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retracted the absolute guarantee of property inserted into the very
definition of the liberal State. Thus extended, liberalism operated oc–
casionally to check the in any case fragmented interests of the proper–
tied classes. And in the regime of FDR the liberal principle of an
autonomous political order was turned to check the increasingly unified
interests of the executive class that had come to be the representative
men of property. Having slowly learned the lessons that the New Deal
had to teach it, the executive class simply took over the administration
of the bureaucratic welfare state and merged its personnel and purposes
with it. Thus, when the historical carriers of liberalism were no longer
served by it, the liberal principle of autonomous and mutually limiting
political and economic orders was scuttled. In America the scuttling is so
recent that Mills takes almost all of his examples of it from the Eisen–
hower years, though of course it began in the Roosevelt war-preparedness
period.
To explain why there has been so little serious opposition to the
scuttling of American liberalism, Mills resorts to the obvious tautology
that American society is, anyway, in process of transition from liberal
to mass form. And, as a result of this trend, the classes and the masses
grow together.
If
anything, I should say that the elites Mills studies
are farther along toward the psychology characteristic of a mass society
than large segments of the population. The elites are incapable of con–
templating serious questions steadily; they have a few fixed ideas and
no fixed morality. This much Mills confirms. But the intellectual and
moral condition of the many is scarcely better than that of the ruling
few; Chapter 13, "The Mass Society," makes this clear. Being so un–
sentimental as to label the "people" of nineteenth-century liberalism
and socialism alike as a "mass," Mills is at a loss to find a sharp angle
from which to criticize the higher immorality of the elite. Unwittingly,
he demonstrates that the powerless mass and the power elite complement
each other perfectly. The lower immorality differs only in size and
import from the higher. Such essential agreement creates a major
problem of approach for Mills. As a serious critic, who will allow
neither his socialism nor his respect for the liberal civilization of an
earlier America to bemuse his vision of the present, Mills is unable to
moor the repugnant facts of American public life against the pier of
American values. In a manner no critic has yet adequately described,
the pier has somehow torn loose and floats around like another fact on
the calm, oily surface of American life.
Of course to defend is to be conservative, as Mills points out. But
just at its best, as an attack, Mills' performance is purely negative.
Against the conservative mood of the liberals, Mills offers a mood of
