Walter Lippmann
Based on Wikipedia: Walter Lippmann
In 1922, a journalist named Walter Lippmann published a book that would fundamentally challenge how we think about democracy. His central argument was unsettling: most citizens don't know enough to participate meaningfully in public life, and they never will. The problem isn't education or effort. It's the sheer complexity of the modern world.
This wasn't some curmudgeon ranting about the masses. Lippmann was one of the most influential public intellectuals of the twentieth century, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner whose career spanned six decades. He advised presidents, shaped foreign policy debates, and coined terms we still use today. He gave us "stereotype" in its modern psychological sense. He popularized "Cold War" as a description of the emerging geopolitical standoff with the Soviet Union.
But his most enduring contribution was his skeptical analysis of democracy itself—and the fierce debate it sparked.
A Gilded Youth
Walter Lippmann was born on September 23, 1889, into what his biographer Ronald Steel called "a gilded Jewish ghetto" on New York's Upper East Side. He was the only child of wealthy German-Jewish parents. His father Jacob had grown rich from the family textile business and real estate speculation. His mother Daisy cultivated connections in high society and took the family on summer holidays across Europe.
The Lippmanns were Reform Jews, uncomfortable with traditional observance. They attended Temple Emanu-El and gave Walter a Reform confirmation rather than a bar mitzvah when he turned fourteen. He was emotionally distant from both parents but close to his maternal grandmother. The family's politics leaned Republican.
His education was elite and secular. He attended the Sachs Collegiate Institute, a private school in the German Gymnasium tradition run by Julius Sachs, a son-in-law of Marcus Goldman from the Goldman Sachs banking family. The curriculum was rigorous: eleven hours of ancient Greek and five hours of Latin every week.
Just before his seventeenth birthday, Lippmann entered Harvard. He studied philosophy and languages under luminaries like George Santayana, William James, and Graham Wallas. He spoke German and French fluently. He tried out for The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper, but was rejected. He joined Phi Beta Kappa but was excluded from important social clubs because he was Jewish.
At Harvard, something unexpected happened. The privileged son of Republican rentiers became a socialist.
The Socialist Phase
Lippmann joined the New York chapter of the Socialist Party of America alongside Sinclair Lewis, who would later win the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1911, fresh out of Harvard, he became secretary to George Lunn, the first Socialist mayor of Schenectady, New York.
He quit after four months.
Lunn's programs were worthwhile, Lippmann thought, but they weren't really socialism. They were municipal reform dressed in radical language. This early disillusionment with the gap between ideological promise and practical reality would become a recurring theme in Lippmann's thought.
By 1913, he had moved on. Together with Herbert Croly and Walter Weyl, he became a founding editor of The New Republic, a magazine that would become one of the most influential journals of liberal opinion in America. Lippmann was evolving from socialist organizer to public intellectual.
War and Propaganda
When World War One broke out, Lippmann's life took another sharp turn. In 1918, he was commissioned as a captain in the Army and assigned to the intelligence section of the American Expeditionary Forces headquarters in France. By October, he was working on the staff of Edward House, President Woodrow Wilson's most trusted adviser.
Through House, Lippmann helped draft Wilson's Fourteen Points, the famous speech outlining America's war aims and vision for postwar peace. He was attached to the American Commission negotiating the Treaty of Versailles.
But even as he worked for the Wilson administration, Lippmann was troubled by what he saw. He sharply criticized George Creel, whom Wilson appointed to head the Committee on Public Information, the government's wartime propaganda operation. Lippmann was willing to accept some curtailment of civil liberties during wartime—he admitted he had "no doctrinaire belief in free speech"—but he warned Wilson that censorship should "never be entrusted to anyone who is not himself tolerant, nor to anyone who is unacquainted with the long record of folly which is the history of suppression."
This tension—between the practical needs of governing and the ideals of liberty—would define much of Lippmann's career.
The Problem with the News
After the war, Lippmann turned his attention to journalism itself. In 1920, he and Charles Merz published "A Test of the News," a devastating analysis of how The New York Times had covered the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. They found the coverage systematically biased and factually inaccurate.
The problem, Lippmann realized, wasn't individual journalists' dishonesty. It was structural. News is not the same as truth. As he would later write, "the function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act."
News is fragmentary, episodic, incomplete. A journalist's version of events is subjective, limited by what they can observe and how they interpret it. The news is "imperfectly recorded" and too fragile to serve as "an organ of direct democracy."
This was the foundation for his 1922 masterwork, Public Opinion.
