50
PARTISAN
REVIEW
among the educated strata-the intellectuals and those who take
cues from them-have been silenced, rather more by their own feel –
ings of inadequacy and failure than by direct intimidation. On the
other hand, many who were once among the inarticulate masses are
no longer silent: an unacknowledged social revolution has transformed
their situation. Rejecting the liberal intellectuals as guides, they have
echoed and reinforced the stridency of right-wing demi-intellectuals–
themselves often arising from those we shall, until we can find a less
clumsy name, call the ex-masses.
II
During the New Deal days a group of intellectuals led and
legislated for a class of discontented people who had tasted pros–
perity and lost it, and a mass of underprivileged people who had
been promised prosperity and seen enough mobility around them to
believe
in
it. Today, both sources of discontent have virtually disap–
peared as a result of fifteen years of prosperity, but this same prosper–
ity, and its attendant inflation, has created new sources of discontent.
Thus many elderly and retired people cannot adjust financially, polit–
ically, or psychologically to the altered value of a dollar-though they
have the money, they cannot bring themselves to repair their homes
because they have not been brought up to "do it yourself" nor to pay
three dollars an hour to someone else for doing
it.
But among the
youth, too, are many people who are at once the beneficiaries and the
victims of prosperity, people made ill-at-ease by an affluence not pre–
ceded by imagining its reality, nor preceded by a change in character–
structure more attuned to amenity than to hardship. The raw-rich
Texas millionaire appears often to be obsessed by fears that "they" will
take his money away- almost as if he were fascinated by a fatality
which would bring him, as it were, back to earth.
These people, whether suddenly affluent or simply better off,
form a new middle class, called out of the city tenements and the
marginal small towns by the uneven hand of national prosperity;
many have moved to the fringes of urban centers, large and small.
They have been described in
Fortune
as the new middle-class market,
and we can only admire the adaptability of many of these consumers
who enjoy higher standards of living with little strain and even a sense
