Posts Tagged ‘Wilfred McClay’

“Democracy and its Phantoms: Walter Lippmann and the Pathologies of Popular Democracy”

The 2008 presidential election has made us think afresh about the proper place of popular and elite opinion in American politics. It isn’t the first time the questions have arisen, and it won’t be the last. How is public opinion created, detected, measured, and managed? How much weight should be given to the perspectives of candidates who claim to speak for non-elite voters, or embody non-elite attitudes? How much should a democracy be required to defer to the vox populi, and how much to the voice of expertise? And what do we do when our elites seem unwise or untrustworthy? Doesn’t a democracy empower its citizens to ask that impertinent question, “Says who?”

Such questions come up regularly, and have ever since the very beginnings of the American experiment. They have been a fixture of our national life since the days of Andrew Jackson, and have been the object of reflection for countless pundits and scholars. But no one had more to say about them than Walter Lippmann, one of the great American journalists of the twentieth century, and a man far less well known today than he should be.

Indeed, there is good reason to think that Lippmann’s work may come to be seen as even more important and influential in the years to come. As Americans continue to struggle with the prospects and problems of their experiment in mass democracy, Lippmann’s fearless criticism of modern American democracy may serve as an increasingly valuable intellectual touchstone in contemporary debate, where the disparaging term “elitist” has too often served as the ultimate trump card and conversation-stopper. Even if Francis Fukuyama had been right in asserting that all the ideological alternatives to liberal democracy in our time were exhausted—surely a temporary state of affairs, at most—an awareness of the pathologies of democracy suggests the a continuing need for frequent and sustained democratic self-criticism.

Although the gloomy and demythologized view of democracy found in Lippmann’s The Phantom Public is hardly likely to convert mainstream American public opinion—such a development being unlikely virtually by definition—it preserves a serious and distinctive intellectual option, one with sympathetic resonances and precursors in the American past. The first epigraph of The Phantom Public, questioning the wisdom of the adage Vox populi, vox Dei, suggests an even more influential intellectual provenance: the antidemocratic skepticism of Alexander Hamilton, and the antidemotic fears of so many of the continental-minded men who drafted and campaigned for the U.S. Constitution.

Such historical continuity is not in itself a sufficient argument for Lippmann’s importance. But the astonishing contemporary relevance of much of his work is. Sentences and paragraphs out of The Phantom Public could be lifted, unchanged, out of their context and be republished on the editorial pages of one of today’s great American newspapers, where they might well win a Pulitzer for the plagiarist intrepid enough to appropriate them. (For instance, the book’s first nine pages, which comprise a chapter entitled “The Disenchanted Man,” can easily be mined for observations that seem to speak directly to the discontent of much of the current American electorate.) Moreover, Lippmann’s cool, analytical acuity and complete eschewal of moral posturing should forestall any dismissive charge against him of self-interested elitism, moss-backed crankishness, or crypto-legitimism. As those who have read Public Opinion can attest, Lippmann’s discussion of stereotypes and propaganda in the modern mass-communications media, written at a time when radio was in its infancy and television little more than a pipedream, has hardly been improved upon by eight decades’ worth of subsequent writers, who had the advantage of observing those media in full operation.

The Phantom Public is arguably an even more valuable text, precisely because it was the clearest, pithiest, and most full-throated expression of Lippmann’s crystallizing skepticism. Perhaps it was for that very reason that The Phantom Public disappeared from print so rapidly, and has remained so until now. Though it was acceptable, and even amusing, for a semicomic literary virtuoso like H.L. Mencken to mouth disdain for democracy and public opinion, such opinions were quite another matter coming from a man of Lippmann’s reputed probity and wide influence. Lippmann himself came to suspect, before publication, that an untoward fate might lie in store for the book. Although he had written it as a shorter and more popularly aimed sequel to Public Opinion, which had enjoyed considerable intellectual and popular success, Lippmann worried that the more pointed and damning argument of The Phantom Public would get him in trouble, and even see him “put on trial for heresy by my old friends on The New Republic.”

The [book's] argument, for all its bleakness, deserved a better hearing than it got…. [M]ost reviewers were disheartened by its seeming pessimism. The Phantom Public soon went out of print, and in the years since has been virtually forgotten. This neglect is unfortunate, for it is one of Lippmann’s most powerfully argued and revealing books. In it he came fully to terms with the inadequacy of traditional democratic theory.

Indeed, no better testimony to the power and importance of The Phantom Public can be found than the seriousness and admiration with which it was read (and reviewed in the pages of the New Republic) by John Dewey, who was so stimulated by it that he went on to write one of his most ringing and durable defenses of democracy, The Public and Its Problems (1927), as an attempt at rebuttal. As it turns out, many of the contemporary reviews of The Phantom Public were unqualified raves, quite as favorable as Steel’s retrospective one. Harold Lasswell enthused over its “cogent and spirited qualities.” Another reviewer called it “a champion’s performance” by a “dynamiter of fallacious doctrines of government and exploder of specious political arguments.” Yet another proclaimed that The Phantom Public, like Public Opinion, “will become one of the modern classics of American political thought. And it is a book that will be read and reread for pure delight in its rare literary quality.”

The influential Senator William E. Borah, writing in the New York World, went so far as to call it “one of those rare books which startles one into a realization of how stupendous is the task before us as a people if we are to carry to a successful conclusion the work initiated in 1789.” Given this degree of favorable reception, the mystery of The Phantom Public’s phantom-like disappearance from public sight seems even harder to fathom. Perhaps the only plausible answer is the most obvious one: that the challenges it poses, and the implications of those challenges for the conduct of practical politics, have proved too unpleasant or difficult for even its most ardent admirers—or at any rate those less well-equipped than John Dewey—to face in a sustained manner.

It is not coincidental, then, that the debate with Dewey provides us a useful point of departure in exploring Lippmann’s aims in writing The Phantom Public. No concept, after all, had been more central to the Progressive vision of social reform than that of “the public”; the efforts to tame special interests which so often animated Progressive reform were always undertaken in the name of “the public interest,” and it was generally assumed that such a thing as the “public” existed, and that its “interest” could be ascertained. Indeed, the term “disinterested,” which is, significantly, so frequently misunderstood and misused in our own time, carried a powerfully ethical, indeed almost religious, weight in Progressive social thought—for no word was freighted with greater negative import in the vocabulary of Progressivism than the noun “Interests.” A favorite term of abuse for muckraking journalists, “the Interests” not only stood for the specific venality of Standard Oil and the other “trusts,” or for other self-interested groups. In a deeper sense it came to stand for the pernicious values of individualism, particularism, self-seeking, and growing social inequality: for everything that threatened to corrupt the great American experiment in political democracy.

“Disinterestedness” stood for a contrasting vision of hope, of common subjection to the rule of the common good: an unsullied ideal of theoretical and practical expertise, to be administered conscientiously, impartially, and selflessly by an enlightened “new middle class” trained in the burgeoning new research universities. In such places, this new knowledge class would be versed in the scientific and action-oriented knowledge needed to produce a just and rationally ordered public realm. Such a new middle class would not be imprisoned by the shortsighted pursuit of self-interest, or the false individualism of classical-liberal economics; it would instead be bound by the self-regulating and rational autonomy of professional organizations, and the uncorrupted social altruism of those trained to identify the public interest and pursue the common weal.

The ideal of science was no less crucial to Lippmann than to Dewey. But Dewey trusted that the inherent democracy of science—since science was by its very nature no respecter of persons or of untestable sources of authority—would make it eminently compatible with democracy; indeed, the only form of authority ultimately so compatible. The key link between science and democracy in the Deweyan scheme was the concept of the “public” as an ideal point of convergence and interaction. Without the distinctive assumption of a “public interest,” which could be articulated through institutions of political democracy and clarified through the disinterested resources of scientific intelligence, the essential moral core of the Progressive strain of political and social thought would collapse. There had to be something called a public, and it had to have an identifiable interest, distinguishable from that of any of its constituent elements. Social science not only possessed the capacity to reveal that interest, but the authority to show the citizen how the public interest was also his own.

