The Phantom Public
by . New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. 1925. 12mo. xii+188 pp. $2.00.
To his Liberty and the News and his Public Opinion Mr. Lippmann has now added another challenging volume in which he has thrown overboard some of the most familiar shibboleths of the liberal in a democracy, and already it has been acclaimed as the conversion of another liberal to the doctrine that government is only for the chosen few. Despite the brilliance and assuredness of statement, this volume is not without its contradictions and its repetitions, and it is not to be believed that it will add further to the author’s reputation as a political thinker. Mr. Lippmann himself says that he has ‘attacked certain of the confusions (of democracy) with no conviction except that a false philosophy tends to stereotype thought against the lessons of experience.’
Primarily, Mr. Lippmann declares that neither better education for the masses nor more, instead of less, democracy is a cure for our political ills. The people he finds, as a whole, politically incompetent for the reason that ‘many problems cannot be advanced by that obtuse partisanship which is fundamentally all that the public can bring to bear upon them’ — pace Abraham Lincoln! The public he finds ‘a mere phantom,’‘random collections of bystanders.’ The average voter, it appears, ‘lives in a world which he cannot see, does not understand, and is unable to direct.’ So he does not express an opinion, but merely aligns himself for or against a proposal or a man. ‘The work of the world goes on continually without conscious direction from public opinion.’ If the public intervenes it ‘will arrive in the middle of the third act and will leave before the last curtain, having stayed just long enough, perhaps, to decide who is the hero and who the villain of the piece.’
There is no denying the effectiveness of Mr. Lippmann’s presentation of the difficulty of calling upon the multitude to deal directly and intelligently with the ever-growing conflict of economic, social, and political problems, His motive is his belief that, if the world understands what the public can and cannot do, ‘the more effectively it will do what lies in its power to do well, and the less it will interfere with the liberties of men.’ What does he think it can do well? The ‘utmost that public opinion can effectively do’ is to ‘come to the assistance’ of somebody who first challenges arbitrary power. At best, the public is a ‘reserve force that may be mobilized on behalf of the method and spirit of law and morals’ — although we were just assured that the public could neither see nor understand nor direct, and could only vote for the ruling group, or for a proposal. The public, the author declares, need only answer two questions: first, if a questioned rule of living is defective;second, ‘How shall the agency be recognized which is most likely to mend it?’ In order to answer the first, if the public insists upon ‘full freedom of discussion, the advocates are very likely to expose one another.’ To whom? Why, to the public, of course, which neither sees nor hears nor understands. As for a rule of life, it cannot work, if new, unless ‘in some degree it has been first understood and approved by all who must live according to it’ — the ‘all’ being the dumb and blind public again.
Elsewhere we learn that ‘these random publics cannot be expected to deal with the merits of a controversy,’ but on page 131 we are told that ‘the hardest problems are those which institutions cannot handle. They are the public’ s problems’ — the same public of which Mr. Lippmann writes elsewhere: ‘It is the thesis of this book that the members of the public who are the spectators of action cannot successfully intervene in the controversy on the merits of the case,’ and ‘only the insider can make decisions.’ We must regretfully come to the conclusion that we do not know ‘what the lessons will be when we have learned to think of public opinion as it is’ — in Mr. Lippmann’s eyes.
OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD