For Marxists, criticism of petty-bourgeois populism served as a counterpoint to their praise of the industrial workers, the real revolutionaries. According to Marx and Engels, industrialism uprooted the working class, dragged it out of the "idiocy of rural life" into the factory, divested it of the false consolations of religion and respectability, turned its domestic life upside down by forcing the worker's wife and even his children into the marketplace, and thus transformed former artisans and peasants into a class of revolutionary outlaws. By the I950s, however, it was plain to all but a few diehards that industrial workers had failed to grasp their revolutionary opportunity. Disclosures of corruption in the unions, the decline of labor militancy, and the advent of "big labor" tore away the romantic aura of the underdog that surrounded the labor movement in the thirties. One study after another depicted a working class newly suburbanized, economically secure for the first time but socially at sea, resentful of blacks and other minorities pressing up from below, beset by status anxiety, and ripe for radical demagogues. These images of working-class "embourgeoisement" made it possible for liberals to assign the classic traits of the petty bourgeoisie even to industrial workers, formerly the hope of the left but now part of the "historical problem" of the lower middle class.

Mounting evidence of "working-class authoritarianism," according to Lipset, "posed a tragic dilemma for those intellectuals of the democratic left who once believed the proletariat necessarily to be a force for liberty, racial equality, and social progress." Personality research, investigations of working-class family patterns, and studies of public opinion all showed that workers viewed political choices as "black and white, good and evil." Their intolerance of ambiguity—the hallmark of the authoritarian personality, according to Adorno—predisposed them to "extremist movements which suggest easy and quick solutions to social problems and have a rigid outlook." Like many other liberals, Lipset had come to the "gradual realization that extremist and intolerant movements in modern society are more likely to be based on the lower classes than on the middle

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