The Hidden Costs of Opportunity

by EDGAR Z. FRIEDENBERG

THE most persistently troublesome issue in political theory is the relationship between freedom and equality. In the liberal, democratic state, and particularly in the United States, this issue has largely been avoided, at least in popular thought, by assuming — indeed, insisting — that each is conducive to the other. And today, with bitter and fundamental conflict occurring over the demands of black people and the role of the university in society, the question has literally become a burning one.

If equality, in common American usage, meant the maintenance throughout the society of a common, preferably high, standard of decency, comfort, and mutual interaction (as a hotel, say, might attempt to ensure parity of service among its guests even though some were lodged in costlier accommodation than others), the problem, at least in its material aspects, might be solved rather easily by a generous guaranteed annual income and an equally generous conception of civil liberty, guaranteeing each person privacy from his neighbors and the opportunity to commune freely with his friends whether he chose to toil or spin or lie on the grass or smoke it. But this is not what it means. Equality in America means equality of access to what is defined as prizes, and of vulnerability to what is defined as sanctions; in short, equality of opportunity.

The opportunity implied is not limited to that of getting a better room in the hotel, or even of participating in and perhaps turning out the management so that the service may be improved and the enterprise enlarged to accommodate more guests and a greater diversity of them. It extends to the right to conduct businesses in its rooms that make the rest of the building dangerous and uninhabitable; to turn most of it into a military establishment whose function is not so much to protect the hotel as to provide more opportunities for profit and advancement to those who live in its best rooms and run it. These people arrest the less influential guests and force them into their army; but this is not held to be a serious violation of freedom because the most important freedom is freedom to work for them. The managers of the hotel do, and they have agreed to give better rooms and more service to guests who prove especially useful as employees.

There are not, however, nearly enough habitable rooms because the military wing has grown so fast and is very expensive to run, though it is very profitable to those involved in running it. There have not been enough funds left over to enlarge, or even renovate, the other wings of the building. There is reason for hope, however, that this problem will be temporary. More and more of the hotel is being converted to military use, and hence included in the funding, so that soon none of the guests need be excluded. And since the tenants of abutting structures are complaining more and more loudly that they find the whole institution obnoxious, its guests will find that its conversion to a war footing was an act of keen foresight. Meanwhile, the most serious problem the hotel faces —it has others, more serious, that it doesn’t face — is the disorderly behavior of the people who live in the worst rooms, and of the wild youngsters who live in the better rooms but don’t want to stay in the hotel at all and keep making trouble by trying either to run away or to grow marijuana and other dangerous drugs in its ruined and neglected gardens.

IT ISN’T easy to manage this hotel, and it is unlikely that its management will be skillful. In the Land of Opportunity, the most prevalent technical specialists are the opportunists. Positions of influence in American life are won by people who are especially good at winning, not by those whose interests, skills, and sense of responsibility most qualify them for the post they seek. The ground rules under which they operate, moreover, require that opportunity always be kept open to challengers, so that they themselves are continually vulnerable to the next wave of opportunists; and they become anxious and opportunistic in their own defense.

The only protection they can legitimately demand is that the game be played according to the rules. But this demand, though it accounts in part for our obsessive preoccupation with “law and order” and our insistence on “a government of laws and not of men,” makes life in America more contused and ruthless. The stakes involved in “making it" in America are a little too high for sportsmanship, and too many of the players are involved in other little games of their own. Moreover, no society has rules that permit a fundamental challenge of the legitimacy of the social system itself. There are many, many games, but they all have about the same rules, and in none is a player allowed to rise in freedom and reject the context, saying, like Alice in Wonderland, “You’re only a pack of cards anyway!”

In America, as in Wonderland, however, the rules may be bent and reinterpreted to permit the stronger creatures to control their society and punish offenders. The following report from the Buffalo Evening News for September 11, 1968, has precisely the quality of the White Queen’s enthusiastic endorsement of the criminal code of Wonderland, under which the punishment precedes the trial, and the crime comes last of all.

A City Court public defender accused the New York State Legislature Wednesday of “putting their stamp of approval” on free love for teen-agers.

