Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography
By Tom Arnold-Forster
Princeton, 353 pages, $35
There is a genre of popular media history that traces the rise of the propaganda-saturated reality we now inhabit to the influence of particular individuals who had (or claimed to have) novel insights into major shifts in communication technology. Perhaps the most influential practitioner of this genre is the documentarian Adam Curtis, whose Century of the Self portrays the PR pioneer (and nephew of Sigmund Freud) Edward Bernays as the malign demiurge of 20th-century consumer culture. Curtis went on to find a postmodern successor to Bernays in the person of Vladislav Surkov, Vladimir Putin’s colorful advisor, who makes appearances in several of his later films. Comparable stories have circulated about right-wing media impresarios including Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica founder Alexander Nix, as well as Obama adviser Ben Rhodes (like Surkov, a fiction writer as well as a political spin doctor).
The journalist and political theorist Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) is another frequent protagonist of such accounts. Critics on both the right and the left have portrayed him as a pioneering ideologue of elitist technocratic rule and a Svengali for the mass-media age. In the most influential work of progressive media criticism ever written, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s 1988 book Manufacturing Consent—which takes its title from one of Lippman’s favored phrases—Lippmann appears as a founding theoretician and practitioner of the modern media’s propaganda function. Meanwhile, on the far other end of the spectrum, the neoreactionary theorist Curtis Yarvin just recently referred on X to “our 20th century Walter Lippmann managed democracy,” echoing earlier blog posts in which he used the phrase “the Lippman system” as a synonym for what he elsewhere refers to as “the Cathedral.” Yarvin isn’t the first right-winger to see Lippmann this way: In Phyllis Schlafly’s A Choice Not an Echo (1964), he was named as one of the “kingmakers” who covertly governed America.
There is no question that Lippmann was a towering figure in 20th-century American journalism and political commentary. In two books written in the 1920s, Public Opinion and The Phantom Public, he literally set the terms of debates about the media, propaganda, technocracy, and the role of elites in democracy that are still raging. In the first of those books, he repurposed the technical printing term “stereotype” to refer to the generic mental impressions gathered from media representations. He also popularized the phrase “the manufacture of consent,” using it in a more neutral and descriptive register than Chomsky and Herman later would. When presented in summary, Lippmann’s dispassionate analysis of the reality—as opposed to the abstract ideal—of mass democracy in a technological age can sound icily technocratic.
“The vicissitudes to which Lippmann was responding are still those of our own world.”
But a new biography by Tom Arnold-Forster offers a salutary challenge to what we can only call the stereotype that has often substituted itself for his complex legacy. “Lippmann’s career,” Arnold-Forster writes, “was not a one-note argument for the rule of experts; it was a six-decade commentary on the vicissitudes of politics.” In their broad contours, the vicissitudes to which Lippmann was responding are still those of our own world. In his time as in ours, an increasingly complex political, economic, and social landscape and an ever-evolving array of media technologies posed fundamental questions about the viability of American democracy. The stereotype of Lippmann as a patrician apologist for expert rule persisted in part because it reassured us that we’d arrived at better answers than his. It’s increasingly clear we haven’t.
The starting point of Lippmann’s thinking, Arnold-Forster explains, was the concept of the “great society” developed by the progressive British social theorist Graham Wallas, who was a visiting scholar at Harvard in 1910, when Lippmann was a 21-year old undergraduate there. In his 1914 book The Great Society, which he dedicated to his former student, Wallas began with the observation that the modern world was “a radically new environment.” He attempted to apply the new insights of social psychology to the reality of the mass societies forged by the industrial revolution, characterized by “unequal social relations, a vertiginous increase in social scale, and structural psychologies of anxiety and unhappiness.” From his early dialogues with Wallas, Lippmann derived the central question which preoccupied him for the rest of his career: how the American ideal of self-government could be sustained in an increasingly complex, abstract, and fragmented society, in which people’s images of the world were mediated by technologies of mass communication.
This concern became more acute for Lippmann during World War I. In this period, he worked for The New Republic, which ended up serving as the unofficial propaganda apparatus of the Woodrow Wilson administration, and also briefly for Wilson’s War Department. In his 1920 book Liberty and the News, he reflected back on the implications of his experiences inside the state information apparatus, asking whether “government by consent [could] survive … in a time when the manufacture of consent is an unregulated private enterprise.” The quandary prompted Lippmann to develop the key concepts for which he is remembered: not just “stereotypes,” but “pseudo-environments,” his term for the composite mental pictures of the world held by individuals on the basis of direct experience, hearsay, and cultural beliefs, but also, increasingly, exposure to the burgeoning output of mass media and the stereotypes it disseminated.