The Bewildered Herd
Public Opinion is often called the founding book of modern journalism and American media studies. In it, Lippmann argued that democratic ideals had collided with modern complexity. Voters were largely ignorant about issues and policies. They lacked the competence to participate meaningfully in public life and showed little interest in doing so.
The basic problem, he wrote, was how people form their understanding of the world. We don't gather facts and then reach conclusions. We do the opposite. We make up our minds first, then selectively perceive facts that fit our preconceptions. Lippmann called these mental shortcuts "stereotypes"—coining the term in its modern psychological meaning.
Stereotypes aren't necessarily wrong, but they subject us to partial truths. We see what we expect to see. We filter reality through mental categories formed before we encountered the facts.
Given this, Lippmann argued, the notion of a public competent to direct public affairs was "a false ideal." He compared the average citizen's political understanding to a theatergoer who walks in during the third act of a play and leaves before the final curtain. How could such a person judge the whole drama?
His solution was technocratic. A "governing class" must rise to meet modern challenges—a specialized class of experts and intellectuals "whose interests reach beyond the locality." He described the mass of ordinary citizens as a "bewildered herd" who must be guided by those with deeper knowledge.
Democracy could still function, Lippmann believed, but only if public opinion was managed by what he called "a propaganda machine." He didn't mean this pejoratively. He meant a systematic effort to shape public understanding so that democracy could work in practice.
Dewey Pushes Back
Not everyone agreed. Philosopher John Dewey, one of America's leading public intellectuals, published The Public and Its Problems in 1927 as a direct response to Lippmann.
Dewey accepted Lippmann's diagnosis. Yes, public opinion was often irrational. Yes, modern life was complex beyond any individual's full comprehension. But Dewey rejected Lippmann's technocratic solution.
In a democracy, Dewey argued, the public must be part of the public discourse. Not just managed or guided, but actively engaged. He believed that society contained many overlapping "publics," and that these could form a "Great Community"—educated, deliberative, capable of wrestling with problems and arriving at solutions.
The Lippmann-Dewey debate became foundational to American thinking about democracy and communication. It crystallized a fundamental question: Can ordinary citizens govern themselves in a complex modern society? Or must they be guided by experts?
By the late 1980s, this debate was being widely discussed in communication studies circles. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, in their book Manufacturing Consent, cited Lippmann's advocacy for "the management of public opinion, which he felt was necessary for democracy to flourish, since he felt that public opinion was an irrational force."
Evolving Skepticism
Lippmann's views weren't static. In 1925, he published The Phantom Public, where he admitted that even his expert class had limitations. Experts were outsiders to most problems, he now recognized, and hence not always capable of effective action.
By the 1930s through the 1950s, Lippmann became increasingly skeptical of intellectual elites themselves. His 1955 book The Public Philosophy, which took almost twenty years to write, argued that these very elites were undermining democracy's foundations. The book was poorly received in liberal circles—perhaps because it questioned the premise that had made Lippmann famous.
His political judgments during this period were mixed. In 1932, he famously dismissed Franklin Roosevelt as a lightweight: "Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President."
Even after Roosevelt's New Deal transformed American government, Lippmann stood by his assessment. The Roosevelt he had judged in 1932, he insisted, really was unqualified. The New Deal was "wholly improvised" after the election, bearing no resemblance to the campaign Roosevelt had run.
Cold War and Containment
Lippmann's influence extended beyond domestic politics. He was the first to popularize the term "Cold War" in his 1947 book of that name, giving a label to the emerging struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union.
After World War Two, when Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace was removed from office in 1946, Lippmann became the leading public advocate for respecting a Soviet sphere of influence in Europe. He opposed the containment strategy being developed by George Kennan, arguing instead for negotiated boundaries and peaceful coexistence.
He had long believed that nationalist separatism, imperialist competition, and failed states were the key causes of war. He envisioned the eventual decline of the nation-state and its replacement with large, inclusive, democratic political units. Commerce and regular interaction between nations, he thought, would soften nationalism's harsh edges.
As early as 1942, after the fall of Singapore, Lippmann had written a Washington Post column criticizing empire and calling on Western nations to "identify their cause with the freedom and security of the peoples of the East" and purge themselves of "white man's imperialism."
He proposed creating regional authorities and international organizations to manage crisis zones: "there should be in existence permanent international commissions to deal with those spots of the earth where world crises originate." He saw the creation of the United States in 1789—when a constitution brought order to a previously anarchic confederation—as a model for what might eventually become a world state or supranational government.
