Drug Abuse

7 A Dramatistic Theory of Status Politics

Political action has a meaning inherent in what it signifies about the structure of the society as well as in what such action actually achieves. We have argued that Prohibition and Temperance have operated as symbolic rather than as instrumental goals in American politics. The passage of legislation or the act of public approval of Temperance has been as significant to the activities of the Temperance movement as has the instrumental achievement of an abstinent society. The agitation and struggle of the Temperance adherents has been directed toward the establishment of their norms as marks of social and political superiority.

The distinction between political action as significant per se and political action as means to an end is the source of the theory underlying our analysis of the Temperance movement. We refer to it as a dramatistic theory because, like drama, it represents an action which is make-believe but which moves its audience. It is in keeping with Kenneth Burke's meaning of dramatism, "since it invites one to consider the matter of motives in a perspective that, being developed from the analysis of drama, treats language and thought primarily as modes of action." It is make-believe in that the action need have no relation to its ostensible goal. The effect upon the audience comes from the significance which they find in the action as it represents events or figures outside of the drama.

Throughout the analysis of Temperance we have referred to the symbolic nature of Temperance goals. Our theory is further dramatistic in its perspective on political action as symbolic action, as action in which "the object referred to has a range of meaning beyond itself."2 As we have pointed out in Chapter 1, this is the literary sense of the symbol as distinguished from the linguistic. It is in this sense that we refer to the flag as a symbol of national glory, to the cross as a symbol of Christianity, or the albatross as a symbol of charity in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

The dramatistic approach has important implications for the study of political institutions. These will be analyzed in this chapter, in the light of our study of the Temperance movement. Governments affect the distribution of values through symbolic acts, as well as through the force of instrumental ones. The struggle to control the symbolic actions of government is often as bitter and as fateful as the struggle to control its tangible effects. Much of our response to political events is in terms of their dramatic, symbolic meaning.

This is especially the case where elements of the status order are at issue. The distribution of prestige is partially regulated by symbolic acts of public and political figures. Such persons "act out" the drama in which one status group is degraded and another is given deference. In seeking to effect their honor and prestige in the society, a group makes demands upon governing agents to act in ways which serve to symbolize deference or to degrade the opposition whose status they challenge or who challenge theirs. We have seen this in the ways that Temperance goals symbolized victory or defeat for the devout native American Protestant.

This view of social status as a political interest enables us to solve some of the ambiguities about noneconomic issues and movements with which we began our study. It also provides us with a useful addition to the economic and the psychological modes of analysis current in the study of political and social movements.

SYMBOLIC ISSUES IN POLITICS

The State and the Public

Following Max Weber, it has become customary for sociologists to define the state as the legitimate monopolizer of force.8 A major defect of this view, however, is that it minimizes the extent to which governments function as representatives of the total society. Other organizations or institutions claim to represent the values and interests of one group, subculture, or collectivity within the total social organization. Government is the only agency which claims to act for the entire society. It seeks its legitimation through the claim that it is effected with a "public interest" rather than with a special, limited set of goals. Much of the effective acceptance of government as legitimate rests upon the supposition that it is representative of the total society, that it has the moral responsibility "to commit the group to action or to perform coordinated acts for its general welfare." 4

The public and visible nature of governmental acts provides them with wider consequences for other institutions than is true of any other area of social life. The actions of government can affect the tangible resources of citizens but they can also affect the attitudes, opinions, and judgments which people make about each other.

It is readily apparent that governments affect the distribution of resources and, in this fashion, promote or deter the interest of economic classes. The passage of a minimum wage law does affect the incomes of millions of laborers and the profits of thousands of owners of capital. The Wagner Labor Relations Act and the Taft-Hartley Act have changed the conditions of collective bargaining during the past 26 years. Tariff laws do influence the prices of products. VVhile these legislative actions may not direct and control behavior as much as was contemplated in their passage, they nevertheless find their raison d'être as instruments which have affected behavior to the delight of some and the dismay of others.

They are instruments to achieve a goal or end through their use.

That governmental acts have symbolic significance is not so readily appreciated, although it has always been recognized. We see the act of recall of an ambassador as an expression of anger between one government and another. We recognize in the standardized pattern of inaugural addresses the gesture toward consensus after the strain of electoral conflict. These acts, of ambassadorial recall and of presidential oratory, are not taken at face value but as devices to induce response in their audiences, as symbolic of anger or of appeal for consensus.

Not only ritual and ceremony are included in symbolic action. Law contains a great deal which has little direct effect upon behavior. The moral reform legislation embodying Temperance ideals has largely been of this nature, as have other reforms, such as those directed against gambling, birth control, and prostitution. The impact of legislation on such problems as civil rights, economic monopoly, or patriotic loyalties is certainly dubious. While we do not maintain that Temperance legislation, and the other legislation cited, has had no effect on behavior, we do find its instrumental effects are slight compared to the response which it entails as a symbol, irrespective of its utility as a means to a tangible end.

