The idea of a new class, articulated by neoconservative intellectuals who were themselves members of the new class (as their critics on the left never failed to point out), was more useful for polemical than for analytical purposes. Even as an explanation of contemporary "permissiveness"—itself a shallow description of our moral and cultural disorder—it overlooked a more obvious explanation. Capitalism itself, thanks to its growing dependence on consumerism, promotes an ethic of hedonism and health and thus undermines the "traditional values" of thrift and self-denial. The therapeutic sensibility does not serve the "class interest" of professionals alone, as Daniel Moynihan and other critics of the new class have claimed; it serves the needs of advanced capitalism as a whole. In the late sixties and early seventies, Moynihan argued that by emphasizing impulse rather than calculation as the determinant of human conduct and by holding society responsible for the problems confronting individuals, a "government-oriented" professional class attempted to create a demand for its own services. Professionals had a vested interest in discontent, because discontented people turn to professionally prescribed remedies for relief. But the same principle underlies modern capitalism in general, which continually tries to create new demands and new discontents that can be assuaged only by the consumption of commodities. Professional self-aggrandizement grew up side by side with the advertising industry and the machinery of demand creation. The same historical development that turned the citizen into a client transformed the worker from a producer into a consumer. Thus the medical and psychiatric assault on the family as a technologically backward sector of society went hand in hand with the advertising industry's drive to convince people that store-bought goods are superior to homemade goods.

Neoclassical or post-Keynesian economics—the right's dubious contribution to economic theory—takes no account of the importance of advertising. It extols the "sovereign consumer" and insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they do not want already. The importance of advertising, however, does not lie in its manipulation of

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