Lippmann had held to such views when a younger man. No one had written a more eloquent brief for the scientific ideal as a basis for cultural authority in a post-religious democratic era than Lippmann’s Drift and Mastery (1914), a book whose title nouns became transformed into bywords for the stark dilemmas facing the era. But Lippmann’s restless intelligence, always alert to the flow of events, had quickly moved beyond the confines of its youthful productions. And in the wake of the First World War’s many disappointments for Progressives, particularly the Wilson Administration’s heavyhanded use of domestic propaganda and curtailment of civil liberties to impose univocal public support for the war effort, his view of democratic governance and its connection with the ethos of science changed dramatically. In Public Opinion he argued that, because citizens in a modern mass democracy made decisions strictly on the basis of media-generated stereotypes, experts would have to be brought into the process, to control and adjust the flow of information to the public in order to keep the “pictures in their heads” in line with realities that only an expert few could properly understand. The domestic wartime propaganda emanating from the Creel Committee had taught Lippmann how frighteningly plastic and manipulable public opinion was. The only sensible solution to the problem was to attempt to assert rational mastery over it. But by 1925 Lippmann’s doubts had deepened considerably.

The opening pages of The Phantom Public even echo some of the quintessential gestures of Twenties postwar intellectual disillusionment, a la Hemingway and Fitzgerald. He depicted the unillusioned reconsiderations of the “disenchanted man” in terms so vivid that it seems likely that he was in part describing himself, and declaring his own somewhat jaundiced “farewell to reform”:

“For when the private man has lived through the romantic age in politics and is no longer moved by the stale echoes of its hot cries, when he is sober and unimpressed, his own part in public affairs appears to him a pretentious thing, a second rate, an inconsequential. You cannot move him then with a good straight talk about service and civic duty, nor by waving a flag in his face, nor by sending a boy scout after him to make him vote. He is a man back home from a crusade to make the world something or other it did not become; he has been tantalized too often by the foam of events, has seen the gas go out of it.”

But more than his mood had changed in The Phantom Public, so too had his substantive concerns about the limitations of democracy. Not only was it inconceivable to him that the average voter was capable of governance—such being the untenable democratic myth of what Lippmann called “the sovereign and omnicompetent citizen”—but it now seemed to him that there was really no such thing as the public. What was called the public was merely a “phantom”; to the extent that there was a genuine and effective public, it was to be defined ad hoc, situationally and operationally, simply as “those persons who are interested in an affair.” As for the grand claims of expertise, on whose behalf Lippmann had formerly spoken with such conviction, these too began to be severely circumscribed; the important distinction was not that between experts and amateurs, but that between “insiders” and “outsiders,” those with firsthand knowledge in a particular affair or circumstance, and those without such knowledge.

Lippmann’s assault was directed, both here and in Public Opinion, towards more than mere naive democratic sentimentalism. It was addressed to the very core of Progressive politics, and by extension to any conception of politics that was holistic and systemic, that spoke in the false terminology of a “body politic,” and sought to coordinate political decision-making according to a model of an operating whole. In this new post-Progressive realist and pluralist dispensation, men were denied the fraudulent support of the fiction that they are agents of a common purpose. They are regarded as agents of special purposes, without pretense and without embarrassment. They must live in a world with men who have other special purposes. The adjustments which must be made are society….When men take a position in respect to the purposes of others they are acting as a public.

Generally, the central problem for decision-making in a democratic society had been understood as that of finding a way to keep the citizenry informed, so that they could correctly assess and address the issues facing a complex and interconnected modern society. But Lippmann held out little hope for this standard bromide of civics textbooks; any such “appeal to education as the remedy for the incompetence of democracy,” he asserted, is “barren.” The Poloniuses who authored such tomes seemed unaware that even under the best of conditions, “the citizen gives but a little of his time to public affairs, has but a casual interest in facts and but a poor appetite for theory.” And the eager-beaver citizen who attempts earnestly to look to all his prescribed duties, from the upkeep of a subway in Brooklyn to the rights of Britain in the Sudan, will end up “as bewildered as a puppy trying to lick three bones at once,” for he “cannot know all about everything all the time, and while he is watching one thing a thousand others undergo great changes.” Such omnicompetence was an unattainable ideal, the “mystical fallacy of democracy,” and a false, pernicious, and disenchanting one at that.