Nature of the Symbol

In distinguishing symbolic from instrumental action we need to specify the way in which a symbol stands for something else. It is customary in linguistic analysis to distinguish between "sign" and "symbol." 5 The former points to and indicates objects or experi- ences to our senses. The latter represents objects and events apart from any sensory contacts. Thus the ringing of the doorbell is a sign that someone is at the front door. The word "doorbell" is a symbol, as is the concept of "democracy." Our usage is not linguistic in this sense,6 but literary. We are concerned with the multiplicity of meanings which the same object or act can have for the observer and which, in a society, are often fixed, shared, and standardized. The artist and the writer have developed language and visual art with the use of symbols as major tools of communication. Religious institutions have developed a rich culture around the use of objects whose meanings are symbolic. The wine and wafer of the Mass are but one example of objects which embody a multiple set of meanings for the same person at the same time.

This distinction between instrumental and symbolic action is, in many ways, similar to the difference between denotative and connotative discourse. In denotation, our eyes are on the referent which, in clear language, is the same for all who use the term. Instrumental action is similar in being oriented as a means to a fixed end. Connotative references are more ambiguous, less fixed. The symbol is connotative in that "it has acquired a meaning which is added to its immediate intrinsic significance." 7

It is useful to think of symbolic acts as forms of rhetoric, functioning to organize the perceptions, attitudes, and feelings of observers. Symbolic acts "invite consideration rather than overt action." 8 They are persuasive devices which alter the observer's view of the objects. Kenneth Burke, perhaps the greatest analyst of political symbolism, has given a clear illustration of how a political speech can function rhetorically by the use of language to build a picture contradicting the instrumental effects of political action. For example, if action is proposed or performed which will offend the businessman, language is produced in speeches which glorify the businessman. In this context, language functions to persuade the "victim" that government is not really against him. It allays the fears and "softens the blow." Burke refers to this technique as secular prayer." It is the normal way in which prayer is used, "to sharpen up the pointless and blunt the too sharply pointed." 9

It is not only language which is utilized in symbolic fashion by political agents. Any act of government can be imbued with symbolic import when it becomes associated with noninstrumental identifications, when it serves to glorify or demean the character of one group or another. Ceremony and ritual can become affected with great significance as actions in which the political agent, as representative of the society, symbolizes the societal attitude, the public norm, toward some person, object, or social group. Law, language, and behavior can all function ceremonially. They persuade men to a form of thought or behavior rather than force them to it. "The officer who doubts the obedience of his men may meet the situation by raising his voice, adopting a truculent tone, and putting on a pugnacious swagger." 10 This, too, is a form of rhetoric, of persuasive art.

Types of Political Symbolism

We find it useful to distinguish between two forms of political symbolism: gestures of cohesion and gestures of differentiation. The first type, gestures of cohesion, serve to fix the common and consensual aspects of the society as sources of governmental support. They appeal to the unifying elements in the society and the grounds for the legitimacy of the political institution, irrespective of its specific officeholders and particular laws. They seek to mobilize the loyalties to government which may exist above and across the political conflict of parties, interest groups, and factions. National holidays, inaugural addresses, and the protocols of address and behavior are ways in which the President of the United States attempts this function in his actions and words. The coronation of the monarch in Great Britain represents a highly ritualized method of symbolizing legitimacy."

Gestures of differentiation point to the glorification or degradation of one group in opposition to others within the society. They suggest that some people have a legitimate claim to greater respect, importance, or worth in the society than have some others. In such gestures, governments take sides in social conflicts and place the power and prestige of the public, operating through the political institution, on one side or the other. The inauguration ceremonies of two presidents can be used as illustrations. In his 1953 inaugural, Dwight Eisenhower prefaced his address with a short, personally written prayer. Commenting on this freely, a WCTU officer remarked approvingly, "Imagine that prayer written in the morning in an offhand wayl It's the finest thing we've had in years from a president's lips." This gesture placed government on the side of the traditionalist and the devout and separated it from identification with the secularist and freethinker. In the inaugural of John F. Kennedy, the appearance of the poet Robert Frost was greeted as a symbol of respect and admiration for art, conferring prestige upon the poets by granting them places of honor in public ceremonies.

Such gestures of differentiation are often crucial to the support or opposition of a government because they state the character of an administration in moralistic terms. They indicate the kinds of persons, the tastes, the moralities, and the general life styles toward which government is sympathetic or censorious." They indicate whether or not a set of officials are "for people like us" or "against people like us." It is through this mechanism of symbolic character that a government affects the status order.

STATUS AS A PUBLIC ISSUE

Deference Conferral

In what sense can the prestige of a status group be a matter at issue? Conflicts about the appropriate deference to be shown can, and do, exist. Currently the relations between whites and Negroes in the United States are examples of a status system undergoing intensive conflict. An issue, however, is a proposal that people can be for or against. A public issue has status implications insofar as its public outcome is interpretable as conferring prestige upon or withdrawing it from a status group.

Desegregation is a status issue par excellence. Its symbolic characteristics lie in the deference which the norm of integration implies. The acceptance of token integration, which is what has occurred in the North, is itself prestige-conferring because it establishes the public character of the norm supporting integration. It indicates what side is publicly legitimate and dominant. Without understanding this symbolic quality of the desegregation issue, the fierceness of the struggle would appear absurd. Since so little actual change in concrete behavior ensues, the question would be moot if it were not for this character as an act of deference toward Negroes and of degradation toward whites.