James Arcadi of the public defender’s office made his comments after City Judge Joseph S. Mattina found himself “bound by law” to dismiss a third-degree sexual abuse charge against a 16-year-old youth arrested on complaint of a 15-year-old Buffalo girl.

Neither Judge Mattina, nor assistant District Attorney Thomas Cleary, could oppose the defense attorney’s motion to dismiss the misdemeanor charge, despite several hours of conferences and careful review of various sections of the newly revised penal law.

Judge Mattina told The Buffalo Evening News that he had conferred by telephone with “several legislators who had a hand in creating the new law” in an attempt to find a way to make the charge “stick” or find a suitable substitute that “fits the situation.”

The “situation is a case of a 15-year-old girl who ran away from home and spent several days in the home of a girl friend. During her absence, according to a statement signed by her and given to police, she “willingly” engaged in sexual intercourse with the defendant on “at least four occasions.”

Police eventually picked the girl up at her father’s insistence, and charges were subsequently placed against the defendant.

It is both the age factors involved and the girl’s testimony that she “willingly” participated in the alleged acts that make prosecution of the defendant virtually impossible. . . .

It is the first time, according to court officials, that this situation has arisen, but many fear that it will not be the last.

Judge Mattina considered it serious enough to request that the district attorney’s office immediately tipprise the City Court warrant clerks’ office of the situation and request that when a similar situation arises, they find ”a different charge” to place against the defendant.

Unfortunately, at this point, Judge Mattina and the DA’s office both admit that they have no idea what that charge should be.

“‘Suppose he never commits the crime?’ said Alice.

“‘That would be all the better, wouldn’t it?’ the White Queen said.”

The news report just quoted reflects a perfectly recognizable social-class position, and one which has become dominant in modern industrial societies. It is the position of the lower middle class: moralistic and punitive, filled with what Nietzsche called Ressentiment; more recently, Harold and Vita Nicolson coined a family word, “bedintness,” for the same mind-set. Americans, bedeviled by this phenomenon, seldom speak of it at all; they bend with it as good egalitarian democrats must — which is rough on Lenny Bruce and the Supreme Court. So do Russians, yielding to the strictures of the comradely art critic, or dutifully tearing up the leaflets an occasional demonstrator may dare to pass out among them and saving the police the trouble. And indeed, there is a serious political issue involved, as there is in all class conflict. Censorship is not concerned so much to prevent the transmission of forbidden information or ideas as to deny legitimacy to a style of life and the experiences to which those ideas attest. And what is needed in order to resist “bedintness” is great confidence in the moral tradition which upholds privacy and tolerance and sexual geniality, and a commitment to equal militancy on its behalf; even though this tradition is not and may never be popular, and even though, if effectively invoked, it will limit the opportunity of persons of humble origins to gain an authority commensurate with their numbers. Traditionally, the assertion and maintenance of this tradition are a central responsibility of conservatives; though in America, those who call themselves that have usually been its worst enemies.

I do not claim that the moral tradition from which human liberty is derived is, generally speaking, more valuable than maximum openness in society and the greatest opportunity for social mobility. Whether it is or not depends, presumably, on a variety of personal factors, including one’s relationship to the means of production. One part of the liberal bag from which I am trying to wrest free is the pompous compulsion to deny that there are real conflicts of interests in society, and hence, to argue that one’s own fundamental interests, properly understood, coincide with the general welfare. They rarely do; and in the case of liberty there seems to be a lethal conflict of interest between those who demand and enjoy it and the populace.

I am suggesting, rather, that one has a right and a personal obligation to defend liberty as a particular vested interest in potential or actual conflict with other vested interests in America. If the cause of liberty be advanced, it may indeed make it harder to get on in the world, or to sell cigarettes, or to conduct counterinsurgence in Thailand. I think it will; I rather hope it does; even though there are doubtless more, and certainly more powerful, people who want these things than who prize individual liberty.

THAT the quest for equality menaces liberty in America is hardly a new thought. Mark Twain, gregarious as he was, was haunted by it; Henry James and T. S. Eliot, becoming convinced of it, left the country while still young men and became British subjects. Henry Adams was driven to the, for him, unnatural effort to write a novel condemning Democracy. Yet it was a still earlier, and basically more sympathetic, observer who most precisely noted that the American way of life bore within it the lethal genes of totalitarianism. Alexis de Tocqueville, writing Democracy in America in the late 1830s, pinpointed, as we say, the problem:

I think, then, that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything which ever before existed in the world: our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I seek in vain for an expression which will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it; the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate: the thing itself is new, and since I cannot name, I must attempt to define it.

