The Confidence Gap: Business, Labor, and Government in the Public Mind By Seymour Martin Lipset and William Schneider Free Press, 434 pp., $19.95
The authors are among the country’s top political scientists, cartographers of the public mind in America. What they have to say on the basis of their examination of survey data concerning the beliefs and perceptions of the American people is important. They are asking the most pressing question that all polities must answer each day, as if, to use Renan’s phrase, by a daily plebiscite: Is there a legitimacy crisis in the United States?
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