Unlike the desegregation question, many public issues are confrontations between opposed systems of moralities, cultures, and styles of life. Examples of these are issues of civil liberties, international organizations, vivisection, Sunday "blue laws," and the definition and treatment of domestic Communism. Probably the clearest of such issues in American public life has been the one studied in this book, the issue of restrictive or permissive norms governing drinking. Status issues indicate, by their resolution, the group, culture, or style of life to which government and society are publicly committed. They answer the question: On behalf of which ethnic, religious, or other cultural group is this government and this society being carried out? We label these as status issues precisely because what is at issue is the position of the relevant groups in the status order of the society. Such issues polarize the society along lines of status group differentiation, posing conflicts between divergent styles of life. They are contrasted with class issues, which polarize the society along lines of economic interests.°13

Status issues function as vehicles through which a noneconomic group has deference conferred upon it or degradation imposed upon it. Victory in issues of status is the symbolic conferral of respect upon the norms of the victor and disrespect upon the norms of the vanquished. The political institution or public is thus capable of confirming or disconfirming the individual's conception of his place in the social order.14 Such actions serve to reconstitute the group as a social object by heaping shame or honor upon it through the support or rejection displayed toward its tastes, values, and customs. When the indignation of the abstinent toward the drinker is publicly confirmed by prohibitory legislation it is, in Harold Garfinkel's analysis of degradation ceremonies, an act of public denunciation: "We publicly deliver the curse: 'I call upon all men to bear witness that he is not as he appears but is otherwise and in essence of a lower species.' " 15

Symbolic properties of deference and degradation can be involved in a wide range of issues and events. They may be implicated as a major theme in some issues or as a peripheral element in other issues, where the groups and themes are more directly those of specific economic interests. David Riesman and Ruel Denney have given us an excellent analysis of American football as a carrier of symbols which served to heighten the prestige of some social groups at the expense of the degradation of others.16 The victories of Knute Rockne and Notre Dame over the previously championship teams of the Ivy League symbolized the growing social and educational equality of the non-Protestant middle-class Midwest vis-à-vis the Protestant upper-class East. Fans could identify themselves with football teams as carriers of their prestige, whether or not they were college graduates themselves. Knute Rockne was football's equivalent of Al Smith in politics.

Status Interests

Precisely because presage is far from stable in a changing society, specific issues can become structured as tests of status when they are construed as symbols of group moralities and life styles. A civil liberties issue, such as domestic Communism, takes much of its affect and meaning from the clashes between traditionalized and modernist groups in American culture. Elements of educational sophistication, religious secularism, or political liberalism may appear as alien, foreign, and in direct contradiction to the localistic ways of life of the traditional oriented culture. Issues of civil liberties become fields on which such cultural and educational groups fight to establish their claims to public recognition and prestige.

In his analysis of McCarthyism, Peter Vierick has referred to just this kind of process in characterizing the attack on officials in the State Department. Vierick placed one source of this attack in the feeling of degradation which the Midwestern, agricultural, middle class felt at political domination by the aristocracy of the Eastern seaboard, educated at Ivy League schools and so prominent in State Department affairs. They symbolized the State Department personnel as "striped-pants diplomats" and "cookie-pushers." "Against the latter ( the Foreign Service—ed.) the old Populist and La Follette weapon against diplomats of 'you internationalist Anglophile snob' was replaced by 'you egghead security risk.' "17

In the struggle between groups for prestige and social position, the demands for deference and the protection from degradation are channeled into government and into such institutions of cultural formation as schools, churches, and media of communication. Because these institutions have power to affect public recognition, they are arenas of conflict between opposing status groups. Their ceremonial, ritual, and policy are matters of interest for status groups as well as for economic classes.

It is in this sense that status politics is a form of interest-oriented politics. The enhancement or defense of a position in the status order is as much an interest as the protection or expansion of income or economic power. The activities of government, as the most public institutions, confer respect upon a given style of life or directly upon a specific group. For this reason questions of institutional support of tastes, morals, and other aspects of life styles have consequences for the prestige of persons. Where status anxieties exist, they are then likely to be represented in the form of symbolic issues through which they are resolved.

To see that government, as do other institutions, is a prestige-granting agency is to recognize that status politics is neither extraordinary nor an irrational force in American history. Seymour Lipset appears to be quite mistaken when he writes, "Where there are status anxieties, there is little or nothing which a government can do." 18 Governments constantly affect the status order. During the 1930's the Democratic Party won many votes by increasing the number of Jews and Catholics appointed to state and federal judgeships. Such jobs did little to increase the total number of jobs open to these ethnic and religious groups. They did constitute a greater representation and through this a greater recognition of the worth of these groups. In this sense they were rituals of prestige enhancements, just as Andrew Jackson's inauguration symbolized the advent of the "common man" to power and prestige by the fact that rough men in boots strode across the floors of the White House.

It is just this consequence of the Temperance movement for the public designation of respectability that we have seen throughout this study. We have been interested in the efforts of Temperance people to reform the habits of others. While such efforts have indeed been motivated by the desire to perfect others in accordance with the reformer's vision of perfection, they have also become enmeshed in consequences affecting the distribution of prestige. Temperance issues have served as symbols around which groups of divergent morals and values have opposed each other.19 On the side of Temperance there has been the rural, orthodox Protestant, agricultural, native American. On the side of drinking there has been the immigrant, the Catholic, the industrial worker, and the secularized upper class. In more recent years the clash has pitted the modernist and the urbanized cosmopolitans against the traditionalists and the localites, the new middle classes against the old.