I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the paltry and petty pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is a stranger to all the rest, — his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind; as for the rest of his fellow-citizens, he is close to them, but he sees them not; he exists, but in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. . . . It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom, and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people.

It might, even. This man had the mind of a laser; the beam of light it emitted has not scattered or diffused in traveling across 130 years. But it does not fully reveal our time. Tocqueville had no basis for imagining either our technology or our insensitivity. Who in America is still devoted to his children and his private friends? Though absolute and minute, how mild — for that matter, how regular — is the operation of the Selective Service System? Even in these respects, Tocqueville’s understanding cannot be faulted, for the factors he stipulated as essential to the viability of American democracy have vanished: the existence of a secure and independent yeomanry, for example, or “the fact that America has no great capital city, whose direct or indirect influence is felt over the whole extent of the country; this I hold to be one of the first causes of the maintenance of republican institutions in the United States.” “If a democratic republic, similar to that of the United States, were ever founded in a country where the power of one man had previously established a centralized administration, and had sunk it deep into the habits and laws of the people, I do not hesitate to assert,” he asserted, “that, in such a republic, a more insufferable despotism would prevail than in any of the absolute monarchies of Europe; or, indeed, than any which could be found this side of Asia.”

Maybe just this side. The contest seems hardly worth judging; let us simply note that, on August 20, 1968, the Republic of Czechoslovakia joined the Dominican brotherhood. Repression, constraint, and surveillance in the twentieth century are vastly popular; as American as apple pie, as Russian as the troika, as international as the CIA. There is no doubt, certainly, that life in the United States remains freer than in the Soviet Union; what is doubtful is that our greater freedoms express the general will or would even be acceptable to it. They seem rather to exist as aristocratic survivals despite it and under diminishingly effective safeguards from it. Opinion research informs us that the noblest section of our Constitution, the Bill of Rights, could not be adopted as a set of constitutional amendments today. It is, in any case, introduced by five words which stand as an adamant rebuke to the legislative process: “Congress shall make no law. . . .” If only the Founding Fathers had possessed the aesthetic discipline to see that with these words the document became perfect and complete, with not a syllable more to be added, the body politic would not today be shaken by spasms of delight with each new stroke of law enforcement; nor feel itself so warmly reassured against disorder by news that its police are now the Bearers of the Mace.

THE “Peoples’ Democracies” may be both more despotic and more egalitarian than our own; but whether a state is democratic in form seems less significant than the inhumaneness and unauthenticity with which, in the interests of equality, it attempts to extirpate any possible unearned increment of satisfaction in life that might have accrued spontaneously to any class of its members. Even racial bigotry, paradoxically, can sustain itself on egalitarianism and does. In the United States today, the most politically effective defense of racism consists not in a futile attempt to impute genetic inferiority to black people, but in a withholding of generosity by refusing to break its “network of small, complicated rules” in order to recognize their plight and redress their grievances. At this stage in our history, the most effective possible expression of racial hostility is achieved by insisting on one law and one set of academic standards for all. Yet the Irishand Polishand Italianand Germanand Old Americans, now finishing out their lives in cities which have gained no conspicuous felicity from their political domination, continue to support policies that bar Negro children from better schools because of low test scores and from employment because of arrest records — the same as they would anybody else — thus sparing themselves the final humiliation of seeing black children receive special consideration that, as they recall, was denied them.