Had he taken a position no further than this, Lippmann might well have earned dismissal as an elitist. But he had a good deal more to say. If the common man was not, contra the American democratic tradition from Jefferson to Bryan, a font of untutored wisdom competent to decide all things, or at least educable to that station, then neither, Lippmann asserted, was the expert. The modern interconnected world, the Great Society, was far too complex to be comprehended by anyone, even by experts. For expertise was only authoritative in relation to some particular subject or task—and no more. Efforts at a comprehensive understanding of, and coordination of, polity and economy could never move much beyond the condition of the proverbial blind men examining the elephant; their local and special knowledge could not be reliably extrapolated or transferred to a comprehensive map, a structural whole. “The work of the world is carried on,” he explained,

“by men in their executive capacity, by an infinite number of concrete acts, plowing and planting and reaping, building and destroying, fitting this to that, going from here to there, transforming A into B and moving B from X to Y.”

Such work is regulated by “a most intricate mechanism of exchange, of contract, of custom and of implied promises,” all of them highly particular in nature. To allow any single authority to attempt the governance of all these matters was extremely ill-advised.

But to turn such authority over to public opinion was an even worse mistake, ensuring either abject failure or complete tyranny. There was a simple reason for this: the sovereignty of the people was a pure fiction. Standard democratic theory refused to recognize that “the functioning of government” was distinct from “the will of the people.” The latter is itself merely a reification of the particular decisions that, for prudential reasons of orderly governance, needed to be put to the people collectively for adjudication. The public does not, properly speaking, express its opinion; it merely aligns itself for or against a person or proposition. The people do not govern; they merely “support or oppose the individuals who actually govern.” The “popular will” only intervenes occasionally, to counteract willful and arbitrary force through its alignment choices.

The principal positive use of public opinion then, he believed, was in times of crisis— a reflection which suggests how fundamentally conservative were his expectations for public opinion’s radically stripped-down role. Public opinion would “align men during the crisis of a problem in such a way as to favor the action of those individuals who may be able to compose the crisis.” Clearly, abstract questions of justice, legitimacy, ultimate values, and so on, did not figure into this formula in the slightest; it was an equilibrist vision of a polity composed of countless competing pieces, and the purpose of governance was to sustain the highest possible level of order and peace. Order and legitimacy were virtually exchangable terms. Public opinion was useful merely as a final court of appeal, useful at those times when government exhausted its ability to resolve a conflict and avert ongoing social or political discord. (Even an election, Lipp-mann asserted, was nothing more than a sublimated form of civil war, its majoritarianism a close cousin to the use of brute force.) The telos of modern politics is the achievement of a workable modus vivendi among competitive interests, since premodern (and Progressive) notions of a bridge between man’s environment and his (limited) political capacity no longer seem tenable.

Lippmann instead posited a “deep pluralism” as the inescapable condition placed upon all future modern political and economic speculation. The political thinker, he declared, should “no longer expect to find a unity which absorbs diversity,” but instead, rather than “looking for identity of purposes” should settle for “an accommodation of purposes.”

Such contentions show how fully Lippmann participated in the demystifying anti-formalism of the generation of Charles Beard, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thorstein Veblen, and John Dewey. His notions of rights and duties, for example, were Holmesian and “realistic”: a right was “a promise that a certain kind of behavior will be backed by the organized force of the state”; a duty was “a promise that failure to respect the rights of others in a certain way will be punished.” Persistent beliefs that these things needed grounding in nature or divine fiat were little more than “tiresome illusions.” But Lippmann pressed his anti-formalist convictions into new territory, prying the individual away from his social matrix. By mercilessly smashing the unitary Progressive notion of “the public” into its multivalent constituent elements, Lippmann opened the way to a post-Progressive conception of politics as a “realistic” process of brokering an openly interest-based pluralism, a politics with no higher conception of the public interest than, as in the subtitle of Harold Lasswell’s 1936 book Politics, “who gets what, when, and how”—or E.E. Schattschneider’s dry observation that public policy was merely “the result of ‘effective demands’ upon the government,” or Thurman Arnold’s jaded conclusion that public debate over matters of political principle or value was little more than the play of useful mythologies and “magic words.”

