The Lonely Crowd

by David Riesman

  For the indignants have hold of one of the great traditions of American politics, that of asking the government to govern more than it knows how to govern—as with prohibition—a latter-day survival of the time when a state like Connecticut, to Tocque-ville’s astonishment, could not justify putting less than the Hebraic law on its statute books but could not justify enforcing its harsh penal provisions either. In line with this tradition, the indignants of today can strive in politics to “get the law” on those movements in culture—in literature, the movies, the universities, the libraries—that symbolize urban sophistication and tolerance. They are resisted in this effort less by tolerant other-directed types than by inner-directed men for whom tolerance is a moral principle, not a character trait. The most fervent defenders of civil liberties in America draw political strength from their principles and firm convictions, not from their knowledge of who’s who in politics. In contrast, the tolerant inside-dopester may become “objective” about intolerance: he knows enough about people to doubt the efficacy of reason or to be sure of his own resistance. His vulnerabilities, as well as his abilities, spring from the fact that he has his eye on the others and not on his own principles or wants.

  In fact, the other-directed try to defend themselves against the political onslaughts of the indignants by inside operations rather than by countermoralizing. Disinclined to personal militancy, to getting out on a limb, they put on pressure through groups and associations that speak in their name. As capable handlers of inside tactics and of the process of communication—they are, of course, at home among the mass media, not all of which are controlled by moralizers—they can often put the brakes on what the indignants would like to do. As a clever district attorney can mitigate the fury of a grand jury to whom he has to present an indictment by making a deal with the defendant’s lawyer to accept a plea to a lesser offense, so the inside-dopester has often, in national and local politics, been able to hold the indignants off with a concession. He can make concessions, since he does not ask of politics that it straighten out the world for him. Indeed, if the indignant asks too much of politics, the tolerant inside-dopester asks too little.

  The moralizers and the inside-dopesters taken together are probably a majority among the better-educated, but surely a minority of the whole population. However, the inside-dopester has little to offer to the indifferents in the way of psychic dividends: his very knowledge leads him to be aware of how little can be accomplished in politics and how fantastic it is to hope to “get rid of politics.” But in rousing the indifferents, indignation has great possibilities. Not only does it make for a better show but it also plays on such grievances as the indifferents have. Sometimes these grievances can be brought into the political sphere by an antipolitical summons. The hate-filled promises of the indignant may appeal to many of those whose political indifference rests not on the security of tradition-direction but on incompetence and affectlessness. From similar sources were rallied many of the early Nazis, a large wing of the de Gaullists, and many other groups in various countries who place themselves “above politics,” “above parties,” and “above opinions.” Such groups attack the more traditionally partisan and politically articulate elements of society and demand freedom from politics—from platforms, principles, and parliaments. Such an attitude toward the American party system and pattern of political discourse is not infrequent. Therefore, if at any time the indignants can make a junction with the indifferents, the former can become very powerful. Internally, indignation can draw on great lower-class reserves of nationalism and xenophobia. Externally, indignation may meet counterindignation, and the congruence of indignants and temporarily aroused indifferents may present the tolerant with a seeming fait accompli. And the tolerant inside-dopesters, as compared with those who are tolerant from inner-directed principle, are men trained to recognize a fait accompli, not resist it.

  Long before the tolerant are able to organize politics after their style and their mood, a stampede of the indignant may have brought on an explosion and may have pushed the tolerant cause and the tolerant character into abeyance.

  V. “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”

  I would like, in conclusion, to hazard the suggestion that if the media encouraged, and if its audience could permit itself, more genuine escape, “away from it all,” Americans would become stronger psychically and more ready to undertake an awakening of political imagination and commitment. By prolonging our present pattern for criticizing the mass media, we make it possible for the media to continue to uphold the prestige of the political even when, as for much of our life at present, the political is devoid of substantial content—for one thing, because this very lack of content could only be glimpsed from a less realistic, more fantasy-oriented outlook. The direct impact of the media on political decision may easily become as thin as the impact of the House of Lords on popular opinion in Britain. The serious press refuses to face this situation, and, far from seeking to explore new emotional currents in American life, it strenuously seeks to present to the Commons of the media—radio, TV, movies, and pulps —a hand-me-down agenda of political debate. Since politics is actually less real than the press lords pretend to themselves and their audience that it is, the consumption of political vituperation may easily become more than ever an escape in the usual invidious sense, rationalized by its high, media-based prestige. Thus, the sources in popular art and culture from which eventual political creation may flow are partially dammed up by false considerations of prestige and by the displaced guilts and ethical urges shared by those who control the media and those who, in turn, look to them for a bill of cultural fare.

