Left Center Left

As I’ve been hinting, I finally got around to my goal of reading Walter Lippmann. I still haven’t finished the seminal Public Opinion, but can heartily recommend the frequently overlooked Phantom Public, a quicker, easier read that still encapsulates several of Lippmann’s key ideas about public opinion and democratic legitimation. In fact, it’s hard to understand why the book is so hopelessly out of print. (The last edition seems to be a 1993 Library of Conservative Thought imprint… odd, because Lippmann’s not really a conservative by most definitions).It’s worth tracking down, though. Lippmann is one of those rare people who can write with erudition, but also with style, ease, clarity, and humor.

His argument? First, that modern democracies are structured by a problem of expert, specialist and inside knowledge. At every turn the citizenry is called upon to make decisions on that which it has limited expertise in. His words put it better than any paraphrase I could conjure up:

…I have been reading some of the new standard textbooks used to teach citizenship in schools and colleges. After reading them I do not see how any one can escape the conclusion that man must have the appetite of an encyclopaediast and infinite time ahead of him…He is told, in one textbook of five hundred concise, contentious pages, which I have been reading, about city problems, international problems, trust problems, labor problems, transportation problems, banking problems, rural problems, agricultural problems, banking problems, rural problems and so on ad infinitum…

But nowhere in this well-meant book is the sovereign citizen of the future given a hint as to how, while he is earning a living, rearing children, and enjoying his life, he is to keep himself informed about the progress of this swarming confusion of problems…

It never occurs to this preceptor of civic duty to provide the student with a rule by which he can know whether on Thursday it is duty to consider subways in Brooklyn or the Manchurian Railway, nor how, if he determines on Thursday to express his sovereign will on the subway question, he is to repair those gaps in his knowledge of that question which are due to his having been preoccupied the day before in expressing his sovereign will about rural credits in Montana and the rights of Britain in the Sudan… Unless he can discover some rational ground for fixing his attention where it will do the most good, and in a way that suits his inherently amateurish equipment, he will be as bewildered as a puppy trying to lick three bones at once (23-5).

It’s statements like the last one that open Lippmann to charges of elitism, which I think are unfair. The amateurish quality — ignorance, really — of the citizenry is a structural function of the complexity of our society and our political and economic systems. Lippmann himself expresses great sympathy for the lay person’s dilemma. More importantly, this core observation of the discrepancy between the theory and practice of liberal democracy allows Lippmann to make a larger point, namely that the “public” in itself is a fiction. Legitimation, he argues, is one of acclamation, not deliberation.

But what in fact is an election? We call it an expression of the popular will. But is it? We got into a polling booth and mark a cross on a piece of paper for one of two, or perhaps three or four names. Have we expressed our thoughts on the public policy of the United States? Presumably we have a number of thoughts on this and that with many buts and ifs and ors. Surely the cross on a piece of paper does not express them…

A vote is a promise of support. It is a way of saying: I am lined up with these men, on this side. I enlist with them. I will follow. I will buy. I will boycott. I will strike. I applaud. I jeer. The force I can exert is placed here, not there.

The public does not select the candidate, write the platform, outline the policy any more than it builds the automobile or acts the play. It aligns itself for or against somebody who has offered himself, has made a promise, has produced a play, is selling an automobile. (56-7)

This critique would be taken up by later critiques of liberal democratic theory and public opinion, both from the vantage of Marxism (C. Wright Mills, Jurgen Habermas) and of postmodern theory (Baudrillard). And Lippmann’s responses to the dilemma of knowledge and democratic legitimation are worth a read in themselves.

But I go at length about Phantom Public in part because it strikes me as a particularly relevant book in a time in which blogs are taking on a greater role in political discourse. They provide dialogue on expert knowledge (say, Social Security projections or peak oil production) previously considered beyond the scope of general-interest journalism and political debate. It has brought a deliberative element to what broadcast media flattened into the "artefact of public opinion," as Habermas calls it. Blogs have become a means that ordinary citizen-readers arm themselves with analytical tools to be able to make sense of world events. To me, all of these are great things. Still, perhaps Lippmann’s worry is also right and we still don’t have a good way of deciding what to focus our attention on - when to talk about the demographic changes in the Middle East, or the wisdom of the Community Preservation Act, or the specifics of a dividend tax cut. This blog is as guilty of that as any.