White Collar by C. Wright Mills — Read

Politics, no matter how important, is only one sphere in the social order, which by no means needs to be tied together by political loyalties. It may even be that political indifference should be taken as an expected psychological fact about a society so dominated by such individuated, pecuniary standards and activities as the United States. This is a bureaucratized society of privatized men, and it may very well go along in this condition for a long time to come.

The decline of the old middle classes does not mean that the U. S. framework of capitalist democracy is broken. But it does mean that the old legitimations of that system no longer move men, and that the institutions under which we live, the framework of our existence, are without enthusiasm. Again, this does not mean that we are in a situation without norms, a situation of anomy, although it is fairly clear that ours is an era of wide moral distress. But moral or ideological consensus is not the only basis for a social order. A network of expediences and conventions, in a framework of power not entirely or firmly legitimated, can hold together a society with high material standards of comfort.