Lippmann III: Public Opinion, Expertise, Lippmann's America and Ours

In the same year of Lippmann's Public Opinion, Elihu Root wrote, in the first issue of Foreign Affairs,:

When foreign affairs were ruled by autocracies or oligarchies the danger of war was in sinister purpose. When foreign affairs are ruled by democracies the danger of war will be in mistaken beliefs. The world will be the gainer by the change, for, while there is no human way to prevent a king from having a bad heart, there is a human way to prevent a people from having an erroneous opinion
(from "A Requisite for the Success of Popular Diplomacy." Foreign Affairs 1:1-10, (1922))

Root had been a US Secretary of War and Secretary of State, and he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1912. By 1922 he was a well respected (Republican) foreign policy expert.

Root's view clearly differs from Lippmann's, and today, as the US seems on the brink of a military action in Iraq, it might be useful to: discuss and debate the merits of Root's and Lippmann's views on the role that public opinion can/should play in US foreign policy; question how and to what extent propaganda can be said to shape US public opinion today compared to the US of the 1920s; and ask, in the spirit of Root's remark, what sorts of errors of political judgement we think worst and whether/how they can be avoided.

I should add here that Lippmann came to question his views about public opinion and foreign policy in light of the Vietnam War. It turned out that public opinion isn't the only "dangerous master of decision when the stakes are life and death" (a quotation from Lippmann's 1955 book, Essays in the Public Philosophy).

Public Opinion, Parts 5-8

We'll do our best to finish Lippmann's book today, with each of the final four parts of the book being presented by different members of the Seminar. A framework that might inform all the presentations and discussions is the one created in the last part of the book by the juxtaposition of chapters titled "The Appeal to the Public" and "The Appeal to Reason."

Last Words and New Questions about Public Opinion

As we finish Lippmann's book it is useful to return to Cherny's The Next Deal and ask:

• To what extent does Cherny's diagnosis of a shift in American political desire, from the parentalism of the New Deal to the Choice Generatin of the Next Deal, address any of Lippmann's concerns?
• To what extent is the development of mass media, from Lippmann's newspapers to Cherny's Internet, a cause for greater or less concern about the problems raised by Lippmann?
• Does information technology provide alternatives to Lippmann's "Organized Intelligence" or does it make the need for such institutional solutions greater than ever?

Next week we'll begin discussing Cass Sunstein's republic.com, which was published last year. One of the wonderful epigraphs in Sunstein's book comes from John Dewey's The Public and Its Problems (1927), a book written partly as a response to Lippmann's Public Opinion. The concern of the Dewey quotation, and of Sunstein's book generally, is the substance (and not just the surface) of a bona fide democracy.

For Monday:: Read the first half of Cass Sunstein's republic.com.

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