Forms of oppression and constraint in modern life that stem from its egalitarianism are a difficult challenge to liberals of goodwill. Liberals cannot be anti-egalitarian; how can a liberal oppose compulsory school attendance as an invasion of liberty when it so obviously contributes to equality of opportunity? How can he favor abolition of the draft when it is clear that the armed forces will continue then as a voluntary force recruited through manifestly inequitable economic pressures? Conservatives can be anti-egalitarian; but they cannot, it seems, in America be men of goodwill. Conservatism here has become a miserable business: the political embodiment of anal-erotic fixation, with appropriately paranoid overtones. American radicals of goodwill, spared the logical necessity of attempting to accommodate their programs to the existing institutional framework, are nevertheless almost universally egalitarian in their political premises, and thus, it seems to me, equally stymied,

The basic difficulty is very clearly implied in a feature article by Ben A. Franklin in the New York Times for Sunday, August 18, 1968. In an article about the proposed party of Governor George C. Wallace of Alabama, Mr. Franklin observes:

The new party would be the party of policemen, beauticians, rubber workers, cab drivers and the American yeomanry, according to Wallace. It would stand foursquare for small, strong Jeffersonian units of local government, each with the unfettered right to control disorders by “knocking rioters in the head,” to repeal school and housing desegregation, and in the field of foreign affairs, for friendship with the apartheid Governments of Rhodesia and South Africa.

Governor Wallace, though a demagogue, is no demographer. His supporters are certainly not all working-class; I should expect his strength to be greater among the sour aged of slender means; small businessmen driven by the psychic necessity of attributing to themselves, as independent entrepreneurs, more autonomy and more status than our society actually grants them; all walks of life, indeed, that reluctantly follow a downward path from earlier expectations. In our present political spectrum, working-class people of the meaner sort, like the longshoremen who refused to load Dr. Spock’s sailboat on a ship so that he could enjoy the use of it during what were probably to be his last months of freedom, are more likely to be good, hard-line Democrats and supporters of Lyndon Johnson. Eric Hoffer — no mean longshoreman — is quite right in perceiving President Johnson’s political style and social values as exemplifying his position as an outsized common man; though whether this is, as Hoffer holds, grounds for confidence in him is quite another matter.

But, in any case, nobody — but nobody —• believes that the American yeomanry, 1968 model, “would stand foursquare for small, strong Jeffersonian units of local government, each with the unfettered right to control disorders by" restraining the violence of its local police, welcoming new black neighbors and helping them find a house in the neighborhood and a job in the community, and in the field of foreign affairs, insisting that the self-determination of Asiatics and other primitives, even Communist types, be respected. This just might happen in Scarsdale, where the people have made it well enough that they could afford to have Eldridge Cleaver to dinner, if he would come, and would be bored sick by Sidney Poitier. But it isn’t going to happen in South Buffalo.

Radicals of goodwill are aware enough of the ethical and political characteristics of the American Lumpenbourgeoisie, but justify their egalitarianism by attributing these to the degradation they have suffered under capitalism. Perhaps; though the East doesn’t seem to be jumping with a generousspirited yeomanry either. But even if this were true, it seems irrelevant to our situation here. The American political climate and American political possibilities are determined by what the citizens we have now are like, not by what they might have been. Those possibilities, to be sure, include the possibility that the people might change, or be changed, to make them fit the demands of a modern technological society better. One suggestion that is authoritatively offered is that our society, if it is to flourish and remain both democratic and genial, can and must cultivate a new kind of personality, at ease in transitory relationships and capable of investing them with emotional significance without feeling bound by them into commitments and loyalties that impede successful operation in the jet age.

In their recent book, The Temporary Society, Warren G. Bennis and Philip E. Slater observe in a chapter called “Democracy Is Inevitable”:

These new professional men are remarkably compatible with our conception of a democratic system. For, like these new men, democracy seeks no new stability, no end point; it is purposeless, save that it purports to ensure perpetual transition, constant alteration, ceaseless instability. . . . Democracy and our new professional men identify primarily with the adaptive process, not the establishment. . . . Democracy is a superior technique for making the uncommitted more available.

This, surely, is to make a virtue of necessity. These authors are aware of the costs of such flexibility, and discuss them honestly. But they find them less impoverishing than a reader more conservative than they would, and are better pleased by the new prospect before us. In his concluding chapter, Dr. Bennis suggests:

I would like to see educational programs in the art and science of being more fully human, which would take very seriously the kind of world we are living in and help produce students who could not only cope with and understand this world but attempt to change it. We should help our students develop the necessary interpersonal competencies, which would include at least the following: (1) learning how to develop intense and deep human relationships quickly — and learn how to “let go.” In other words, learning how to get love, to love, and to lose love.