Dewey meant The Public and Its Problems as a direct and respectful attempt to answer Lippmann’s mounting pessimism (and growing influence), and defend the democratic promise that was at the heart of American civil religion. It valiantly held to the belief that the public was no phantom, but something quite real, though currently “in eclipse.” The chief problems of “the public” revolved around the current lack of shared symbols (”intellectual instrumentalities for the formation of an organized public,” in Deweyese) and inadequate communication of the “numerous, tough and subtle” bonds “which hold men together in action,” whether or not they are fully conscious of it. Without them, he conceded, “the public will remain shadowy and formless, seeking spasmodically for itself, but seizing and holding its shadow rather than its substance.”

Until “the Great Society is converted into a Great Community,” wrote Dewey, “the Public will remain in eclipse.” Such a response to Lippmann’s skepticism, however, was far too abstract, even oddly idealistic in diction, to dispose of the problem. In the same year, Lippmann would write that “the more or less unconscious and unplanned activities of businessmen are for once more novel, more daring and in a sense more revolutionary, than the theories of the progressives.” Few more deliberately insulting rebukes to Deweyan intelligence, or more defiant apostasies from the faith of Herbert Croly and The New Republic, could be imagined.

The process begun in The Phantom Public continued to unfold for the remainder of the decade. By 1929, Lippmann’s post-Progressive reaction had deepened even further, and borne fruit in his Preface to Morals (1929), which became a best-seller and Book-of-the-Month Club selection. That magisterial work echoed and restated the great theme Lippmann had been building upon for a decade and a half: the erosion of traditional forms of authority by the “acids of modernity,” and the difficulty of finding substitutes for them. Even the cultural authority of science, so central to Dewey, had been called into question for Lippmann: partly by the relativism of Einsteinian phys-ics (Darwinism, which had been the source of Dewey’s fundamental philosophical method, was now, Lippmann asserted, “outmoded”), which presented man with a bewildering physical universe wholly incommensurable with his inner life; and partly through a growing awareness of science’s inherent limitations.

On the latter point, Lippmann began with Charles Peirce’s work on the social construction of scientific truth, and then went on to draw the devastating conclusion, training the anti-formalist armory on science itself: “When we say that something has been ‘explained’ by science, we really mean only that our own curiosity is satisfied.” As it advances, we see that scientific explanation “does not yield a certain picture of anything which can be taken naively as a representation of reality,” but only “provisional dramatizations which are soon dissolved by the progress of science itself.” Science was little more than a bag of elaborated and disciplined metaphors, applied variously to an ungraspable reality. Therefore, he concluded, a religion of “scientific materialism has nothing in it, except the pretension that it is a true account of the world”; scientific explanations “cannot give men such a clue to the plan of existence as they find in popular religion.”

A prolegomenon to morals could begin by ruling out any scientific discovery and testing of moral principles. Science, in a word, could not tell us how to live. All that was left, believed Lippmann, with all other supports teetering, was a highly ascetic understanding of the principle of “disinterestedness” itself, attached to a doctrine of “humanism” arising out of the phenomenology of human life, and directed towards the purification and discipline of the individual will. The “ideal of disinterestedness,” he asserted, is “inevitable in the modern world”; for only it can “untangle the moral confusion of the age.” Disinterestedness in fact was the still-living “core of high religion,” the “central insight of the teachers of wisdom” such as Jesus, Buddha, and Confucius.

Such disinterestedness was still present in science; indeed, “pure science is high religion incarnate,” and one of the greatest services of science was its value as a school of disinterestedness, which “matures the human character” and teaches us not to regard “our desires, tastes, and interests as affording a key to the understanding of the world.” The modern world had seemed to teach men that emancipation from the old authorities meant they could at last pursue their passions without restraint, and thereby achieve happiness. But the lesson Lippmann drew was very different: we needed to learn to detach ourselves, not only from the tyranny of “public opinion,” but from the force of our own desires.

