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PARTISAN REVIEW
blesse oblige.
We know many men who made their money
in
war
orders, or through buying government-financed plants, or through
price supports, who hate the federal government with the ferocity of
beneficiaries-and doubtless want to cut off aid from the ungrateful
French or British! Such men cannot admit that they did not make
"their" money by their own efforts; they would like to abolish the
income tax, and with it the whole nexus of defense and international
relations,
if
only to assert their own anachronistic individualism the
more firmly. They are likely to be clients, not only of lawyers who
specialize in the capital gains tax, but also of prophets and politicians
specializing in the bogeys of adults.
The rapid and unanticipated acquisition of power seems to pro–
duce a sense of unreality-people are "up in the air." We face the
paradox that many Americans are more fearful today though more
prosperous than ever before and in some ways (in the face of the
Soviet efforts to "overtake and surpass") more powerful.
III
It
is the professional business of politicians to find in the
electorate organizable blocs who will shift their allegiance, who will
respond with passion in the midst of indifference. In the pre-World
War I days of the great outcry against the Trusts, it was pos–
sible to find a few old and dislocated middle-class elements which
resented the new dominance by big and baronial business. In the '30s,
the way had already in large measure been prepared for an appeal
to unemployed factory workers and Southern and Western farmers
on the basis of Wilsonian and Populist rhetoric, made into a heady
brew by more recent infusions of radicalism, native and imported.
These discontented masses showed in their voting behavior (in NLRB
and Agricultural Adjustment Act elections as well as at the polls)
that the appeal, whatever it meant to those who made it, hit home
in terms of the listeners' wants and situation.
How can the discontented classes of today be welded into a po–
litical bloc? This is the question that haunts and tempts politicians.
The uncertainty of the Democrats faced with Stevenson and of the
Republicans faced with McCarthy signifies not only disagreements of
principle but also doubts as to whether a proper appeal has as yet
