In a tribal all-at-once culture, the idea of the “public” as a differentiated agglomerate of fragmented individuals, all dissimilar but all capable of acting in basically the same way, like interchangeable mechanical cogs in a production line, is supplanted by a mass society in which personal diversity is encouraged while at the same time everybody reacts and interacts simultaneously to every stimulus. The election as we know it today will be meaningless in such a society.

As long as concentrations of men and capital were avoided, Jefferson claimed, American democracy would automatically follow different laws from that of any previous human society, because all previous politics had grown up in consequence of a scarcity of land, and hence concentration of political power. But now all men could be free, he thought, just as long as they allowed their social and political lives to be the automatic expression of small ownership.