Disinterestedness, detachment, asceticism, discipline, and disillusion; such then were the guiding spirits of the Preface. Lippmann had indeed come a long way, by the end of the twenties, from his days as a habitué of Mabel Dodge’s Greenwich Village salon, an editor of Herbert Croly’s New Republic, an apostle of progressive Mastery, and a believer in the malleability of human nature. Indeed, Lippmann’s ascetic ideal sounded more reminiscent of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra than of Progressive reformers like Croly, who had also placed great stress upon the value of disinterestedness. But Lippmann’s disinterestedness now subserved a severely individual (and frankly elitist) worldview; it was “a mountain track which the many are likely in the future as in the past to find cold, bleak, and bare.” The ideal man must “take the world as it comes, and within himself remain quite unperturbed. . . . He would face pain with fortitude, for he would have put it away from the inner chambers of his soul. Fear would not haunt him.”

Such heroic accents contrasted strikingly with the anti-individualist, self-sacrificial, corporative ethos that writers from Edward Bellamy to Richard Ely to John Dewey had hoped a standard of the “public interest” might promote. Not that notions of the public interest or of a consolidated and unified national community suddenly expired. They lived on and comprised one of the intellectual strains in the tangled history of the New Deal, visible, for example, in the efforts of the National Recovery Administration, or in the Civilian Conservation Corps, or in President Franklin Roosevelt’s frequent invocation of the analogue of warfare—the ultimate unifying, self-transcending clarion call. Such thoughts have continued to appear regularly in the rhetoric of American politicians; one thinks, for example, of President Jimmy Carter’s 1979 “crisis of confidence” speech, in which he warned that the nation had embraced “a mistaken idea of freedom” and was heading down the path of “fragmentation and self-interest.” Carter urged that Americans instead “rebuild the unity and confidence of America,” because only by following the “path of common purpose” could we come into an experience of “true freedom.”

Yet it is perhaps an unanticipated legacy of works like The Phantom Public, and more generally of the “realist” approach to political analysis it exemplified and pioneered, that such appeals to common purpose have fallen increasingly upon deaf ears, as Carter’s case so conspicuously demonstrated. In a society that has increasingly come to embrace deep pluralism as normative, and instinctively suspects any appeal to founding principles, common culture, and common purpose as a snare set by would-be hegemonists, Lippmann’s tough-minded and unsparing analysis of the vagaries of the concept of the “public” seem all too familiar and comfortable, even if one suspects that Lippmann would probably never have extended it quite so far as we have.

In that connection, it is perhaps revealing to note that Lippmann himself changed intellectual course dramatically with the approach of the Second World War, breaking ranks with his erstwhile realist allies and embracing, in The Good Society (1937) and later The Public Philosophy (1955), the notion of a “higher” natural law as a bulwark of public morality. Like his contemporary Reinhold Niebuhr, Lippmann came to feel that belief in the purely social and instrumental sources of truth and justice provided no protection against the evil tendencies of human groups, and no firewall of defense against the rise of would-be Übermenschen like Hitler.

But whatever else may be said about this shift, it did not represent much of a change in Lippmann’s view of democracy. One of the principal uses of a higher law, in his view, was precisely as a brake against the rash actions of popular majorities, such as those that allowed Hitler to come to power. Lippmann was willing to adapt and even sacrifice many of his cherished beliefs in the course of his life. But his skeptical view of popular democracy was not one of them. Such stubborn “elitism” may be precisely why we ought to continue to read him in the years to come. In an era pervasively disgusted with politicians, and entranced by public-opinion polling, initiatives, referenda, and the interactive gadgetry of “direct democracy,” the fundamental contention at the core of The Phantom Public remains as stubbornly and painfully relevant as ever: that “public opinion” does not, and simply cannot, rule a nation or propound its policy, but may merely choose between alternatives propounded and proposed by competing elites. Advocates of a more direct and participatory democracy, and the disgruntled American electorate, would do well to ponder that assertion, even if they disagree with it in the end.

Wilfred M. McClay
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Thoughts on Walter Lippmann’s The Phantom Public (1925) (Adapted from editorial introduction to Transaction Publishers reprint edition, 1993)