When Temperance forces were culturally dominant, the confrontation was that of the social superior. He sought to convert the weaker members of the society through persuasion backed by his dominance of the major institutions. Where dominance of the society is in doubt, then the need for positive governmental and institutional action is greater. The need for symbolic vindication and deference is channeled into political action. What is at stake is not so much the action of men, whether or not they drink, but their ideals, the moralities to which they owe their public allegiance.

POLITICAL MODELS AND STATUS POLITICS 20

Our analysis of symbolic acts has implications for traditional theories of American politics. In attempting to understand political processes and movements sociologists, political scientists, and psychologists have operated with two major models of political motivation. One model has been drawn from economic action and reflects the struggle for economic interests. This model we have designated class politics. The other model has been drawn from clinical psychology and reflects a view of politics as an arena into which "irrational" impulses are projected. The latter model, which we have called psychological expressivism, has been utilized by others to describe movements of status politics. Our use of a model of symbolic action has been intended to distinguish movements of status politics from both economic interest on the one hand, and psychological expressivism on the other. This section of the chapter indicates the implications of our analysis for theoretical political sociology.

Class Politics and the Pluralistic Model

The view of the political process as a balance of economic forces organized as classes has led to a compromise model of political actions. The pluralistic model assumes a multiple number of specific interest groups whose demands conflict with and contradict each other. Farmers, bankers, skilled workers, unskilled workers, and professionals are represented through pressure groups and occupational associations. Political decisions are resultants of the compromises mediated between the various groups in accordance with the distribution of political power. Each group tries to get as much as they can but accepts partial losses in return for partial gains.

Compromise and the model of the political arena as one of mutually cooperating yet antagonistic groups presupposes a "political culture" in which victory and defeat are only end points on a continuum. An expediential attitude of calculation and exchange must govern the trading and bargaining. The language and imagery of compromise is drawn to a considerable extent from the marketplace, where monetary transactions enable interaction to be expressed in measurable quantities and mutual advantages. We "meet people halfway," develop political programs that are "deals," and operate through political parties talked about as "brokers of interests."

The "rules of the game" governing pluralistic politics are sharply antithetical to the "poor loser," the "sorehead," the intolerant ideologue who considers himself morally right and all others morally evil. He cannot accept the legitimacy of an institution in which even partial defeat occurs. For him politics is not a search for benefits in his work and life but a battleground between forces of good and evil. He reacts with passion in ways which contradict the rules of pluralistic politics. He rejects the presupposition that everybody in the political arena has a legitimate right to get something and nobody has a legitimate right to get everything. He typifies the moralizer in politics, described by Riesman and discussed in connection with the contemporary Temperance movement in Chapter 6.

Psychological Expressivism as a Model of Status Politics
The analytical scheme of pluralistic politics is most applicable to movements of class politics and instrumental action. Movements such as Prohibition, civil rights, religious differences, and educational change are puzzles to the sociologist and political scientist precisely because they cannot be analyzed in instrumental terms.

Their goals and major images appear 'irrational" and unrelated to the content of their aims. Being puzzles, a resort is often made to schemes which stress the impulsive, uncontrolled elements of spontaneous and unconscious behavior. Thus Upset writes of status discontents as one source of rightist extremism: "It is not surprising therefore that political movements which have successfully appealed to status resentments have been irrational in character and have sought scapegoats which conveniently serve to symbolize the status threat." 21

The essential idea in psychological expressivism is that the adherence to the movement is explainable as an expression of the adherent's personality. "Thus the mass man is vulnerable to the appeal of mass movements which offer him a way of overcoming the pain of self-alienation by shifting attention away from himself and by focussing it on the movement." 22 Unlike instrumental action, which is about conflicts of interest, the substance of political struggles in expressive politics is not about anything because it is not a vehicle of conflict but a vehicle of catharsis—a purging of emotions through expression. The analysis of politics as expressive takes on the attributes of magic, as in Malinowski's classic definition: "Man, engaged in a series of practical activities, comes to a gap . . . passive inaction, the only thing dictated by reason, is the last thing in which he can acquiesce. His nervous system and his whole organism drive him to some substitute activity." 23

If we utilize only the two models of instrumental actions and psychological expressivism we tend to divide political and social movements into two categories—the rational and the irrational. Status politics, as we have seen in both Lipset and Hofstadter, gets readily classified as "irrational": "Therefore, it is the tendency of status politics to be expressed more in vindictiveness, in sour memories, in the search for scapegoats, than in realistic proposals for concrete action." 24 Between instrumental and expressive politics there is no bin into which the symbolic goals of status movements can be analytically placed. Our usage of symbolic politics is an effort to provide such a bin.

Symbolic Politics and Status Interests

The consequences of interpreting status movements in the language of psychological expressivism is that the analyst ignores the reality of the status conflict. Expressive politics cannot be referred back to any social conflict which is resolved by the action taken. It is not a vehicle through which conflicts are mediated or settled. We have tried to show, in the instance of the Temperance movement, that the attempt to utilize political action was not only expressive but was a way of winning a concrete and very real struggle over the distribution of prestige in American society.

