HERE AND
NOW
573
as I can tell, this loss of hegemony, accompanied by a decline in self–
confidence, has occurred more on the social surface than at the eco–
nomic base, but with time it is bound also to affect the latter.
The American creed served to unify a nation that in its earlier
years had largely consisted of a loose compact of regions. Once these
regions were gradually melted into a nation, the unifying ideology
began to lose some of its power and the sociocultural elite articulating
the ideology began to decline. Precisely the unification of the country
through the cement of this ideology gave an opportunity for new
interest groups and competing moral styles to press their claims.
This process could not, of course, act itself out autonomously.
It was always intertwined with social struggles. And as it slowly un–
folds itself at the center of society there occur crisis reactions at the
extremes: on the Right, a heartfelt cry that morality is being destroyed,
religion mocked, our way of life abandoned; on the Left, an impati–
ence to be done with old ways and to plunge joyously, sometimes
merely programmatically, into experiment. The earnest suburban
middle class which only a few years ago was shaking with indigna–
tion at the collapse of standards and the
hippi~
of Haight-Ashbury
and the East Village - these form symmetrical polarities along the
spectrum of American moral life, each reacting to the gradual decay
of American convictions and neither absorbed by the kind of pluralistic
moderation and maneuvering encouraged by the welfare state. Both
the little old lady in tennis shoes and the young hippie in sandals are
demonstrating their hostility to the "role playing" of the current scene.
Both provide complications of response which our increasingly ra–
tionalized and rationalistic society finds it hard to handle. For in a
sense, the kind of issues raised by Barry Goldwater and the SDS are
symmetrical in concern,
if
sharply different in moral value. Both of
these metapolitical tendencies are reacting to long-range historical and
cultural developments at least as much as to immediate political issues.
What then are the political consequences of this gradual deteri–
oration of the American value system?
• The traditional elite can no longer assert itself with its former
powers and self-assurance. One reason Adlai Stevenson roused such
positive reactions among intellectuals was that it seemed to them that
he was a figure in the old style, for which, in their conservative dis–
enchantment, they had developed a sudden fondness.
