Disinformation monopolized the airwaves. It was not that Americans had become stupid or credulous but that they had no institutional alternative to the consumption of lies. Their only available defense was to turn off the television set, cancel subscriptions to newspapers and periodicals, and stay away from the polls on election day. More and more people in fact availed themselves of these options, to judge by declining newspaper sales, lower and lower ratings for political events, and the shrinkage of the electorate. But public opinion polls now made it possible, in effect, to dispense with the electorate by allowing an infinitesimal but allegedly representative sample of the population to determine the outcome of elections in advance.

The question I took up in the mid-seventies—the question of whether changing patterns of family life had not brought about long-term changes in personality structure—grew out of a belief that social order no longer required the informed consent of citizens. Every form of authority, including parental authority, seemed to be in serious decline. Children now grew up without effective parental supervision or guidance, under the tutelage of the mass media and the "helping professions." Such a radical shift in the pattern of "socialization," as the sociologists called it, could be expected to have important effects on personality, the most disturbing of which would presumably be a weakening of the capacity for independent judgment, initiative, and self-discipline, on which democracy had always been understood to depend.

Such were the theoretical concerns, if I can dignify them with that name, that informed my studies in culture and personality; but those studies also grew more deeply out of my experience as a husband and father. Like so many of those born in the Depression, my wife and I married early, with the intention of raising a large family. We were part of the postwar "retreat to domesticity," as it is so glibly referred to today. No doubt we hoped to find some kind of shelter in the midst of general

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