Discontents that arise from the status order are often as sharp and as powerful as those that emerge in the struggles over income and employment. In a society of diverse cultures and of rapid change, it is quite clear that systems of culture are as open to downward and upward mobility as are occupations or persons. Yesterday's moral virtue is today's ridiculed fanaticism. As the cultural fortunes of one group go up and those of another group go down, expectations of prestige are repulsed and the ingredients of social conflict are produced.

The dramatistic approach we have used in this study includes language but is by no means only a linguistic analysis. It is applicable to acts of legislation, such as Prohibition or fluoridation, to court decisions, and to official ceremony. Arguments about symbolic action are real in the sense that men's regard for respect, honor, and prestige is real. We do live in a forest of symbols, and within that forest there is disagreement, conflict, and disorder.

We are not maintaining a symbolic approach to politics as an alternative to instrumental or expressive models. We conceive of it as an addition to methods of analysis but an addition which can best help us understand the implications of status confficts for political actions and, vice versa, the ways in which political acts affect the distribution of prestige. Most movements, and most political acts, contain a mixture of instrumental, expressive, and symbolic elements. The issues of style, which have troubled many social scientists in recent years, have not lent themselves well to political analysis. Those issues which have appeared as "matters of principle" now appear to us to be related to status conflicts and understandable in symbolic terms.

An example of what we have in mind can be seen in the political issues presented by controversies over school curricula in American municipalities. During the 1950's there has been much agitation to force American schools and universities to require more American history or courses on Communism as ways to establish patriotic loyalties among students and oppose Communist doctrine. Observers of American life are likely to deride these actions as pathetic attempts to control a situation with ineffective weapons or denounce such actions as coercion over the content of education. Beneath these programs, however, is the assumption that the school personnel are not succeeding in transmitting some value which the pressure groups feel important. The symbols of "Communism" are related to the cultural conflicts between fundamentalist and modernizing forces in American life, as well as the foreign policy conflicts between Russia and the United States. Cultural conflicts become easily centered upon school curricula because the content of education depends upon cultural assumptions. As our schools are increasingly manned by professionalized, college-trained personnel they come to represent modern, cosmopolitan values against which fundamentalists struggle.25 Whose values shall the school system enunciate? Whose values shall be legitimized and made dominant by being the content of education? The manifest intent of such curricular changes may be inducement of patriotic feeling, but the latent, symbolic issue is not so directly educational. Psychologists may show that the pledge of allegiance every morning has no discernible effect upon patriotic feeling, but this is not the issue as status elements are involved. What such curricular changes "bear witness" to is the domination of one cultural group and the subordination of another. As most educators know, schools are run for adults, not for children. There is more than expression of feeling in such demands. There is an effort to dominate the rituals by which status is discerned.

A political model that ignores symbolic action in politics would exclude an important category of governmental action. It is a major way in which conflicts in the social order are institutionalized as political issues. Groups form around such issues, symbols are given specific meaning, and opposing forces have some arena in which to test their power and bring about compromise and accommodation, if possible. This is precisely what the issues of Prohibition and Temperance have enabled the status groups involved as Wets and Drys to accomplish. Turning status conflicts into political conflicts is precisely what Lasswell seems to have meant when he described politics as "the process by which the irrational bases of society are brought out into the open." 26

Our approach also differs somewhat from that of Murray Edelman, who has been the most salient political scientist to recognize the role of symbolic action in legislative acts. He has pointed out that groups frequently seem satisfied by the passage of legislation, even though the execution of the acts often contradicts the intent of the legislation. This has been true in cases such as antitrust laws, the work of the Federal Communications Commission and other regulatory commissions, and in much civil rights legislation. "The most intensive dissemination of symbols commonly attends the enactment of legislation which is most meaningless in its effects upon resource allocation." ai Edelman's analysis assumes, however, that this discrepancy is a result of the "psychological reassurance" given to such groups that their interests are being protected. We suggest that while this is a credible theory, especially in economic issues, there are some real interests at stake as well.

These can be specified as two different types of ways in which status interests enter into political issues. First, any governmental action can be an act of deference because it confers power on one group and limits some other group. It bolsters or diminishes the claims of a group to differential treatment. Second, the specific status order, as distinct from the constellation of classes, is affected by actions which bear upon styles of life. The issues of Temperance and Prohibition have had particular relevance to the prestige of old and new middle-class ways of life.

We live in a human environment in which symbolic gestures have great relevance to our sense of pride, mortification, and honor. Social conflicts and tensions are manifested in a disarray of the symbolic order as well as in other areas of action. Dismissing these reactions as "irrational" clouds analysis and ignores the events which have significance for people. Kenneth Burke has pointed out the pejorative implications which emerge when noninstrumental usages are described as "magical." He distinguishes between poetic language, which is action for its own sake, scientific language, which is a preparation for action, and rhetorical language, which is inducement to action or attitude. If you think of acts as either magical or scientific there is no place to classify symbolic acts of the kind we have been considering, where an interest conflict is resolved but in noninstrumental symbolic terms. Consequently, a great deal of political activity is dismissed as ritual, magic, or irrational waste when "it should be handled in its own terms as an aspect of what it really is: Rhetoric." 28

THE VOLATILITY OF STATUS POLITICS

Issues invested with status interests are not easily handled by political institutions oriented to the model of a pluralistic class politics. In American politics such issues are likely to be most difficult to regularize within the structure of the American political framework. Their volatile nature is further accentuated by recent changes in American culture and society which make such issues emerge even more explosively than they have in the past.

