The anxieties of the ruling class

The Anxieties Of The Ruling Class

IT HAS BECOME popular on the Right to talk about liberals or Democrats as the "hate-America" crowd. Not only is this unfair and untrue, it misses the point. The problem with liberals and Democrats, or rather with many members of the liberal and Democratic elite, is not that they hate America, but that they have low "national morale." That is, they have lost their respect for their country, and thus part of their self-respect.

Many Americans have noticed that our country has been increasingly divided into "the people" and some other, much smaller group. Different names have been given to the smaller group--such as "elite," or "intellectuals," or "the new class"--but the cleavage itself is almost universally recognized. Though social theorists may disagree about the precise makeup of the elite class, it clearly includes virtually all the people Americans look to for the articulation of ideas.

The 1984 election made this cleavage more obvious than ever to many people who knew scarcely anyone who didn't vote for Mondale, but who woke on Wednesday morning to discover that somewhere there were enough Americans they didn't know to give Ronald Reagan a landslide victory. For though there are many conservatives and Republicans among the elite, its great bulk is liberal and Democratic.

Some of the same conservatives who talk about the hate-America crowd can frequently be heard lamenting "American guilt complexes" or a "loss of national will." The truth is that most of the evidence one could think of citing--opinion polls, the landslide re-election of the least Angst-ridden President in living memory, the popular reaction to Grenada--contradicts the idea that the nation as a whole suffers from any such psychic difficulties.

Our problem, in my hypothesis, is rather that a significant percentage of the American elite has low national morale. I believe that the low national morale in the community responsible for ideas in America is a major cause of the sterility of the national discussion of most public-policy issues in recent years.

Most people have had some experience with the feeling of a low-morale organization, and with the substandard performance it usually delivers. The value of keeping an organization's morale high should be perfectly clear. High morale is not a shallow matter of mood, nor a feeling of automatic or unrealistic optimism or self-congratulation. It is a basic long-term orientation. A high-morale organization is able to recognize and accept unpleasant facts, whereas in a low-morale organization divisiveness and back-biting are dominant, people don't respond well to challenges, and there is a low sensitivity to insults or dangers to the organization.

Just as there is morale in organizations, there is morale in countries. "Morale" can be summarized as the degree of self-respect that the members of an organization feel in regard to that organization. While morale purports to be based on objective facts--such as the organization's success, morality, or prospects--in fact it is based on the members' subjective choice of which standard to use to evaluate the organization. The members of an organization with high morale judge their organization by standards that the organization meets well.

Though it is easy to find criteria by which the U.S. is despicable, it is even easier to find standards by which it is commendable, compared to almost any other country, now or in the past. Roughly speaking, people whose feelings about the U.S. are dominated by the standards our country fails to meet, rather than by those by which we look good, have low national morale. Of course in any country there are some people with high national morale and others with low national morale. But any organization in which a majority of the members have low morale is in an unhealthy condition.

Since it is not obvious how to identify people who have low national morale, the concept does not readily lend itself to statistical analysis. But there is an operational test. If someone who does not have low national morale believes something bad about the country, and you are able to show him that he is mistaken, he will be pleased to hear the news and happy to give up his erroneous reason for dissatisfaction. On the other hand, someone with low national morale will not only be very resistant to such good news, but if he is finally convinced that it is true, he will take no pleasure from it and will immediately go on to tell you something else bad about the country.

I believe that the special minority we are discussing is so important to the country, and that its national morale is so low, that we need to think of this condition as a significant social pathology. (Which is definitely not to say that the individuals who have low national morale are sick; it is the country that has a malady when so many of such a group of its citizens have low national morale.)