For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an 'emergency' without a foreseeable end,...Such men as these are crackpot… - C. Wright Mills

America - a conservative country without any conservative ideology - appears now before the world a naked and arbitrary power, as, in the name of realism, its men of decision enforce their often crackpot definitions upon world reality. The second-rate mind is in command of the ponderously spoken platitude. In the liberal rhetoric, vagueness, and in the conservative mood, irrationality, are raised to principle. Public relations and the official secret, the trivializing campaign and the terrible fact clumsily accomplished, are replacing the reasoned debate of political ideas in the privately incorporated economy, the military ascendancy, and the political vacuum of modern America.

Moral distrust of men in public life is an old American convention. In the current campaign, however, it has reached unprecedented heights: each of the leading candidates has felt it necessary to make public an accounting of his personal income.

The ideals of liberalism have been divorced from any realities of modern social structure that might serve as the means of their realization. ... The detachment of liberalism from the facts of a going society make it an excellent mask for those who do not, cannot, or will not do what would have to be done to realize its ideals.