The notion of public opinion had been a staple of democratic theory going back centuries, with Alexis de Tocqueville, for instance, calling it “the dominant power” in a democracy. But Lippmann believed political theorists had remained trapped in a naive account of it rooted in the realities of a pre-industrial world that no longer existed. Under the conditions of Wallas’s “great society,” public opinion was no longer, so to speak, an organic product of the soil, but a mass-produced commodity, with state and private manufacturers vying for market share. At the same time, new questions had emerged about the value of public opinion amid the asymmetries of knowledge between the growing number of specialized experts on one hand and the broad citizenry on the other. This gap was the inevitable outcome of a basic feature of the industrialized world: the division of labor, which in separating people from each other for the sake of improved efficiency made it ever more difficult for them to speak to each other as fellow citizens.
Lippmann’s question of what became of democratic citizenship under such conditions was the starting point of a long exchange with John Dewey, whose book The Public and Its Problems was a response to his books of the 1920s. This exchange is now remembered as the “Lippmann-Dewey debate,” but Arnold-Forster argues that the standard account of it, in which Lippmann stands for technocracy and Dewey for democracy, oversimplifies their disagreement. The two in fact agreed that “experts should be contested and ultimately controlled through public debates.” Where they differed was on Dewey’s belief that “democracy would ideally create a fully expert citizenry,” a view Lippmann rejected. Instead, he claimed that specialized expertise was an inevitable feature of modern society, but that it could be democratized through the public contestation of ideas. This argument assigned a key role to journalists like himself in staging such contestation. For Arnold-Forster, Lippmann’s public-facing critiques of the eugenicist and IQ testing pioneer Lewis Terman in the 1920s enacted the approach he advocated, in which “expert authority [was] something that public opinion should ultimately judge and control.”
In idealized form, the model of journalism that emerges here, in which the journalist renders a service to democracy by mediating between specialized knowledge and the general public, remains a familiar one. But it now exists mostly as a nostalgic projection back onto the halcyon era of Walter Cronkite, a gauzy view satirized by Joe Bernstein in Harper’s a few years ago: “In the beginning, there were ABC, NBC, and CBS, and they were good.” This was, of course, the same era whose democratic deficits were scathingly enumerated by Chomsky and Herman just as it was coming to a close. Lippmann, who lived through and participated in the emergence and consolidation of the 20th-century media dispensation, never saw it as the realization of his ideals—in part because he was too deep in it not to recognize its shortcomings.
In his closing chapter, Arnold-Forster writes that “Lippmann spent his final years in despair at the United States.” This was above all because of the catastrophe of the Vietnam War, which was widely taken as an indictment of the media and political establishment with which he was indelibly associated. The Johnson administration, which he initially supported and later turned against, even used his old mentor Wallas’s phrase “the great society” for its signature domestic agenda. Unsurprisingly, Lippmann came to identify its failures with his own, and after his death, many more came to share this view. Chomsky’s critique of Lippmann made his career emblematic of the hubris of experts and the excessive proximity of journalists to power. It’s not far from there to the view of him, with Bernays, as a sinister architect of media mind control.
Just before the enshrinement of the Cronkite era as a lost eden, there was a brief period when many viewed the democratization of media by digital technology as the solution to the problems Lippmann first identified at the outset of his career. Citizens armed with social-media accounts would be able to demand accountability from the government everywhere from Washington, DC to Tahrir Square, balancing the power exercised over public opinion by powerful commercial entities and bridging the gulf separating specialists from the general public. For a short while, it seemed, the mass-scale manufacture of consent might give way to more localized modes of production, enabling the reemergence of Jeffersonian democracy in digital form.
Once the euphoria died, there followed a crude and futile attempt to reassert technocratic rule through the regulation of “misinformation” as well as an often equally crude backlash to that effort. The demise of the Biden administration’s Disinformation Governance Board was a welcome outcome, but the failure of technocratic reconsolidation has only further underlined Lippman’s question: What becomes of democratic self-rule in an era of proliferating pseudo-environments and resulting epistemic fragmentation? Elon Musk’s declarations that “you are the media” notwithstanding, few if any see his slop-ridden, spam- and porn-infested “free-speech zone” as an instance of a healthy democratic public sphere. The line of inquiry Lippmann pursued throughout his career—whether “government by consent [can] survive … in a time when the manufacture of consent is an unregulated private enterprise”—remains a vital one.
It is unclear whether Lippmann ever crossed paths with Robert Moses, the great urban planner, but the parallels between their trajectories are striking. Born within a year of each other, both rose to prominence in the orbit of Al Smith, the popular New York governor, in the 1920s; later in life and posthumously, both came to be seen as emblematic of midcentury technocratic hubris and overreach. Recently, though, Moses’s legacy has begun to be reassessed, in no small part due to the failings of the modes of urbanism that came after him. One hopes that Arnold-Forster’s book might provoke a similar reconsideration of Lippmann as we sift through the wreckage of the digital media revolution.