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THE NEW-STYLE INDIFFERENT is an other-directed type. In a Vermont town, interviewers found that the older generation had inner-directed attitudes toward politics; they knew quite a lot; they thought they could influence political causes (and some felt guilty because they did not). The younger generation contained many new-style indifferents, "who know enough about politics to reject it, enough about political information to refuse it, enough about their political responsibilities as citizens to evade them." Riesman believes that more than half the adults in the U.S. are Indifferents—Old Style or New Style.
THE INSIDE-DOPESTER is an other-directed type who in political style is just the opposite of the inner-directed indignant. The inside-dopester knows, but he doesn't care. (High competence, low affect.) Riesman takes his text for the inside-dopesters from St. Paul, Acts 17:21: "(For all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new things)."
One subdivision of this species wants to be on the inside. With his competence, his sensitive other-directed radarscope, he can rise quite high in government. But his style, even at high levels, will be as a consumer of inside information, not a producer of policy.
Another variety of inside-dopester wants to know the inside dope because it helps him get status and approval in his peer group. Inside-dopesters frequently change the content of their politics in response to changed fads in their peer groups.
The New Tribunes. When indignants, who are interesting and exciting from the viewpoint of the political consumer, find a good show that will pull the indifferents into active politics, an explosive political crisis may arise. But there are dangers short of explosion—and they may be as serious. Riesman finds much of current politics turning around "the Veto groups," which are much more clear about what they don't want than about where they want the society to go.
Contemporary veto groups—ethnic, sectarian, regional, occupational—are more shapeless and more numerous than the old American interest groups, which had clear ideas about their goals. The new ones spread their pressures beyond the field of politics into, for instance, movie censoring. Their leadership is heavy with inside-dopesters. Their membership ranks are swelled by new-style indifferents, driven thence by well-meaning moralizers, who are always railing at the indifferents for not taking part in politics. Anxious to conform, the indifferent finds a group— but remains at heart an indifferent. Vetogroup leaders can manipulate the indifferents, but usually for negative, not positive, ends. "By their very nature," says Riesman, "the veto groups exist as defense groups, not as leadership groups." Each group has "a power to stop things conceivably inimical to its interests, and, within far narrower limits, a power to start things."