White Collar by C. Wright Mills — Read

Our most familiar model of political consciousness is liberalism, which in focusing upon the individual citizen has tried to enlarge his political rights, his formal opportunities to act politically and to be political. It has assumed that once given the rights, the individual citizen would naturally become politically alerted and act on his political interests. It might be that he would require more education, but education was one of the rights that liberalism sought to make universal.

The difficulties of liberalism's assumption of the alert citizen were well stated by Walter Lippmann in the early ‘twenties. His point was that the citizen was unable to know what was going on politically, to think about it straight, or to act upon it intelligently. There was a great gap between individual men, on the one hand, and events and decisions of power, on the other; this gap was filled by the media of communication, which, in their necessity to compress the volume of communication into shorthand slogans, created a pseudo-environment of stereotypes that stood for the unseen political world and to which the citizen reacted. In the great society, the citizen had no time to study things out, his politically fruitful contact with others as well as with the media of communications being limited to fifteen or twenty minutes a day. These facts, in addition to those of artificial censorship and the fear of facing realities that might disturb routine, added up to this, that the political alertness required of the citizen by liberal theory was based on a woefully Utopian, rational psychology, which might make sense in a simpler democratic set-up but was impossible in modern society. No one of liberal persuasion has refuted Lippmann's analysis.