The young intellectual in the United States today very often feels, almost from the outset of his career, the distractions and pressures attendant up… - Richard Hofstadter

Jackson argued that even when personal integrity made corruption unthinkable, men who enjoyed long tenure in office would develop habits of mind unfavorable to the public interest. Among long-standing officeholders, “office is considered as a species of property, and government rather as a means of promoting individual interests than as an instrument created for the service of the people.” Sooner or later, whether by outright corruption or by the “perversion of correct feelings and principles,” government is diverted from its legitimate ends to become “an engine for the support of the few at the expense of the many.

Get action, do things; be sane,” he once raved, “don’t fritter away your time; create, act, take a place wherever you are and be somebody: get action.

And it is significant that some of the bitterest indictments of mass culture have come from writers who were, or still are, democratic socialists.