John Gagnon, workers were driven by a "mythic sense of the past" and by a desire to restore an older order. William Kornblum traced blue‐ collar populism, with its irrational "distrust of big business," its sense of alienation from a "government insulated from the popular will," and its "fear of foreign ideologies," to the competition for "rectitude and status" in communities marked by "general provincialism," "parochial neighborhood solidarity," and "cultural isolation."

Workers believed that "big business is running this country," Robert Lane noted. Instead of asking himself whether there was any truth in this perception, Lane explained it as the product of a "cabalistic" mentality or "usurpation complex." Subject to "whim and impulse," workers adopted conspiracy theories as a "counterweight to the chaotic forces of drift and change welling up in anarchic fashion within themselves." Lane's Political Ideology, widely regarded as the leading study of political alienation, reduced working-class discontent to personal pathology. Lane wondered why workers did not "see the President or Congress as running things," instead of attributing so much power to big business. The explanation, he decided, was that people with an underdeveloped "ego or self" demanded an image of "absolute power" that was "clearly hard to find in Congress or the President." Only a handful of Lane's subjects, "free of cabalist thinking," realistically perceived power as "generally shared and limited" and respected "legitimate power as superior to and containing ... the power of private groups." As in The Authoritarian Personality, liberal ideology—in this case, the dogma that political power in the United States was distributed so evenly among a plurality of interest groups that none achieved overweening influence—furnished the standard of mental health.

Lane had little patience with the theory of "mass society" advanced by William Kornhauser and others. According to Kornhauser, anomie and political alienation reflected the breakdown of "community." Lane argued, on the contrary, that it was the "very absence of community that makes democracy possible." Democratic institutions were the product of modernization: "industrialization, increased wealth, increased urbanization, increased education, increased communication." The "professional class," more fully exposed to modernizing influences than other classes, was the most liberal in its outlook, the "staunchest defender of democracy's two greatest ideals," freedom and equality. "Neither the commer

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