The Columnist Years
For much of his career, Lippmann was best known for his syndicated column "Today and Tomorrow," which ran for decades. In 1943, George Seldes described him as one of the two most influential columnists in the United States.
He won a special Pulitzer Prize in 1958 for "the wisdom, perception and high sense of responsibility with which he has commented for many years on national and international affairs." In 1961, he won another Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, citing his interview with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. He also won a Peabody Award for an interview on CBS Reports.
Lippmann was an informal adviser to several presidents. On September 14, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But the relationship soured. Lippmann became highly critical of Johnson's handling of the Vietnam War, and the two men feuded publicly.
He retired from his column in 1967. Seven years later, on December 14, 1974, he died of cardiac arrest in New York City. He was eighty-five years old.
The Almond-Lippmann Consensus
Lippmann's views on public opinion influenced later political scientists, particularly Gabriel Almond. Together, their ideas formed what became known as the Almond-Lippmann consensus, based on three assumptions.
First, public opinion is volatile, shifting erratically in response to recent events. Mass beliefs in the early twentieth century were "too pacifist in peace and too bellicose in war, too neutralist or appeasing in negotiations or too intransigent."
Second, public opinion is incoherent, lacking organized or consistent structure. American citizens' views could best be described as "nonattitudes"—responses to polling questions that didn't reflect any underlying stable belief system.
Third, public opinion is irrelevant to policymaking. Political leaders ignore it because "most Americans can neither understand nor influence the very events upon which their lives and happiness are known to depend."
This consensus dominated political science for decades, though it has been challenged by scholars who find more coherence and influence in public opinion than Lippmann and Almond acknowledged.
The Neoliberal Connection
Lippmann's influence extended into unexpected territory. In 1937, he published The Good Society, a defense of liberal capitalism against both fascism and communism. The book argued for a middle path: markets and individual liberty, but with some government role to prevent monopoly and provide social insurance.
In August 1938, French philosopher Louis Rougier convened a meeting in Paris to discuss Lippmann's ideas. The gathering of French and German liberal intellectuals was called the Colloque Walter Lippmann—the Walter Lippmann Colloquium. They discussed what a new liberalism, or "neoliberalism," should look like.
This meeting is often considered the precursor to the first gathering of the Mont Pèlerin Society, convened by Friedrich von Hayek in 1947. Both meetings centered on reimagining liberalism for the twentieth century, though the ideas that emerged would take radically different forms in subsequent decades.
Personal Life
Lippmann's personal life was less successful than his professional one. He was married twice. His first wife, from 1917 to 1937, was Faye Albertson, daughter of Ralph Albertson, a Congregational pastor and pioneer of Christian socialism. During his Harvard years, Lippmann often visited the Albertson family estate in West Newbury, Massachusetts, where they had founded a socialist cooperative colony.
The marriage ended when Lippmann fell in love with Helen Byrne Armstrong, the wife of Hamilton Fish Armstrong, who was not only the editor of Foreign Affairs but also Lippmann's closest friend. When a hotel in Europe accidentally forwarded Lippmann's love letters to Armstrong, the friendship shattered. Faye divorced Walter. Helen divorced Hamilton. Walter and Helen married in 1938.
Helen died on February 16, 1974, less than ten months before Walter's own death. The affair that had ended his first marriage and his most important friendship had lasted thirty-six years.
Legacy
Walter Lippmann has been called the most influential journalist of the twentieth century and the "Father of Modern Journalism." The Walter Lippmann House at Harvard, which houses the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, is named after him.
Media scholar Michael Schudson writes that James Carey considered Public Opinion both "the founding book of modern journalism" and "the founding book in American media studies."
His legacy is contested. To some, he was a prescient analyst of democracy's limitations in a complex age. To others, he was an elitist who gave intellectual cover to technocratic manipulation of public opinion. Chomsky and Herman saw him as an architect of propaganda. Dewey saw him as defeatist about democracy's potential.
But what's undeniable is this: Lippmann asked questions we're still grappling with. In an age of misinformation, algorithmic feeds, and political polarization, his skepticism about citizens' ability to navigate complexity feels uncomfortably relevant. His solution—rule by experts—feels deeply unsatisfying. Dewey's alternative—an educated, engaged public forming a Great Community—seems aspirational at best.
Perhaps the real lesson is that Lippmann was right about the problem but wrong about the solution. Or perhaps we're still searching for an answer to the question he posed: How can democracy work when the world has become too complex for any of us to fully understand?