Status Conflict and the Political Process

It is the issues of morals and style, of religious belief and ethnic loyalties which searchers for political harmony most often implore be kept out of politics. Such pleas are recognition of the intensity with which status loyalties and aspirations prevent the operation of the culture of bargaining, compromise, and detached trading so necessary for a pluralistic politics. The introduction of status issues cuts deeply at the sources of political consensus by converting political questions into moral ones.

The language of status issues, essential to their symbolic import, is the language of moral condemnation. In the confrontation of one culture with another, each seeks to degrade the other and to build its own claims to deference. The sources of conflict are not quantitative ones of the distribution of resources. Instead they are differences between right and wrong, the ugly and the beautiful, the sinful and the virtuous. Such issues are less readily compromised than are quantitative issues. When politicians argue about the definition of sin instead of being uniformly opposed to it, then the underlying political consensus is itself threatened.

The discontents generated by social change become fixed upon groups which are in status opposition. Each becomes the symbol of the other's obstacle in objectifying its view of its proper position. Each seeks to wrest from the other the admission of its place in the order. An issue like fluoridation, for example, carries the status struggle between the culturally modern and cosmopolitan middle classes and the culturally fundamentalist and localistic old middle classes.

The association of an issue with the styles of life of its supporters enhances the tendency of political issues to turn into matters of "face," freezing the adherents to a given program and further diminishing the possibilities of compromise or graceful defeat. When participants have become committed to a "line" which makes retreat and compromise immoral, discontinuance of the stance will be more painful than if they had entered with a bargaining orientation. In the former case, they invested their egos. In part, compromise is possible at all because the parties to the action will help each other maintain the illusion that a victory has been achieved. In human encounters, as Coffman has shown, parties to the interaction help maintain each other's "face." People mutually accept each other's lines—the consistent pattern of acts expressing the actor's evaluation of himself and the participants. The hostess covers over the embarrassment of the guest who has just broken a new and expensive piece of glassware by minimizing the importance of the breakage. She maintains the guest's "face" as a considerate person and permits him to "erase" the act by mumbling apologies. "Should the person radically alter his line, or should it become discredited, then confusion results, for the participants will have prepared and committed themselves for actions that are now unsuitable." 29

Status conflicts, however, involve just such "face-smashing" operations. The pretense that one's values and morals are prestigious and powerful is undermined whenever public actions contradict such assertions. Loss of face becomes degrading. Since status confficts involve opposition between styles of life, it is necessary to break the "face" of the opponent by degrading his cultural content. Ego is invested in status claims and degradation is keenly felt. The inability of the forces of North and South to reach compromise on the eve of the Civil War is a good illustration of how investment in a line made compromise less possible. ". . . after years of strife the complex issues between the sections assumed the form of a conflict between right and rights. . . . They suggested things which cannot be compromised."30

Political Structure and Status Politics

The institutionalization of status conflicts occurs less frequently than the institutionalization of class conflicts. Class organization develops out of stable, institutional positions in the occupational and economic structures. Labor unions, businessmen's associations, professional organizations are constructed on the basis of institutional roles and statuses. The organization of conflict associations is a necessary step in the structuring of conflict relationships. It enables political accommodations to be worked out among contending groups. Institutional ties operate both to promote the formation of pressure groups" and to integrate the occupant into organizations on this basis.

Some historians have recently suggested that American politics has displayed a higher degree of consensus than has been true in Europe.31 The sharp antagonisms between economic and social classes described by Marx have been avoided in the United States, with its higher available level of resources and the absence of a feudal past. Because economic conflicts have been less salient, American politics has been open to the interjection of status issues to a very great degree.32

We lack the techniques to measure accurately the degree to which European politics displays more or less class conflict than American politics. Certainly issues of cultural conflict have often been significant in European politics. ". . . every significant stratum (in Europe) is divided between support for a modern, secular, industrial society and preference for the values, if not the fact, of a clerical, non-industrial order." 88 The presence of a multiple party system, however, enables such elements to be introduced into politics within the structure of political institutions.

In American politics, especially in recent decades, issues involving cultural conflict appear to find less place in the structure of the two-party system than was the case in past historical periods. The designation of either major party as predominantly Catholic or immigrant or the voice of Puritan morality is less accurate today than it might have been in the nineteenth century and even in the first third of the twentieth. The studies of national voting behavior during the last 20 years indicate the saliency of economic differences between Republicans and Democrats and the lack of any sharp relation between party preference and orientations toward such issues as civil liberties, race relations, internationalism, and religious education."

The exclusion of status elements from institutionalized politics imparts an erratic, highly emotional, and disturbing character to such issues when they do find their way into politics. They emerge in highly diffuse forms. The separation of the issue from any specific party location destroys the control of the institution, the political party system, over it. Support in the form of sentiments are just as likely to come from one class as another, from Republicans as well as Democrats. Since status issues are likely to be highly symbolic, the absence of fixed political connotations enables people to provide their own connotations. In this fashion a bewildering array of diverse groups can become attached to any set of symbols when they lack clear location in the political spectrum. Almost every major social segment in the United States has been included by some writer as one of the major supports of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Pro-McCarthyism has been attributed to highly diverse and often conflicting groups, sometimes by the same author. Neo-Populists, Catholics, anti-Catholics, isolationists, downwardly mobile people, upwardly mobile people, Protestant fundamentalists, small businessmen, and industrial workers have all been held "responsible" for McCarthyism.35 This "looseness' is seldom the case with economic issues.

