Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order.

The same historical development that turned the citizen into a client transformed the worker from a producer into a consumer.

It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.

Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family; their defense of families carries no conviction.

Conservatives unwittingly side with the social forces that contribute to the destruction of traditional values.

We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle-class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition.

We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.