Love is not love, however, which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove. Irrigation may make the desert bloom, but calling something else water won’t. Love takes time, as Jefferson Airplane observes in Jorma Kaukonen’s lovely song, “Star Track,” which people who wander around fearing they may disappear without a trace don’t have. Their album Crown of Creation says lyrically much of what I have said more prosaically here; while the fact that petty litigation has obstructed the artist’s right to authorize printing his own song in this article dramatizes very crudely the values of this culture that I wish to combat.

Jefferson Airplane knows better than Bennis and Slater why we need somebody to love, and why we may not be able to have and hold them when we find them. The development of democracy, as it moves toward totalitarianism, is making love unavailable. That rough beast, its hour come round at last, has not an affectionate nature. And any attempt to make modern society more individualized and personal, and less competitive and bureaucratic, must, it seems to me, make it less open and meritocratic, more clublike and fundamentally elitist. This is highly objectionable to the warmest and most morally serious people in our society, the young student activists, who correctly perceive themselves as a disfranchised and often persecuted minority, akin to the poor and to black people.

But in fact, their conflict with American society is so much more deeply rooted than that of the poor and the black that efforts to make common political cause are likely to be short-lived, and possibly disastrous. Repressively as the poor, and especially the black poor, are treated in this country, their demands arc nevertheless consistent with the deeply egalitarian, urban, and bureaucratic trends of modern industrial society, and they can be accommodated by allotting them a greater share in the present system. And the system quite properly, though too slowly, is coming to terms with them — more favorable terms than it offers disruptive students. Black militants, for example, were treated far more gently in the Columbia University hostilities of spring, 1968, than the white allies whom the black students cast out and who then occupied other buildings. In Chicago after the Democratic Convention, the Blackstone Rangers boasted of their sagacity in staying out of the range of police clubs and tear gas. The political issues, from the Vietnam War to the basic need for social reform, did not, after all, interest them enough to lead to their involvement in that terrifying battue. Black athletes, finally unable to resist the extraordinary opportunities to compete offered them by the 1968 Olympics, canceled their boycott and agreed to join our team; while Columbia has started hiring black campus guards to subdue student demonstrations.

In noting this, I do not mean to put black militants down, but merely to emphasize that the issue between them and the dominant society is different from and ultimately more easily compromised than the issues that polarize the feelings of middle-class student activists — though white activists, in my experience, hate to admit this.¹

Black militants demand — in terms of the social contract, quite rightly — more access to greater opportunity. And this the society is geared to provide to them, as it has to other ethnic groups in the past — though its officials are often too terrified of the racism of the dominant common white, or too ambitious for his political support, to do their plain duty. But student radicals want something quite different: not only power, which is a goal they do share with black militants, but a basically different kind of society.

THE conception of freedom most valued by radical student groups conflicts crucially with the core values of mass society, which functions in such a way as not merely to tax such freedom as a luxury but to frustrate and destroy the minority that prizes it. A major source of this conflict is the incompatibility of the demands of the radical young with the quest for opportunity within the existing social — and particularly the academic — structure. A university at odds with its major sources of financial support and under continual attack from its community, in which recruiters, military or industrial, are turned away, is not as useful to the career interests of its students or its faculty as the complacent institutions to which the nation is accustomed.

The demands of student radicals are fundamentally elitist and aristocratic, and should be frankly faced as such, especially by the student radicals themselves. Their style shows this quite clearly, in precisely those characteristics that their middleclass critics find most offensive and boorish. Our conception of a gentleman has become so bourgeois that we forget that gentlemen can be — on occasion should be —rude, arrogant, unkempt; and that nobody has worse manners than an aristocrat. When Columbia Vice President David Truman observed of the insurgent student leader Mark Rudd: “It makes me uncomfortable to sit in the same room with him,” a part, at least, of his discomfiture may have been due to a sense of social inferiority evoked by Rudd’s freedom to express himself and to behave incautiously, to a degree no bureaucrat could accept. Their elitism, indeed, seems to me the great and distinctive moral contribution student radicals are making to American society, which needs a sharp reminder that the validity of a moral position cannot be determined by counting its adherents, but must be judged by the view of man and of the human condition it expresses.