  The probabilities are that the media, in their direct, message-bearing impact, are likely to do less either to help or hurt the audience than the controllers of the media and their critics like to think. Awareness of this fact may permit both the controllers and the critics of the media to reorient their attention. They are free, much freer than they realize, to attend to the medium itself, rather than to the message it purveys or is believed to purvey. The movie producer or critic who is concerned mainly with messages, for instance of ethnic tolerance, may actually despise the movies as an art form. The editorializer or social scientist who is concerned only with arousing the electorate may hate the English language because it has become for him a mere tool. The broadcaster who wants to atone for his big salary and sponsors by slipping in a crack against business may have little respect for the aesthetic resources of his medium.

  In these and other ways, the men who work in radio, film, and fiction tend to give politics, as the press and its uplifters see it, a prestige denied to art, and especially the popular art of the media themselves. There is pathos in this for their personal lives, since it leads them to unwarranted contempt for their own craft. There is irony in this for American politics, since it seems to me that a country which produced artistically first-class movies, papers, and broadcasts—no matter what the topic and, indeed, subordinating the whole question of topic—would be, politically as well as culturally, a livelier and happier land. Good mass-media artists are quite as important, and perhaps even scarcer, than responsible, anti-escapist commentators.

  X

  Images of power

  In the United States the more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people; on the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes; they listen to them, they speak to them every day. They know that the rich in democracies always stand in need of the poor, and that in democratic times you attach a poor man to you more by your manner than by benefits conferred.

  Tocqueville, Democracy in America

  There has been in the last fifty years a change in the configuration of power in America, in which a single hierarchy with a ruling class at its head has been replaced by a number of “veto groups” among which power is dispersed. This change has many complex roots and complex consequences, including the change in political mood from moralizing
to tolerance. A clear-cut power structure helped to create the clarity of goals of the inner-directed; an amorphous power structure helps to create the consumer orientation of the other-directed.

  I. The Leaders and the Led

  There have been two periods in American history in which a sharply defined ruling class emerged. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the Federalist leadership—landed-gentry and mercantilist-money leadership—certainly thought of itself as, and was, a ruling group. Long before its leadership was actually dislodged, its power was disputed and, in decisive instances, overruled in the northern and middle states by yeoman farmers and artisans. These latter, having little time or gift for politics, ordinarily left it to their “betters,” but they retained a veto on what was done and occasionally, as with Jackson, moved into a more positive command. After the Civil War, however, farmers and artisans lost their capacity to check what was done, and the captains of industry emerged as a ruling class. During their hegemony the images and the actualities of power in America coincided more closely than I think they do today.

  CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRY AND CAPTAINS OF CONSUMPTION

  According to this view of the matter, the election of 1896 appears as an historical watershed: the high point of oligarchic rule. In terms of political style, there were moralizers for Bryan and moralizers for McKinley. And there were groups that, whether or not they saw their interests in moral terms, had a clear picture of themselves and of their interests; they, too, responded to the election in an inner-directed way. Only a few people like Brooks Adams, who supported Bryan out of his hatred for the “gold-bugs,” were aware of some of the ambiguities in the positions of both candidates.

  Certainly, the victorious leaders—McKinley, Hanna, and Morgan in their several bailiwicks—were not aware of ambiguity. The success of their electoral bid is less important to us than the mood of their undertaking, which was one of conscious leadership, directed by conscious class considerations. This self-conscious leadership took support from the close connection, to which I have already called attention, between politics and work. The world of work was the great world; politics was an extension that could either facilitate work or sabotage it. While bankers and Grangers had different notions as to what work politics should do and what leave undone, they agreed as to the primacy of the production side of life.

  Of course, the political sphere was not devoid of entertainment for the inner-directed man: with its opportunity for cracker-barrel argument, beer drinking, and shirt-sleeved good-fellowship by torchlight, it had its occasional uses as a “downward” escape from the dignities of work and the propertied existence. But the great difference from today is that the leaders went into politics to do a job—primarily to assure the conquest of American resources—rather than to seek a responsive audience. As Rockefeller sold his oil more by force or cheapness than by brand, so the late nineteenth-century political leader sold his wares (votes or decisions) to the highest bidder. Either cash or morality might bid—but not “good will” as such.

  This situation and these inner-directed motivations gave a clarity to the political and social scene in 1896 that it does not appear to have had in Tocqueville’s day and has not had since. The bullet that killed McKinley marked the end of the days of explicit class leadership. Muckraking and savage political cartooning—arts that depend on clarity of line—continued for a time and of course have not quite vanished yet. But as the old-time religion depended on a clear image of heaven and hell and clear judgments of good and evil, so the old-time politics depended on a clear class structure and the clear and easily moralized judgments of good and bad that flow from it. It depended, too, and I cannot emphasize the point too much, on an agreement between leaders and led that the work sphere of life was dominant. And because the goals were clear, the obvious job of the leader was to lead; of the led, to follow. Their political cooperation, like their cooperation in industry and agriculture, was based on mutual interests, whether directly moralized or not, rather than on mutual preferences and likings.

