Civil Society Watch

A mericans are increasingly oblivious to politics but exceptionally sensitive to culture. What constitutes for other countries the meat and potatoes of political conflict--the distribution of income among classes, regulation of industry, protectionism versus free trade, sectional antagonism--here captures only the attention of the interests immediately affected. Politics in the classic sense of who gets what, when, and how is carried out by a tiny elite watched over by a somewhat larger, but still infinitesimally small, audience of news followers. The attitude of the great majority of Americans to such traditional political subjects is an unstable combination of boredom, resentment, and sporadic attention.