of reinforcing complacency instead of disturbing it. The authors of "These United States" implicitly invited their readers to count themselves among the elect. The rest of America might live in darkness, but they themselves—the knowing authors and their readers—had seen the light. A perceptive commentator, Louis Siegel of Cleveland, noted in a letter to the Nation that Mencken's criticism of American life, seemingly so sweeping, lost most of its force in its very excess, since readers understood that his spleen was directed not at themselves but against everyone else. Mencken voiced the mockery and contempt for their neighbors, based on a conviction of their own superiority, that his readers also felt but hesitated to express. "Each and every American thinks himself too intelligent to be the target of Mencken's venom, admiringly endorses it as aimed at his neighbor, and takes a vicarious satisfaction in brutality his [own] humaneness inhibits." The only readers who resented Mencken's satire were those who failed to recognize his appeal to exempt themselves from his indictment of the common man.

Mencken's view of social criticism assumed that since we find fault with others more easily than we find fault with ourselves, we need to turn our neighbors into aliens before we can find fault with them. But "such easy fault-finding," as Michael Walzer has recently remarked in another context, quickly becomes self-defeating. It makes social criticism "superfluous," Walzer argues, because it does not "touch the conscience of the people to whom it is addressed"—and the "task of the social critic is precisely to touch the conscience." A proper understanding of the function of social criticism requires us to reject the "standard view of the social critic as someone who breaks loose from his particular loyalties and views his own society from the outside—from an ideal point, as it were, equidistant from all societies." In place of this disembodied or "desocialized" criticism, Walzer advocates "connected" criticism, which tries to steer between the universal and the particular, the abstract and the concrete. Unconditional commitment to the universal tends to create an "ideologically flattened world" in which particular human beings disappear and the critic's "impartiality slides into a cold indifference." Unconditional commitment to the particular, on the other hand, leads to undiscriminating acquiescence in a community's good opinion of itself, to an acceptance of its self-serving illusions at face value. Loyalty to a particular way of life, unless it is attentive to the disparity between profession

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