trait of liberals nowadays," Matthew Josephson noted in 1930, "is their disappointment at finding that the people care little for liberty." Josephson did not deny that liberty was "nearly dead," crushed by a "triumphant equality." He denied only that there was anything anyone could do about it. An "immense mechanization" had "visibly shifted the seats of power," raising a class of millionaires who shared the plebeian tastes of the "man of the filling station"—"the same horizons, the same preoccupations." The new rulers of America were men elevated from the crowd and imbued with the crowd mentality. "Their hours of toil are the same; their pleasures are similarly the familiar drives on Sundays, the passive vigil before the universal receiving set." Liberals, Josephson argued, were now obliged "to resist the majority, the vox populi, the great crowd" they had formerly worshiped. But they were also obliged to resist the new "humanists" and other reactionaries who demanded a "return to ancient systems of authority, discipline, culture." As "good determinists," liberals knew that history always marches forward. "The human race never turns back to an old order." The best hope lay in an orderly "transition to that which Dewey and Beard have called a 'technological-rationalist society.' " even if the "more valid equality" it promised meant the "inevitable sacrifice" of individual liberties. "There is something ponderously fatal about such a transition," Josephson mused, "but if it results in order, enthusiasm, harmony, we will be content with our sacrifice."

The most sobering assessment of the public's incapacity for critical judgment and self-government came from Walter Lippmann, who devoted four separate studies in the twenties, each gloomier than the last, to the problem of public opinion. The first of these, A Test of the News, written with Charles Merz and published as a supplementary issue of the New Republic in 1920, examined press coverage of the Russian revolution. According to Lippmann and Merz, American papers gave their readers an account of the revolution distorted by anti-Bolshevik prejudices, wishful thinking, and sheer ignorance. Liberty and the News (1920) was also prompted by the collapse of journalistic objectivity during the war, when

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