After WWI, Lippmann was very pessimistic about the prospects for American democracy. Dewey while he was more optimistic nevertheless agreed with Lippmann about the social dynamics that were hollowing out democracy. Lippmann wrote The Phantom Public in 1925 and Dewey wrote The Public and Its Problems in 1927 in response.
For Lippmann the public was incoherent and fickle and for the most part clueless. It had become an impotent bystander concerned about its private interests and affairs, which overlapped hardly at all with public affairs. Public affairs became the exclusive domain of experts constituted by the college educated which in turn came mostly from privileged classes. C. Wright Mill wrote The Power Elite in the 1950s, which essentially described the ecosystem of the elites who ran America. Whatever one might say about them, they were for the most part public spirited and retained, probably from their Calvinist upbringing, some sense of the common good. So while at first Lippmann embraced an elitist approach to managing public affairs, by 1955 in The Public Philosophy he saw that the elites were as clueless as everybody else. Things had just become too complex for everybody. Elites were not pleased with his defection, but Lippmann was proved right, and David Halberstam wrote the epitaph for the liberal managerial elite and their pretensions to be the best and the brightest.
Dewey was a committed democrat, and his ideas about democracy are worth laying out in some detail, but not here. He understood everything that Lippmann understood, and still retained hope that what had become a hollowed-out parody of democracy that Lippmann described could be supplanted by a restored vigorous democracy and laid out a program for it, that I think is plausible, but clearly before its time. Maybe someday. In the meantime Lippmann more accurately saw what the American public had become and would remain: passive spectators managed by an elite that didn't know what it was doing, but blundered ahead heedlessly thinking it did. The Vietnam War was the proximal cause for the final toppling of whatever residual confidence the public had in its 'expertise'.
And so the liberal progressive ethos that dominated the 20th Century American managerial elite has been under attack and in decline ever since. It has become permanently delegitimated in ways that I really hadn't come to understand until after 2008. I still retained hope even then that it could make a comeback. And while part of me is says good riddance to the technocratic arrogance, it's not like we're getting anything better to replace it. If the old Liberal elite were still influenced by a Calvinist ethic of social service and commitment to the common good, the new elite is more influenced by the Social Darwinism of Ayn Rand.
And worse, the basic big government and cold war infrastructure that the old liberal managerial elite created has not been dismantled by the ascendant Right; it has instead been taken over by the illiberal mentality exemplified by Dick Cheney, i.e., a militarist mentality obsessed by secrecy and a need for security. And so the quasi-paranoid, fear-soaked mentality that was allowed to flourish during the Cold War persists now even though the US faces no threat even remotely as dangerous as the one posed by the Soviet Union. And yet we see the dramatic expansion of the Cold War security state, which in turn has created the infrastructure for a repressive, authoritarian, endocolonialist surveillance state with a militarized police.
The Ferguson story is on one level the old story of racist habits in American society that we so far seem unable to break; but more chillingly it has brought into greater public awareness the degree to which the police in this country has become militarized. A number from the November Harper's "Index" really jumped out at me:
Estimated number of times SWAT teams were deployed in the United States in 1980: 3000. In 2013: 60,000.
Yikes.
So this is pretty disturbing, but we're beyond doing anything about it now. Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders or the ACLU isn't going to save us. Life will go on as usual for most of us in the powerless public; maybe some of us can do some useful things on the local level, but the general American ethos will continue to get meaner. How mean it can get, I don't know. There are still factions within the American elite that want to play nice, but in a fight between the mean guy and the nice guy, the smart money knows on whom to bet. And the mean guy never seems to get enough, and he doesn't care about playing fair. If push back comes, it will come from communities of faith; it's not going to come from the secular left.
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