In the meantime, increased governmental intervention and deliberate social engineering - the latter derived from "theories" of social change and development - created a blend of operational incompetence, crosscutting group conflicts, social indifference, and political complexity that made for both a breakdown of political consensus and the alienation of the younger generation. Having finally obtained a unique oppertunity to do much of what he had long aspired to do, the pragmatic liberal discovered that his intellectual arsenal, derived from a highly succesful response to the crisis of an advanced industrial society, was exhausted; the doctrinaire liberal - confident that he had the right remedies and theory, impatient with the seeming conservatism of the more pragmatic power practitioner, and ambivalent toward the anarchism and the totalitarianism of the New Left - undermined the liberal's base of support by destroying public confidence in the liberal's commitment to liberal democracy.
Another threat, less overt but no less basic, confronts liberal democracy. More directly linked to the impact of technology, it involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled and directed society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite whose claim to political power would rest on allegedely superior scientific know-how. Unhindered by the restraints of traditional liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control. Under such circumstances, the scientific and technological momentum [...] would not be reversed but would actually feed on the situation it exploits. The emergence of a large dominant party, alongside the more narrowly focused and more intensly doctrinaire grouping on the right and the left could accelerate the trend toward such technological managerialism.
[...] In different ways, both the doctrinarian and the conservative might find the temptations inherent in the new techniques of social control too difficult to resist. The inclination of the doctrinaire left to legitimize means by ends could lead them to justify more social control on the ground that it serves progress. The conservatives, preoccupied with public order and fascinated by modern gadgetry, would be tempted to use the new techniques as a response to unrest, since they would fail to reconize that social control is not the only way to deal with rapid social change.
Fragment uit Between Two Ages, Zbigniew Brzezinski, 1970, p.94 & p.97
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
H. L. Mencken
