THE DISCONTENTED CLASSES
55
been found on which a ruling or controlling coalition can be built.
As
geologists cover the earth prospecting for oil, so politicians cover
the electorate prospecting for hidden hatreds and identities.
In local elections campaigns can be waged on the promise to
hold down taxes and build no more schools. And many people in
national affairs will respond to a promise to hold down inflation or
to create more jobs. But when voters feel insecure in the midst of
prosperity, it is not an economic appeal that will really arouse them.
For it is not the jobs or goods they do not have that worry them; in–
deed, what worries them is often that they do not know what worries
them, or why, having reached the promised land, they still suffer.
Sharply felt needs have been replaced by vague discontents; and at
such a time programs or clear-cut ideas of any kind are worse than
useless, politically speaking. This is one reason why the appeal to the
discontented classes is so often more a matter of tone than of sub–
stance- why a gesture of retroactive vindictiveness like the Bricker
Amendment can mobilize angry Minute Women and small-town law–
yers, why on the whole the pseudo-conservative right has so small a
program and so belligerent a stance. In this situation, ideology tends
to become more important than economics.
And when one must resort to ideology in a prosperous America,
one must fall back on the vaguely recalled, half-dreamlike allegiances
and prejudices serving most people for ideology. Americanism, of
course, will playa major role; but, paradoxically enough, so do those
underground half-conscious ethnic allegiances and prejudices which,
as
Samuel Lubell has shown, still playa large part in American poli–
tics. In much that passes for anti-Communism these strands are com–
bined, as for instance for many Irish or Polish Catholics whose avid
anti-Communism enables them to feel more solidly American than
some less fanatical Protestants who, as earlier arrivals, once looked
down on them; similarly, a good deal of McCarthy's support repre–
sents the comeback of the German-Americans after two world wars.
A haunting doubt about Americanism and disloyalty, however, affects
not only those of recent enemy or socially devalued stocks but also
those many businessmen forced to operate under government regula–
tions of price and materials control, or under defense contracts. As
Talcott Parsons has observed, these men are constantly being asked,
on grounds of patriotism, to obey government norms which they are
