America, so it seems, is under siege. Armies of men and women, equipped with clipboards and pencils, sweep across the land, prying and probing into people's minds. The results are served up in hundreds of public opinion surveys for newspapers, TV networks, corporate managers, cabinet officers, and White House staffers.
Consider just a few of the questions that have been put to people in recent months:
Ã? DO you believe in Unidentified ~l~in~
Objects? George Gallup recently asked. (Fifty-seven...
a coquette.
On a national level, unpredictable leftlright divisions are tantalizing: Americans seem immune to neat pigeonholing by political scientists. For example, a 1978 New York TimesICBS News survey found that those who described themselves as "lib- erals" were far more likely than self-described "conservatives" to support sending U.S. troops and equipment to halt Soviet advances in Africa.
As we edge toward the 1980 presidential election, cam- paigns are being mounted...
individuals
also acting in the name of groups, are
Public Opinion with capital letters.'
These definitions, from Public Opinion (Harcourt, 1922, cloth; Free Press, 1965, paper) are as precise as any we are likely to get. Writing long before the advent of TV news, Lippmann emphasizes the barriers to informed opinion, notably the "comparatively meager time avail- able [to citizens] in each day for pay- ing attention to public affairs' and "the distortion arising because events have to...
In November 1830, the evangelist Charles Grandison Finney faced an audience of merchants, master craftsmen, and their families at Third Presbyterian Church in Rochester, New York. The people at Third Church were inheritors of New England Calvinism, and they knew that the world was beyond their con- trol. In 18 15, the town's Presbyterians had declared themselves impotent before a God who "foreordained whatsoever comes to
Copyright @ 1978 . Reprinted by permission of Hill and Wang.
The Wilson...
ROAD
A quarter of a century ago, in Brown v. Board ofEducation, the
U.S. Supreme Court spoke with one voice in outlawing "sepa- rate but equal" schools for black and white children. Such unanimity has been rare in recent years, as a divided Court has looked beyond de jure segregation in the South to deal with de facto segregation in the North. At the same time, the goals of colorblind justice and desegregation have been superseded by more complicated disputes over affirmative action...
David Maclsaac and Samuel F. Wells,Jr.
In 1784, shortly after the end of the War for Independence, the Continental Congress agreed with Elbridge Gerry of Massa- chusetts that "standing armies in time of peace are inconsistent with the principles of republican government." So saying, the Congress ordered the post-Revolutionary Army reduced to 80 caretakers (at Fort Pitt and West Point), banned any officers above the rank of captain, and asked the states for 700 militia to guard the western...