the consumer or its direct influence on consumer choices. The point is that it makes the consumer an addict, unable to live without increasingly sizable doses of externally provided stimulation. Neoconservatives argue that television erodes the capacity for sustained attention in children. They complain that young people now expect education, for example, to be easy and exciting. This argument is sound as far as it goes. Here again, however, neoconservatives incorrectly attribute these artificially excited expectations to liberal propaganda—in this case, to theories of permissive child rearing and "creative pedagogy." They ignore the deeper source of the expectations that undermine education, destroy the child's curiosity, and encourage passivity. Ideologies, no matter how appealing and powerful, cannot shape the structure of perceptions and conduct unless they are embedded in daily experiences that appear to confirm them. In our society, those experiences teach people to want a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs. A defense of free enterprise hardly supplies a corrective to such expectations.

Right-wing economics conceives of the capitalist economy as it was in the time of Adam Smith, when property was still distributed fairly widely, businesses were individually owned, and commodities still retained something of the character of useful objects. The right's notion of free enterprise takes no account of the forces that have transformed capitalism from within: the rise of the corporation, the bureaucratization of business, the increasing insignificance of private property, and the shift from a work ethic to a consumption ethic. When the right takes any note of these developments at all, it is only to attribute them to professional and governmental interference. People on the right decry bureaucracy but see only its public face, missing the spread of bureaucracy in the misnamed private sector. They show no acquaintance with the rich body of historical scholarship that shows how the expansion of the public sector itself came about, in large part, in response to pressure from the corporations themselves.

The right holds that the new class controls the mass media and uses this control to wage a "class struggle" against business. Since the mass media are financed by advertising revenues, however, it is hard to take this contention seriously. It is advertising and the logic of consumerism, not anticapitalist ideology, that govern the depiction of reality in the mass media. The right complains that television mocks "free enterprise" and

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