effects. Free land is gone, though home ownership spreads–with a
minimum of land. The once self-employed shopkeeper is in the toils of the
big distributor, and may echo Marx’s complaint that everything is in chains.
Economic freedom, even in the middle classes, becomes more and more
exceptional, making political freedom a consolatory pretense. And all this
has come about not (as we thought in our hot youth) through the perversity
of the rich, but through the impersonal fatality of economic development,
and through the nature of man. Every advance in the complexity of the
economy puts an added premmm upon superior ability, and intensifies the
concentration of wealth, responsibility, and political power.
Democracy is the most difficult of all forms of government, since it
requires the widest spread of intelligence, and we forgot to make ourselves
intelligent when we made ourselves sovereign. Education has spread, but
intelligence is perpetually retarded by the fertility of the simple. A cynic
remarked that “you mustn’t enthrone ignorance just because there is so
much of it.” However, ignorance is not long enthroned, for it lends itself to
manipulation by the forces that mold public opinion. It may be true, as
Lincoln [Lincoln, Abraham (1809-65)] supposed, that “you can’t fool all
the people all the time,” but you can fool enough of them to rule a large
country.
Is democracy responsible for the current debasement of art? The
debasement, of course, is not unquestioned; it is a matter of subjective
judgment; and those of us who shudder at its excesses–its meaningless
blotches of color, its collages of debris, its Babels of cacophony–are
doubtless imprisoned in our past and dull to the courage of experiment. The
producers of such nonsense are appealing not to the general public–which
scorns them as lunatics, degenerates, or charlatans–but to gullible middle-
class purchasers who are hypnotized by auctioneers and are thrilled by the
new, however deformed. Democracy is responsible for this collapse only in
the sense that it has not been able to develop standards and tastes to replace
those with which aristocracies once kept the imagination and individualism
