JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Wed, This article argues that recent instances of cultural conflict in the United States are part of a single, historically distinctive trend likely to intensify in the future. Recent cultural conflict springs in part from growing competition for cultural capital between dominant and subordinate racial groups in the United States. This article analyzes this conflict, treating its chief symbolic expression-"multiculturalism"-as a form of subordinate resistance to dominant group power. This article concludes that the uncertain outcome of cultural conflict in the United States reveals the absence currently of white ideological hegemony in American society.I would like to thank Michael Olneck, Crawford Young, Donald Culverson, and Clarence Stone for comments on earlier drafts of this article.

“Myself, I get confused. The President tells ya that he don't want no war, it's peace. You pick up a paper, they're bombing children. And television, the guys being interviewed, talking about peace, and the picture shows where the women and children are being bombed and slaughtered and murdered. How long if I think that way and I have had a bad feeling, how long will other people that their mentality's not strong enough, to separate the cause of it? Fear. What's gonna happen to our kids, our grandchildren?“Lotta them are afraid of their jobs, losing their jobs. Because the government's maybe got some contract with some company. For example, we got one fellow here works with the government, with this here carbonic gas or whatever it is. If he opens his mouth up too much, he can lose his job. And the senators or congressmen, they personally don't take interest in their own country, right here, what's going on.“The colored. We had a tavern on 61st and State, three and a half years, Negro neighborhood. I tell you I never was insulted no place by not a Negro person over there. They respected me highly. It took a white fella to come in and insult me because I wouldn't serve him beer, he was too drunk. And if it wasn't for these poor Negro fellas, I'd a probably killed this man. (Laughs) Because he called me a dirty name.”

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This paper examines the theory of political legitimacy through the framework of psychological learning theory and the theory of cognitive dissonance. The concepts of primary and secondary reinforcement in cases of learning permit a general understanding of the growth of positive affect toward a political system. Cognitive dissonance theory allows us to understand how this general positive affect built up by a regime's actions produces the sub-set of attitudes called political legitimacy. In order to build a theory of political legitimacy on these foundations, it is necessary to conceive of government policy-making as a case of producing successful learning throughout a population.The diffuse, largely irrational nature of political legitimacy has made it difficult for political scientists to handle the concept systematically. That systems are or are not “legitimate” has been asserted numerous times, though often the precise definition of legitimacy employed has been at best vague and the indices of legitimacy unclearly stated. This paper attempts to meet the problem by setting forth a theory and a set of implicit indices of political legitimacy. After the general model has been explicated, I will specify several problems in the manipulation of political legitimacy. Finally, I will look at the relationship of governmental structure to these problems.Before consideration of the model two preliminary tasks must be performed: a definition of legitimacy and justification for discussing it. We may define political legitimacy as the quality of “oughtness” that is perceived by the public to inhere in a political regime.

The process of inquiry occasionally exhibits a dialectical pattern in which a series of assertions is advanced and then attacked. A third phase, which consists of an attempt to salvage the first set of assertions, often ensues. The study of American community power has followed this sequence almost classically, and today we find ourselves in the third phase of the dialectic. The first period marked the contemporary emergence of community power as a distinct field of study, mainly through the investigations of Hunter, Mills and their followers. These observers contended that communities were controlled by “elites,” usually economic, who imposed their will, often covertly, on non-elites. The second phase was marked by the challenge of another group of observers, the “pluralists.” Pluralists contended that the methods and premises of the “elitists” predisposed them to conclusions about community power which were unjustified. Elitists commonly reached their conclusions either by investigating the reputations for power of various members of the community or merely by assuming that all who possessed certain presumed sources of power were in fact powerful. The pluralists claimed that reputations did not guarantee control and demanded evidence that community decisions on political issues, major and minor, were controlled by a reputed elite. The pluralists, after studying community decisions on a variety of subjects, concluded that shifting coalitions of participants drawn from all areas of community life actually controlled local politics. Rarely could a single elite be discovered imposing itself in each area of decision, policy, and conflict.Many observers felt that the pluralists had won the day. Their methodology studied actual behavior, stressed operational definitions, and turned up evidence. Most important, it seemed to produce reliable conclusions which met the canons of science. Recently, however, new considerations have been introduced which intend to prop up the elitist Humpty Dumpty on a more substantial wall of theory than the one from which it had previously tumbled. The beginnings of a new position on community power appear in the work of those responsible for the third phase, the “neo-elitists,” as I shall call them. That position forms the subject of this analysis.