (the inner-directed) dominant in the nineteenth century. The moralizer-in-retreat represents the same class and character in their mid-twentieth-century decline.

  THE STYLE OF THE MORALIZER-IN-POWER

  Much of what we know of nineteenth-century American politics may be seen in terms of inner-directed self-interest and inner-directed moralizing. While today we tend to think of moralizing and self-interest as contradictory approaches to politics, amalgamated only through hypocrisy, this very outlook says something about our own loss of political simplicities. In the nineteenth century moralizing and self-interested stances were compatible because, in comparison with today, there was little conflict between the clear emotions felt and the clear interests recognized by the inner-directed. The Federalist Papers are perhaps the classic example of this. To be sure, with the broadening of the electorate it became increasingly difficult to be as frank as the Founding Fathers—as Nicholas Biddle learned to his sorrow—and one result was an increasing tendency to divorce interest from morality or to cloud their junction in vague, demagogic ideology. Even so, until the Civil War, unconcealed economic interests constantly intruded on the political sphere, shaping up in great arguments over fiscal policy, internal development, taxation, and property interests in slavery or antislavery. Likewise, moralizing interests made themselves felt quite openly in the government of towns, in arguments about manhood suffrage, universal education, and slavery.

  The platforms and programs of the pre-Civil War unions and Mechanics’ Associations illustrate these nineteenth-century patterns of political relatedness. The self-educated workmen of these organizations were passionately concerned with questions of political, legal, and economic justice and only indirectly interested in wages and working conditions. These workmen were unashamed moralizers, eager to participate in middle-class religious and educational values. Their press and their meetings did not look at everything from the labor angle. (Today such an outlook has all but vanished from the labor press and program, save for a few old-time Socialists or ex-ministers in the CIO. It has not been succeeded by a vision of clear labor interest, but rather by a labor line laid down as an ideology by the union officials to an indifferent mass of nominal union members.)

  In general the press in the era depending on inner-direction fortified its readers in their political role playing—reassured them that they had roles, and that politics was responding to their playing of them. Journalism zealously preserved an individualistic slant, personal rather than personalized—as it could more easily do before the days of the AP, mailed boilerplate, and chain newspapers—and its individualism helped foster the feeling of the reader that his individual political decision always mattered for him and usually mattered for the country. Cynicism toward politics as a whole (as against cynicism about democracy or bossism or other specific political form or usage)
was virtually unknown. Indeed, a feeling prevailed in many circles that the millennium was near. The defined political problems of the period were felt to be manageable by their customary devotees: a few professionals (the bosses and a small corps of career officials) and the amateurs who worked part time or full time (the statesmen and good government people).

  Thus, the limits of the political sphere as well as its meaning were self-evident to the inner-directed man of the nineteenth century. Political activity was no more baffling in terms of motivation than work. So many political tasks needed doing and were obviously obligatory on the basis of one’s class position, regional location, and morality, that each active person could find satisfying political employment. This employment was satisfying because many problems were indeed finally overcome by the reformer’s zeal: not only was the franchise extended and free education spread, but the prisons and asylums were somewhat ameliorated, factory legislation was introduced, and so on. Perhaps it was only because these were, at least when taken singly, relatively limited goals that reformers were so successful.

  In fact, it was characteristic of the moralizers, and perhaps of inner-directed people generally, not to be aware of the narrow limits they imposed on their relation to the political sphere. Each reform movement of the nineteenth century powerfully channeled the energies of its friends and foes, without necessarily producing in either group a larger, more comprehensive and hence more realistic political awareness. If the aim sought was attained, whether it was emancipation or railroad legislation, the moralizer’s grip on politics vanished in success. If the aim sought did not succeed, as the women’s movement did not succeed in the nineteenth century, its members remained prisoners of a crusade. Even then, however, they felt the political sphere to be malleable: success would come, as it would to their own strivings for upward mobility, if they worked hard enough and were of good character.