cial classes nor the working classes" had much "affection" for those ideals. "It is not to 'The People,' not to the business class, not to the working class, that we must look for the consistent and relatively unqualified defense of freedom and equality." Lane's attack on working‐ class pathology served as an apology for his own class, the educated, salaried elite.

James D. Wright came to similar conclusions in The Dissent of the Governed, in which he took issue with the commonsensical proposition that democracy required popular trust in government. By means of the usual questionnaires, Wright discovered widespread "alienation" in the form of support for statements to the effect that "people like me don't have any say about what the government does" or that "public officials don't care much about what people like me think." He went on to argue, however, that alienated Americans were too passive and apathetic to threaten the body politic. "Aging, poorly educated, and working-class," they were "unlikely to attend church, inattentive to the mass media," and seldom inclined even to vote. "The evidence ... suggests that democracies function reasonably well with the consent of no more than half their population." McClosky made much the same point, reassuring his readers that those who were "most confused about democratic ideals" were also "apathetic and without significant influence." "Their role in the nation's decision process is so small," McClosky wrote, "that their 'misguided' opinions or non-opinions have little practical consequence for stability." The only people who really mattered, it appeared, were the members of the professional and managerial class. "The consent of this group," Wright observed, "is critical for the persistence of the regime.... The system could quite easily grind to a halt if their consent was withheld."

The theory of working-class authoritarianism did not escape criticism, but the broader assumptions behind it proved highly resistant to attack. A few sociologists objected to its emphasis on the pathological roots of unenlightened attitudes, preferring to blame them on a lack of education, not on deep-seated character flaws. "The greater authoritarianism of the

-465-