Kenneth Minogue (1930-2013) The Liberal Mind (1963)
Chapter four: Moral and Political Evasions
III.: How to Make Trends and Influence People
...Somewhere between those responsible for policy in a society, who live in a world of speculations about the future, and those who care for nothing except their immediate and local life, there is a large class whose interest in social and political problems lacks the anchorage of direct responsibility. They are eager to do the right thing, and have been taught that their duty is to take an interest in world affairs.
Normally they lack experience of these matters, and often their education has not made them discriminating about the printed word. They are, indeed, a valuable section of the community and they are not the least effective of checks on government. Perhaps for this reason they often have an ingrained suspicion of politicians, yet their own political judgments are wildly erratic. They are decent, sympathetic and idealistic. They are at present the main bearers of liberalism.
...No one would deny that these are important questions opening up explosive political and social possibilities; but for most of the inhabitants of western countries they are vicarious ones. Short of disrupting his normal life (which he is not usually prepared to do), the average man can do very little about them. But feeling a compulsion to act, he chooses substitute acts-passing resolutions, going to meetings, writing letters to papers-and imagines that he is “doing something about it.” This type of mind is found most prevalently, though by no means exclusively, in the political tradition of liberalism.