THE DISCONTENTED CLASSES
51
of fitness. But in politics, these former masses do not have so benign
an influence-we shall call them the
discontented classes.
As we have
already implied, their discontent is only partially rooted in relative
economic deprivation. Many of them, it is true, forgetting their con–
dition of fifteen years ago with a convenient amnesia Freud as–
sumed we reserved for the lapses of childhood, see only that the
salaries and income they would once have thought princely do not
add up to much. Politically, such people, thinking in terms of a rela–
tively fixed income (in this case, of course, not from capital, save
occasional rentals, but from salaries and wages) against a standard
of variable expenses, are generally conservative. And their conserva–
tism is of a pinched and narrow sort, less interested in the preserva–
tion of ancient principles than in the current reduction of government
expenditures and taxes. It is the conservatism we usually associate
with provincial France rather than with the small-town venture capi–
talist of the older Yankee sort. This conservatism helps create the par–
ticular posture of the discontented classes vis-a.-vis America's foreign
role: they are mad at the rest of the world for bothering them, hate
to waste money in spankings and cannot stand wasting money in
rewards.
But more significant, and more difficult to understand and
grapple with, is a discontent which arises from the mental discom–
forts that come with belonging to a class rather than a mass-dis–
comforts founded less on economic than on intellectual uncertainty.
If
one belongs to the middle class one is supposed to have an opinion,
to cope with the world as well as with one's job and immediate
surroundings. But these new members have entered a realm where
the interpretations of the world put forth by intellectuals in recent
decades, and widely held among the educated, are unsatisfying, even
threatening. Having precariously won respectability in paycheck and
consumption style, they find this achievement menaced by a political
and more broadly cultural outlook tending to lower barriers of any
sort-between this nation and other nations, between groups in this
nation (as in the constant appeals to inter-ethnic amity), between
housing colonies reserved for Negroes and suburbs reserved for whites;
many famili es also cannot stand the pressure to lower barriers between
men and women, or between parents and children. When this barrier–
destroying outlook of the intellectuals promised economic advance as
