By Chris Bray
A politician speaks, the Progressive journalist and former Wilson administration advisor Walter Lippmann explained in 1922, but the public never really gets the meaning of his words. "Millions of those who are watching him can read hardly at all. Millions more can read the words but cannot understand them." Others can read and sort of understand, but lack the time and the inclination to seriously pursue the meaning of words used by a statesman — a technical specialist in statecraft. For them, the deployment of words in political speech triggers a set of pictures that march through their heads, causing associations and meanings that may or may not be reasonable.
But Lippmann had a solution to the problem. Since "the facts of modern life" are too complex for common understanding, he explained, those facts "must be given a shape by somebody." A cognitive elite, a trained corps of symbolic analysts, can line up the pictures in our heads, pointing us in the direction we need to go.
There were, Lippmann realized, a number of difficult implications to this claimed insight: "It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original dogma of democracy." The common man simply lacked the tools for it, so the professional thinking class had the hard task of steering democratic initiative through the manipulation of images and useful stereotypes. Lippmann compared the public, the helpless human mass, to babies, who require guidance by adult perception.
If you want to see Lippmann's view of the infantile public in action, spend three minutes looking at the way House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries explains recent policy debates: House Republicans have been ordered by right-wing extremists to shut down the government. Who will be hurt? The American people. What's the meaning of a 1,547-page appropriations bill? It is good; it is helping people. Opposition is hurting people; it is extreme. Ask no further questions... | 
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