But for student radicals to insist that they are champions of a democratic society and the common man is to betray their own essential virtue; the common man, in his turn, has made it very clear that if anybody is going up against the wall, it will be they. The endorsement of the actions of the Chicago police at the Democratic National Convention by a majority of the American people; the vitriolic denunciations of “dirty-necked, dirty-mouthed” antiwar demonstrators and “rioters, looters, peaceniks, beatniks, and all the rest of the nuts who are trying to destroy” the country by union officials speaking at the International Machinists Union Convention in September; the strength of the Wallace candidacy — all these show quite clearly where the common man stands on student radicalism.

An elite, if we had one, might dig them. But they themselves are the closest thing to an elite we have. Apart from the imperiled and atavistic group of young people who have been making what well may be a last stand against the totalitarian garrison state all over the world, modern industrial states have not developed responsible standard-bearers who claim respect on the basis of their own commitment. An elite, whatever its political or ideological character is, must also be a genuine community, not an aggregate of collectively powerful arrivistes. Its members should know one another, share certain experiences and certain values; they need not be admirable individuals personally, but they must have developed some basis for mutual trust from the fact that they comprehend one another. Student radicals usually do; but this is so rare a condition in modern life as to constitute, in Governor Reagan’s eyes and those of many other people, a conspiracy.

The decision-makers of a modern, open society do not constitute such a community of colleagues; though they seek by mutual accommodation to create a community of interests. Ralf Dahrendorf, speaking of their German version, calls them a “cartel of anxiety”: too value-free to be intolerant; seldom malicious, but shifty and careerist. As administrators, they have lost or abandoned, if they have ever possessed, the conviction that their policies should be guided by their own moral judgment.; they are not that serious-minded; they have been too long accustomed to thinking that their only real obligation is to preserve the structure of the institutions that employ them from being ground up by conflicting demands to retain the ability or the inclination to assess those demands — or those institutions — ethically. They are not hypocrites, but men who make a virtue of flexibility. Since they like to think themselves liberal, they often begin by supporting the more humane or progressive side of each successive conflict; then they cave in and cop out when the infuriated and punitive members of their constituency, or those William Burroughs calls “control addicts,” demand a crackdown. Thus, paradoxically, it is their liberal tendencies that make them the willing instruments of a more repressive policy than they themselves might have chosen.

Our leaders are terrified of real internal conflict, for democracy proceeds on the assumption that negotiation and compromise improve the general welfare, while strife leads to chaos. But there may be no such thing as the general welfare; and the belief that there is serves chiefly to legitimate the demands the more powerful make upon the weaker. Society is not an organism, but an arena in which loose and shifting coalitions of interest contend. Thus, there is no substantial common interest shared by the old men who serve on draft boards and the young men they conscript; unless it be the preservation of the national state itself. And the value of preserving it cannot be assumed — this is the most fundamental issue of all. Does the preservation of the United States of America contribute to the general welfare? Devotees of the ballot might like to take a poll on that, canvassing, to be sure, not merely the registered voters of this country but all people whose interests are substantially affected by its policies. Unfortunately, some millions of those whose interests have been most strongly affected in Indonesia, Vietnam, Bolivia, the Congo, and elsewhere have lost the franchise through untimely death.

To raise this question is indeed to approach the disaffection with which Alice finally cried, “You’re nothing but a pack of cards, anyway!”; though when the familiar faces of our leaders turn up they make one feel more like Carmen than like Alice. It is hard to imagine a game in which their appearance would not spell doom. Chicago made it clear, if any further clarification was needed, that the old game spells exactly this to the best of our youth, who seek, in any case, prizes very different from those awarded to its winners. They must reject it, as they have been doing, and create new ones with different rules under which they count, instead of being used as counters. But they must also survive, if they can; and the popularity of Mayor Daley’s crude but impressive pioneering attempt at a final solution to the youth problem strongly suggests that they would be wiser not to keep trying to devise games that any number can play. Perhaps the emphasis on participatory democracy implies that even a group as open and unstructured as Students for a Democratic Society are learning what Benjamin Disraeli could have told them. Society should be open to all, regardless of ethnicity; but democracy functions best among a small circle of friends.