World

Trump’s victory through the eyes of Walter Lippmann — a warning from history

Walter Lippmann at his desk in 1936. (Photo: Wikipedia)

12 Nov 2024

A century ago, Walter Lippmann foresaw the corrosive impact of disinformation on democracy. When radio was in its infancy in the 1920s, he wrote prophetic columns on propaganda and what we would now call ‘fake news’.

US President-elect Donald Trump will walk back into The White House next year exactly a century after the publication of The Phantom Public.

The anniversary will not be lost on those familiar with Walter Lippmann’s pioneering work. It is one of the gloomiest tracts ever written on American democracy. In the cold light of Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris on 5 November, it reads as a warning from history.

trump election warning history lippman Walter Lippmann at his desk in 1936. (Photo: Wikipedia)

Predictably, the Democratic Party has turned into a circular firing squad since the election last week, as recriminations fly over what went wrong in a contest that seemed theirs for the taking.

Three key themes have emerged in the avalanche of commentary on why the Democrats lost: they didn’t connect with working-class families, including those from minority communities, who feel alienated by coastal elites’ obsession with identity politics; they didn’t overcome the impression created by Republicans that households were getting poorer; and they didn’t convince Americans that US borders and immigration were under control.

Each was a significant failure, to be sure. But hindsight can be misleading.

A candidate relentlessly scorned as “unfit for office” by mainstream media for nearly a decade has just won the presidency for the second time. Six weeks before this election, more than 700 current and former US national security officials signed a letter describing Trump as a threat to the nation’s defence and its democratic system. His own former Vice-President, Mike Pence, accused him of being unfaithful to the US constitution.

None of that mattered.

Ergo: Trump’s hold on voters might have withstood anything Harris’s team threw at them.

Not for nothing did one of the most astute observers of US politics, the British-born historian Simon Schama, quail that his adopted land was “not a serious country” because it re-elected Trump.

In Schama’s lament, there was a nod to Hillary Clinton’s contemptuous dismissal of Trump supporters – “half [of whom] could be put in a basket of deplorables” – during her failed presidential run against Trump in 2016.

Read more: What Trump’s victory means for you, the world and SA — seven takes from Daily Maverick writers

A phantom

Whereas Clinton may have suffered at the polls for letting slip her elitist instincts, a century ago Lippmann seemingly advised his fellow Americans to embrace them, lest their democracy fall victim to what he described in The Phantom Public as “the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd”.

By which he meant the US public.

When the book was published in 1925, critics bristled at Lippmann’s theory that people generally did not vote based on what was best for them and society. The public, he argued, was “inexpert”, “slow to be aroused” and “quickly diverted” on most substantive issues. Consequently, it could readily become “the dupe or unconscious ally of a special interest”.

The idea of a public supposedly composed of “sovereign and omnicompetent citizens” was for Lippmann an abstraction – a mere phantom. His theatre analogy was unsparing:

(The public) is a deaf spectator in the back row … interested only when events have been melodramatised as a conflict. (It) arrives 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 is the villain of the piece.

Lippmann’s cynicism took root after he witnessed first-hand the manipulation of public opinion during World War 1 and the alarming rise of fascism in Benito Mussolini’s Italy. As both a journalist and an adviser to US President Woodrow Wilson – whom he helped draft the famous “14 points” that were supposed to make the world safe for democracy – Lippmann explained how the “manufacture of consent” by governments had warped democracy.

Noam Chomsky – wrongly viewed by many as his moral and intellectual antithesis – used Lippmann’s phrase for the title of his own seminal work on the media.

Unlike Lippmann’s earlier books – notably his hugely influential Public Opinion published in 1922 – The Phantom Public did not gain a wide readership until the 1970s, decades after it was released. US politics was then reeling in the wake of a disastrous war, Vietnam, and an unprecedented political scandal, Watergate. Public trust in government had cratered. Lippmann’s demythologisation of democracy aligned perfectly with the zeitgeist.

Until he died in 1974, the year President Richard Nixon was forced to resign over Watergate, Lippmann had had the ear of every US president over 50 years. He is regarded by many as the country’s greatest public intellectual of the twentieth century.

Read more: Panel weighs in on Trump’s election victory and what it means for America, SA, Africa and the world

Paradoxes of opinion

On the face of it, Lippmann would have been grist to the mill for Republicans this year. An elitist depiction of a world divided between the “masterful few and the ignorant many”, as Lippmann’s critics put it at the time, is exactly how Democrats apparently saw the world.

Yet Lippmann would have been chiefly concerned with why more than half of the US electorate reached that conclusion, even though the world’s richest – and arguably most powerful – man was Trump’s biggest supporter.

And why the majority of Americans felt that they were getting poorer, despite real wages going up and the US economy – described as “the envy of the world” by The Economist a few weeks before the election – performing better than it had for decades.

And why Trump’s big plans to fix America – wholesale tariffs and mass deportations – were popular with the working class, when most economists warned that they would exacerbate the biggest “kitchen table” problem Americans complained about during the election, inflation.

Lippmann would have recognised these and other paradoxes in his own attempts to understand the true nature of public opinion.

A century ago, he foresaw the corrosive impact of disinformation on democracy. When radio was in its infancy in the 1920s, he wrote prophetic columns on propaganda and what we would now call “fake news”.

None of the fact-free rhetoric that pervaded this election campaign would have surprised him. Nor, perhaps, even claims that an administration was whipping up hurricanes to stay in power.

“Where the facts are most obscure, where precedents are lacking, where novelty and confusion pervade everything”, Lippmann wrote, “the public, in all its unfitness is compelled to make its most important decisions.”

Like choosing the leader of the free world.

Red meat

There is, of course, another possibility: Trump’s victory was a fair representation of contemporary America.

It now seems clear that a majority of US voters wanted red meat this election, nothing more.

If the electorate is changing and becoming more like Trump – less bothered by the idea of a US strongman and an authoritarian turn, less interested in preserving the liberal international order, less convinced that government acts in their interest – then Democrats must answer a different set of questions, should they ever hope to regain The White House.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson sombrely noted in the aftermath of the election, “you can get people to vote away their democracy… as long as you create a false world for them to believe in”.

This was not the first time a US leader has exploited anger and division in society, fuelled resentments, even serviced popular delusions. The fear of Richardson and many others is that the guardrails that minimised chaos and democratic slippage in the past are disappearing in the swirl of disinformation.

This is a less comforting thought than the possibility that Lippmann, for all his haughty pessimism, was right: public opinion is fickle and often “irrational” but it is malleable. Building a citizenry which critically evaluates information and the media, trusts expertise and science, encourages self-awareness, is possible.

Lippmann just didn’t believe that it would be easy.

He would probably think it even harder today. DM

Dr Terence McNamee is a writer and consultant, and a non-resident Global Fellow of the Wilson Center in Washington, DC. This article draws in part on an earlier essay by the author on Walter Lippmann, published in Daily Maverick in 2018.

Categories:

World

Tags:

DM is much better if you are signed in...

World

A phantom

Paradoxes of opinion

Red meat