216 - The Bluing of America

The Bluing of America
By Peter and Brigitte Berger

A CONSIDERABLE number of American intellectuals have been on a kick of revolution talk for the last few years. It began in a left mood, with fantasies of political revolution colored red or black. The mood now appears to have shifted somewhat. The fantasies have shifted to cultural revolution, which, we are told, will color America green.

What the two varieties of revolution talk have in common is a sublime disregard for the requirements of technological society and for the realities of power and class in America. To be sure, drastic (if you like, "revolutionary") things are happening in this society, but the currently fashionable interpretations only serve to obfuscate them.

It is conceivable that technological society will collapse in America. In that case, as grass grows over the computers, we would revert to the ways of an underdeveloped country. Conceivable, yes; probable, no. The more likely assumption is that technological society will continue. If so, who will run it? We would venture, first, a negative answer: It will not be the people engaged in the currently celebrated cultural revolutions.

The "greening" revolution is not taking place in a sociological vacuum, but has a specific location in a society that is organized in social classes. There are enough data now to pinpoint this location. The cadres of the revolution are, in overwhelming proportions, the college-educated children of the upper middle class. Ethnically, they tend to be Wasps and Jews. Ideologically, they are in revolt against the values of this class-which is precisely the class that has been running the technological society so far. But the essentially

Peter L. Berger is Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University. Brigitte Berger is Associate Professor of Sociology at Long Island University. This editorial, under the title "The Eve of the Bluing of America," is reprinted with permission by The New York Times where it first appeared on the "op-ed" page, Feb. 15, 1971. A more extended version appeared in the New Republic (April 3, 1971).

217 - The Bluing of America

bucolic rhetoric of this rebellion goes far beyond a radical (in the leftist sense) rejection of American class society and its allegedly evil ways. The rhetoric intends a dropping out of technological society as such.

The matrix of this revolution has been the youth culture. What are the prospects for the children of the people of the emerging counterculture? We don't want to speculate in detail about the probable career of the son of a dropped-out sandal maker in Bella Vista-except for the suggestion that he is unlikely to make it to the upper-middle-class status of his grandfather. In sociological parlance, he is probably headed for downward social mobility.

The black revolution, for quite different reasons, is also headed for a counter or subculture, segregated from the opportunity system of technological society and subsidized through political patronage. The prospects here are for segregated social mobility. This may have its own cultural or ideological satisfactions. But upward mobility in a black ("community controlled") educational bureaucracy is unlikely to lead to positions of power and privilege in the enveloping technological society.

If the "greening" revolution will in fact continue to lure sizable numbers of upper-middle-class individuals out of "the system," and if the black revolution will succeed in arresting outward mobility among its adherents, a simple but decisively important development will take place: There will be new "room at the top." Who is most likely to take advantage of this sociological windfall? It will be the newly college-educated children of the white lower middle and working classes (and possibly those nonwhites who will refuse to stay within the resegregated racial subcultures). In other words, precisely those classes that remain most untouched by what is considered to be the revolutionary tide in contemporary America face new prospects of upward social mobility.

A technological society, given a climate of reasonable tolerance, can afford sizable regiments of sandal makers and Swahili teachers. It must have quite different people, though, to occupy its command posts and to keep its engines running. These will have to be people retaining the essentials of the old Protestant ethic-discipline, achievement orientation, and, last not least, a measure of freedom from gnawing self-doubt.

218 - The Bluing of America

If such people are no longer available in one population reservoir, another reservoir will have to be tapped. There is no reason to think that "the system" will be unable to make the necessary accommodations. Should Yale become hopelessly "greened," Wall Street will get used to recruits from Fordham or Wichita State. Italians or Southern Baptists will have no trouble running the Rand Corporation. It is even possible that the White House may soon have its first Polish occupant (or, in a slightly different scenario, its first Greek).

There is one proviso-namely, that the children of these classes remain relatively unbitten by the "greening" bug. If they, too, should drop out, there would literally be no one left to mind the technological store. So far, the evidence does not point in this direction.

Indeed, what evidence we have of the dynamics of class in a number of European countries would indicate that the American case is not all that unique. Both England and West Germany have undergone very similar changes in their class structures, with new reservoirs of lower-middle-class and working-class populations supplying the personnel requirements of a technological society no longer serviced by the old élites.

The aforementioned process is not new in history. It is what Vilfredo Pareto (that most neglected of classical sociologists) called the "circulation of élites." Even Marx, albeit in the most ironical manner, may be proved right in the end. It may, indeed, be the blue-collar masses that are, at last, coming into their own. "Power to the people!"-nothing less than that. The class struggle may be approaching a decisive new phase, with the children of the working class victorious-under the sign of the American flag. In that perspective, alas, the peace emblem represents the decline of the bourgeois enemy class, aptly symbolizing its defeat before a more robust adversary. This would not be the first time in history that the principals in the societal drama are unaware of the consequences of their actions.

"Revolutionary" America? Perhaps. We may be on the eve of its bluing.