Status constituencies, however, are looser collections of adherents than are economic interest groups. Formed out of sentiments rather than concrete, objectified interests, commitment is less structured. The organization is less able to speak for its constituency, less able to "deal" with opposing groups in the negotiations on which the model of class politics has been built. The constituency of doctors is more clearly represented by the American Medical Association than the constituency of birth control adherents is represented by the Association for Planned Parenthood.

We have pointed out in the previous chapter that the institutional and communal differences of the past are becoming muted in American life. They are replaced by conflict between characterological and cultural groups within the same institution and community. In our terminology, status communities are breaking up and cultural conflicts emerging in the form of status collectivities. This means that the differences in life styles between Protestants and Catholics or between urban and rural people are lessened. Differences between cosmopolitan and local, between fundamentalist and modernist remain but they are not connected to specific institutions, such as the church or the local community.

Ethnic and religious groups are better structured than social classes, generations, or stylistic groups. Catholics, Jews, Negroes, Protestants, Italians, rural people, or urban people possess stable relationships to churches, communities, or political units which serve to structure their relation to the political institutions. The effectiveness of the Anti-Saloon League as a "pressure group" rested on the consensus within the Protestant churches on the Temperance issue. As social and cultural cleavages cease to be superimposed on religious, residential, and communal groups the institutional basis for status group representation is lessened.

The isolation of status collectivities from the political party structure is double-edged. We have seen how it operates to push some elements of the Temperance movement toward an extremist response in political programs. On the other hand, as status communities are less salient as political forces, the volatility of status issues cuts across party lines and minimizes the bitterness of party differences. Had the Democrats been clearly pro-McCarthy and the Republicans clearly anti-McCarthy the issues surrounding his actions would have generated as intense conflict as did the nominations of Al Smith and Abraham Lincoln.

Temperance has receded as an issue of paramount significance in American life. It is highly doubtful that the status conflicts which it represented have disappeared from the American scene. The quest for an honored place in society is likely to persist. Social changes are likely to continue to upset old hierarchies and develop new aspirations. Cultural transformations are to be expected and resistance to them is almost certain. Status politics is neither a new nor a transient aspect of American society.

1 Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1945), p. xxii.

2 M. H. Abrams, quoted in Maurice Beebe (ed.), Literary Symbolism (San Francisco: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1960), p. 18.

3 Max Weber, Theory of Social and Economic Organization, tr. A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 156. "The claim of the modem state to monopolize the use of force is as essential to it as its character of compulsory jurisdiction and of continuous organization." This definition is open both to the objection discussed above and to the inadequacy of singling out "force" as a major method of compulsion. Other institutions compel behavior by effective means other than violence, such as the ecclesiastical controls of a priesthood or the employment powers of management. The phenomena of "private governments" is not included in Weber's definition but the only ground of exclusion which is sociologically significant is the public character of governing bodies.

4 Frances X. Sutton, "Representation and the Nature of Political Systems," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2 (October, 1959), 1-10, at 6. Sutton points out that in primitive societies the political officers are often only representatives to other tribes rather than agents to enforce law.

5 See the discussion of signs and symbols in Susanne K Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (Baltimore, Md.: Penguin Books, 1948), pp. 45-50.

6 Neither is our usage to be equated with the discussion of symbolic behavior used in the writings of the symbolic interaction school of social psychology, best represented by the works of George H. Mead. The idea of symbolic behavior in that context emphasizes the linguistic and imaginative processes as implicated in behavior. It is by no means contrary to our usage of symbols but the context is not specifically literary. The symbolic interactionists call attention to the fact that objects are given meanings by the systems of concept formation. We emphasize one aspect of this process.

7 Talcott Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1954), p. 286.

8 Phillip Wheelwright, The Burning Fountain (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1954), p. 23.

9 Burke, op. cit., p. 393. My debt to Burke's writings is very great. He has supplied the major conceptual and theoretical tools for bridging literary and political analysis. In addition to A Grammar of Motives, see his Attitudes Toward History (Los Altos, Calif.: Hermes Publications, 1959), and Permanence and Change (New York: New Republic, Inc., 1935). Two sociologists, heavily influenced by Burke, have been extremely useful in developing attention to symbolic behavior in the sense used here. They are Erving Coffman, whose works are cited throughout this study, and Hugh D. Duncan, Language and Literature in Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953).

10 Harold Lasswell, "Language of Politics," in Ruth Anshen ( ed.), Language ( New York: Harper and Bros., 1957), pp. 270-284, at 281.