  What I have said must be taken as an “ideal-typical” political portrait of the age, useful by way of contrast to our own times. Actually, the changes are, as always, changes in emphasis and degree, and the portrait would be seriously overdrawn if the reader should conclude that no emotional moods, no cravings for charisma and glamor, eddied about the relations between leaders and led. These relations were not built entirely out of sober moralizing and well-understood economic interests, but occasionally, as Veblen described matters, the Captain of Industry served to provide the underlying population with personages to admire “to the greater spiritual comfort of all parties concerned.”

  Ruling-class theories, applied to contemporary America, seem to be spectral survivals of this earlier time. The captain of industry no longer runs business, no longer runs politics, and no longer provides legitimate “spiritual comfort.” Here and there, it is true, there are survivals. In the booming Southwest, Texas still produces men like Glenn McCarthy, and California produced an old-style lion of the jungle in A. P. Giannini (who was, significantly enough, from a family which lacked the opportunity to educate him for the newer business motivations). Yet even these types are touched by traits that were not nearly so evident in the earlier captains of industry who fascinated Veblen as Lucifer fascinated Milton. Like Henry Kaiser, they depend much more than did the older magnificoes on public opinion and, as a corollary to public opinion, on the attitude of government. To this end they tend to exploit their personalities, or allow them to be exploited, in a way that makes the elder Rockefeller’s Ivy Lee stunt of dime-giving seem as remote as the Fuggers.

  Much more than their pre-World War I predecessors, then, these surviving captains stay within the limits as well as the possibilities of the economy of the glad hand. If they enter politics they do so because it is a sport or obligation for the rich; or simply because they are tied in with government at every step in their ramifying enterprises. These latter-day captains neither see themselves nor are recognized as political leaders who, by their presence and by what they stand for, clarify and thereby moralize politics. The elder Morgan and his friends thought it was up to them to stop Bryan and to stop the depression of 1907. No one has taken their place.

  In the focus of public attention the old captains of industry have been replaced by an entirely new type: the Captains of Non-industry, of Consumption and Leisure. Surveys of content in the mass media show a shift in the kinds of information about business and political leaders that audiences ask for.1 In an earlier day the audience was given a story of the hero’s work-minded rise to success. Today, the ladder climbing is taken for granted or is seen in terms of “the breaks,” and the hero’s tastes in dress, food, women, and recreation are emphasized—these are, as we have seen, the frontiers on which the reader can himself compete, while he cannot imagine himself in the work role of the president of the United States or the head of a big company.

  What is more, there is a shift in such biographies from an accent on business leaders to an accent on leaders in consumption. Proportionately, actors, artists, entertainers, get more space than they used to, and the heroes of the office, hustings, and factory get less. These consumers of the surplus product may, in Veblen’s terms, provide “spiritual comfort” by their very skill in consumption. The glamor of such heroes of consumption may reside in their incompetence in the skills of businesslike performance and, as we have seen, in some cases their wholly personal sincerity may do duty in place of more objective artistic criteria.

  But, of course, these captains of consumption are not leaders. They are still only personalities, employed to adorn movements, not to lead them. Yet the actual leaders have much in common with them.

  For an illustration we can turn to a recent American leader— undoubtedly a leader—who shared many characteristics of the artist and entertainer: Franklin D. Roosevelt. We are accustomed to thinking of him as a man of great power. Yet his role in leading the
country into war was very different from that of McKinley or even of Wilson. Think of McKinley pacing the floor of his study, deciding whether or not to ask for a declaration of war on Spain—when he already knew that Spain would capitulate. McKinley felt it was up to him; so did Wilson. Roosevelt felt he could only maneuver within very narrow limits, limits which came close to leaving the decision to the enemy.

  Again, if we compare his activities during the war years with those of Churchill, we can see important differences. Churchill led the British in something like the old-time sense of an explicit relation between the leader and the followers. That he led, moreover, as a moralizing leader and not, despite his great personal charm, as a personality, appeared in the readiness of the electorate to follow him in war and to dispense with him in peace: they were work-minded rather than consumption-minded about him. Roosevelt on the other hand remained throughout the war, as before, a powerful though tolerant persuader, even conniver and stimulator, of changes in public opinion that he followed with deep concern at all times. Churchill exploited his indignation, Roosevelt his charm.

  The obviously real differences in the military situation of Britain and the United States during this period are not sufficient to explain these differences in the mood and method of leadership. Much more important than the wartime differences between the two countries are the differing shifts in political pattern during the last half century. America in the 90’s could be led politically and morally. Since then we have entered a social and political phase in which power is dispersed among veto groups. These groups are too many and diverse to be led by moralizing; what they want is too various to be moralized and too intangible to be bought off for cash alone; and what is called political leadership consists, as we could see in Roosevelt’s case, in the tolerant ability to manipulate coalitions.