Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> But among the mass distractions this feeling
> soon passes harmlessly away. For the American distrust of the high
> and mighty is a distrust without doctrine and without political
> focus; it is a distrust felt by the mass public as a series of more
> or less cynically expected disclosures. Corruption and immoralities,
> petty and grand, are facts about the higher circles, often even
> characteristic facts about many of them.
What Mills does not touch on here (and from my memory in most of his writing) is the "What-Can-We-Do-About-It" element in what he calls cynicism. That perspective was broken, briefly, in the '30s by the CIO and, again briefly, in the '50s-60s by the black liberation movement. It became dominant again after Watergate and the defeat of ERA. Jan & I have worked with quite a variety of people since 1969, and the chief (often the only) reason for many of the best of these to drop out of politics has been precisely this conviction -- What's the use. And it occurred to me as I was writing this paragraph that two of the more notorious phrases of Jimmy Carter were quite perceptive in catching the mood of the mid-'70s: "life is unfair" and "national malaise." What got him in trouble was not that the phrases were inaccurate but that leaders aren't supposed to be so honest in their labelling. "Life is unfair," so why fight, followed by malaise.
Carrol