11 Edward Shils and Michael Young have studied the consensual effects of the coronation ceremony in England. See their "The Meaning of the Coronation," Sociological Review, 1, n.s. (December, 1953), 63-81. The use of ritual and ceremony to establish cohesion and social control through historical pagents and holidays in modern society is studied empirically in W. Lloyd Warner, The Living and the Dead (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959), esp. Pts. I and II. These aspects of "political religion" have received comparatively little attention from students of modern societies although most recognize the importance of such rituals and would agree with Hugh Duncan that "Any institution can 'describe' the way it wants people to act but only as it develops rites, ceremonies and symbols for communication through rite in which people can act does it rise to power." Duncan, op. cit., p. 18.

12 Another example of this symbolic process in political issues can be found in the conflicts over city manager plans. Development of city manager government is usually supported by middle-class voters and opposed by the lower socioeconomic groups. The impersonal, moralistic, and bureaucratized "good government" is much closer to standards of conduct typical in middle classes. The machine politician is closer to the open, personalized, and flexible government that represents the lower-class systems of social control. The issue of the city manager poses the two subcultures against each other. One study of the advent of city manager government reported that the first thing the new council did was to take away jobs from Catholic employees and, under merit employment, give them to Protestants. The city manager people celebrated their political victory with a banquet at the Masonic hall. See the discussion in Martin Meyerson and Edward Banfield, Politics, Planning and the Public Interest (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1955), pp. 290-291.

13 Essentially the same distinction is made by students of the voting process. Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee distinguish between issues of style ("ideal" issues) and issues of position ("material" issues). Bernard Berelson, Paul Lazarsfeld, and William McPhee, Voting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), p. 184.

14..    the individual must rely on others to complete the picture of him
. . . each individual is responsible for the demeanour image of himself and deference image of others, so that for a complete man to be expressed, individuals must hold hands in a chain of ceremony, each giving deferentially with proper demeanor to the one on the right what will be received deferentially from the one on the left." Erving Coffman, "The Nature of Deference and Demeanor," American Anthropologist, 58 (June, 1956), 473-502, at 493. Coffman's writings constitute an important discussion of deference and degradation ceremonies in interpersonal interaction. In addition to the article cited above see The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959), and Encounters (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961).

15 Harold Garfinkel, "Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies," American Journal of Sociology, 61 (March, 1956), 420-424, at 421.

16 David Riesman and Ruel Denney, "Football in America," The American Quarterly, 3 (Winter, 1951), 309-325.

17 Peter Vierick, "The Revolt Against the Elite," in Daniel Bell (ed.), The New American Right (New York: Criterion Books, 1955), pp. 91-116, at 103.

18 Seymour Upset, "The Sources of the Radical Right," in ibid., pp. 168-234, at 168.

19 This is evident in Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961), esp. Ch. 9. Benson's work appeared too late to have been used in earlier sections of the book. It provides valuable evidence for the role of moral issues, and especially Temperance, in developing party loyalties in New York state in the 1840's. Using the concept of negative reference groups, Benson shows that economic interests played less of a role than did religious, cultural, and moral differences as influences on voting. Voters tended to see the two major parties as linked to one or another ethnocultural group.

20 Some of the matters discussed in this section are treated in greater detail In my "Mass Society and Extremist Politics," American Sociological Review, 21 (February, 1962), 19-30.

21 Upset, op. cit., p. 168.

22 William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society (Glencoe, M.: The Free Press, 1959), p. 112.

23 Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954; orig. pub., 1925), p. 79.

24 Richard Hofstadter, "The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt," in Bell (ed.), op. cit., pp. 33-55, at 44.

25 For an analysis of one such school controversy in which "Communism," "human relations," "progressive education," and UNESCO were symbols of a feared cosmopolitanism see National Education Association of the United States, The Pasadena Story (Washington, D.C.: National Education Association, 1951). This same use of these symbols is linked to group conflict in many of the speeches and pamphlets of the extreme right wing in the 1950's and early 1960's. They underline the cultural values which are the center of the struggle. One example is the following from a reprinted speech: "Our most dangerous enemies are the thousands and thousands of disguised vermin who crawl all around us and, in obedience to orders from their superiors in the conspiracy, poison the minds of those about them with glib talk about 'social justice,' progressive education,' civil rights,' the social gospel,' one world' and 'peaceful coexistence.' You will find them everywhere: in your clubs, in your schools, in your churches, in your courts." R. P. Oliver, "Communist Influence in the Federal Government," speech to the fifth annual convention of We, the People! Chicago, September, 1959.

26 Harold Lasswell, Psychopathology and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930), p. 184.

27 Murray Edelman, "Symbols and Political Quiescence," American Political Science Review, 54 (September, 1960), 695-704, at 697.

28 Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1950), p. 42.

29 Erving Coffman, "On Face-Work," Psychiatry, 18 (August, 1955), 213- 231, at 218.

30 Avery O. Craven, "The Civil War and the Democratic Process," in Kenneth Stampp (ed.), The Causes of the Civil War (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1959), pp. 150-152, at 152.

31 See the presentation of this point of view with additional references in Benson, op. cit., pp. 272-277.

32 Ibid., p. 275.

33 Seymour Lipset, "Party Systems and the Representation of Social Groups," European Journal of Sociology, 1 (1960), 50-85, at 60.

34 Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee, op. cit., pp. 189 ff.; Samuel Lubell, The Future of American Politics (New York: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1956); Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, and Warren Miller, The American Voter, (New York: John Wiley, 1960), Ch. 9, esp. pp. 194-195.

35 See the array of theories and groups in Bell, op. cit.

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