When watching the drama of politics, Americans, the journalist Walter Lippmann once remarked, tend to arrive in the middle of the third act and leave before the curtain falls, staying just long enough to determine who the heroes and villains are, and little else. Although Lippmann had a poor opinion of Americans' attention span, he did not dismiss the role that socio-economics played in shaping their domestic and foreign policy attitudes. When the Los Angeles Times newspaper building was bomb...
