1. Walter Lippmann Drift and Mastery (1914)

2. Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery (1914) 1. There is a consensus that business methods need to change. “The leading though of our world has ceased to regard commercialism either as permanent or desirable, and the only real question among intelligent people is how business methods are to be alerted, not whether they are to be altered.” 2. The chaos of too much freedom and the weaknesses of democracy are our real problem. “The battle for us, in short, does not lie against crusted prejudice, but against the chaos of a new freedom. This chaos is our real problem. So if the younger critics are to meet the issues of their generation they must give their attention, not so much to the evils of authority, as to the weaknesses of democracy….”

3. Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery (1914) 3. Many are absorbed and overly worried about evil conspiracies against society. “The sense of conspiracy and secret scheming which transpire is almost uncanny. “Big Business,” and its ruthless tentacles, have become the material for the feverish fantasy of illiterate thousands thrown out of kilter by the rack and strain of modern life. It is possible to work yourself into a state where the world seems a conspiracy and your daily gong is beset with an alert and tingling sense of labyrinthine evil. Everything askew—all the frictions of life are readily ascribed to a deliberate evil intelligence, and men like Morgan and Rockefeller take on attributes of omnipotence, that ten minutes of cold sanity would reduce to a barbarous myth….”

4. Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery (1914) 4. Although there is little legal basis for it, the standards of the public life are being applied to certain parts of the business world, thus making businessmen think more about their “responsibilities,” and their “stewardship.” “As muckraking developed, it began to apply the standards of public life to certain parts of the business world…. [T]he cultural basis of property is radically altered, however much the law may lag behind in recognizing the change. So if the stockholders think they are the ultimate owners of the Pennsylvania railroad, they are colossally mistaken. Whatever the law may be, the people have no such notion. And the men who are connected with these essential properties cannot escape the fact that they are expected to act increasingly as public officials …[W]hat puzzles them beyond words is that anyone should presume to meddle with their business. What they will learn is that it is no longer altogether their business. The law may not have realized this, but the fact is being accomplished, and it’s a fact grounded deeper than statutes. Big business men who are at all intelligent recognize this. They are talking more and more about their “responsibilities,” their “stewardship.” It is the swan-song of the old commercial profiteering and a dim recognition that the motives in business are undergoing a revolution.”

5. Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery (1914) 5. Americans need to deal with life deliberately. We should organize our society, and actively formulate it an educate it. We should substitute purpose for tradition. “America is preeminently the country where there is practical substance in Nietzsche’s advice that we should live not for our fatherland but for our children’s land. To do this men have to substitute purpose for tradition: and that is, I believe, the profoundest change that has ever taken place in human history. We can no longer treat life as something that has trickled down to us. We have to deal with it deliberately, devise its social organization, alter its tools, formulate its method, educate and control it. In endless ways we put intention where custom has reigned. We break up routines, make decisions, choose our ends, select means….”

6. During the 1920s, Walter Lippmann published two of the most penetrating indictments of democracy every written, Public Opinion and The Phantom Public, valedictories to Progressive hopes for the application of “intelligence” to social problems via mass democracy. Instead of acting out of careful consideration of the issues or even individual or collective self-interest, the American voter, Lippmann claimed, was ill-informed, myopic, and prone to fits of enthusiasm. The government, like advertising copywriters and journalists, had perfected the art of creating and manipulating public opinion—a process Lippmann called the “manufacture of consent”—while at the same time consumerism was sapping Americans’ concern for public issues. (Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom, p. 181.)