Walter Lippman is name rarely heard popularly, yet is a pillar of the current world order. An American scribbler who helped pioneer "journalism" as a social science, his Public Opinion remains a textbook for the disciple. His Good Society forged the basis of the "new liberalism" that he advocated, reflected in Woodrow Wilson's "New Freedom" as well in the trans-Atlantic Lippmann Colloquy and a successor/sub-division, the Pelerin Society (which had such free-trade luminaries as von Mises and von Hayek). My first acquaintance with Lippmann came obliquely through Chomsky/Herman's Manufacturing Consent, a book on the media-complex that takes its title from a Lippmann phrase. However, reading his opus Good Society is like discovering the key to the current order of things. Lippmann's theorizing remains a helpful lens to understand the phenomenon "neoliberalism" which is bandied about to the point of meaninglessness. Yet the term should not be abandoned. It has a historical provenance to explain why the Anglo-American order has come about and remains so powerful.
Lippmann's political affiliation explains a lot of neoliberalism's flexibility as a term. Lippmann as a young man was part of Norman Thomas' American socialist party, reflecting a more radical edge of Progressivism's social gospel politics of mastery, technique, and uplift. Lippmann floated into the progressive wing of the Democratic party, supporting Wilson from his perch at The New Republic. However, Lippmann was never a party hack and seemed quite flexible. He was an early critic of the Cold War. He had a dovish interpretation of George Kennan's doctrine of containment. Unlike later theories of detente, Kennan saw Russia as a political rival with the US in Europe. Kennan feared Soviet totalitarianism as brutal, but he did not see the USSR as an ideological competitor for the soul of the world. This shift would mark both pro-Europe Democratic containment theorists, as well as pro-Asia Republicans. Communism was not simply the doctrine of a regime, but styled as the only alternative to American capitalism. Lippmann never wavered from his belief in this project, but he could easily be construed as a peacenik. He believed the Soviets should have their sphere of influence in eastern Europe (even interviewing Khrushchev in 1961). Lippmann remained a stalwart within DNC politics, although he criticized Johnson and the war in Vietnam. Lippmann's views reflect the far more conciliatory, "global", positions later advanced by Carter, Clinton, and Obama. And yet, how could Lippmann inspire the Austrian/Chicago economists that so eagerly supported Reaganomics? Socialist and liberal, free-trade and Keynsian welfare, all of these pieces are part of a single whole that represents Lippmann's "new liberalism".
It's important to note that Lippmann didn't design neoliberalism, as if he somehow came up with a system that was later adapted. Nothing of the sort. Lippmann offers the clearest conceptualization that had gripped the mind of not a few corporate progressives in the late 19th/early 20th c. He represented the interest of the new masters of mankind, the vulture perched in Wall St. imagining how the American empire could create a new order of the ages. It was the age when New York was becoming the new London, and America's antagonism toward the British Empire moved towards synthesis. Lippmann was simply one of many who realized that a new order was necessary to preserve and advance the goods of liberalism, which had become racialized as "Anglosaxonism" that united the often antagonized peoples into a "cosmopolitan" global power bloc. Rothschilds and Morgans had far more in common than the frothing rage from a Joseph Chamberlain or a William Jennings Bryan. Capital was the bond of a new order, cementing peace and stability.
Reading The Good Society, one might be tempted to appreciate this order. But under the shroud of freedom and peace lurks a more devilish, ensnaring doctrine. The rest of this essay will explicate what Lippmann theorized and its significance. Hopefully, by the end, the reader will understand that the real root is neither capitalism nor socialism, as these have become ideologically-charged terms that simply play off each other. The vision goes far deeper.
In short, Lippmann was a liberal in defense of liberalism. Lippmann believed the ideal society prized freedom (hence liberal). But what was freedom? Freedom from what or to do what? Beyond the stupid characterization of Isaiah Berlin, Lippmann saw freedom as fundamentally a freedom of exchange. In the realm of ideas, men should be able to debate any position. In the realm of goods, men should be able to buy/sell goods at the best price/quality. Thus, a world-order is necessary to uplift and protect these mechanisms. The Pragmatist valorization of "the market place of ideas" was key to this vision: all things could be bartered, debated, questioned, bought, and sold. However, as any keen analyst will quickly realized, there's a certain limit: the market itself could not be questioned. Freedom itself could not be turned against the matrix of freedom. This position is the most basic criticism of liberalism, that it still depends upon a metaphysic and justification for its own view. Liberalism may have emerged mainly as triage in relation to intractable social divisions, but it needed stronger foundations than simply temporary tolerance. Freedom was the natural virtue and position of man. Markets were the natural activity of man in freedom. Thus, free man would gravitate to free markets which was the "natural" (and rational) state of things. The Marketplace was, in now secularized theological parlance, nature's god. And it was in such a framework where men could flourish.
However, Lippmann worried that classical liberalism had failed. The theory of laissez-faire combined with Darwinian/Spencerian evolution into a rigid dogmatism. Some liberal statesmen adapted Malthusian political economy to justify the most brutal regimes. They would argue, with a straight face, that it was the duty of the rich to let the poor die. Artificial sustenance through charity was only prolonging the inevitable. The strong grow and survive, the weak cling on until their doom. Spencerian Darwinism not only categorized the peoples of the earth in a racial taxonomy, but even classes within society. Not only were the negros and mongoloids inferior races, so too were the poor an inferior race. Eugenics emerged from within this harsh reckoning of things. But for Lippmann, as for many Progressive liberal reformers, this approach was awful. It was not simply the inhumanity of it, but it simply lacked vision. Liberalism had become rigid dogmatic orthodoxy, obscuring the fact that men had to protect Nature from other men. Had lord Palmerston not capitulated to this logic when gunboats blew open Argentine markets and kept the Qing from prohibiting opium in China? Had Gladstone not given in when he occupied the Suez? In theory, this dogmatism seemed impeccable. However, as Progressivism fused scientific technique to the human efforts of politics, trade, religion, and culture, the "social sciences" renounced this rigidity. Did not engineers need to constantly adjust calculations and calibrations to real world flux? How could these "scientific" racists simply ignore the data? While a Richard Cobden may lament the failure for truly free markets, Gladstone had to act contrary to his master. The anti-imperial "Cobdenist" Grover Cleveland was quite willing to blow open markets to keep them open to the world-powers. Thus, while Cleveland (unlike his rival James G. Blaine) would not annex Hawaii, he would use gunboat diplomacy to keep the island as an international port of trade. Lippmann knew that liberalism, if it were to survive, needed to adopt a new level of flexibility.
The old model of liberal dogmatisim in service of capital seemed destined for collapse. Exploitation of workers and resources had a breaking-point until revolution would consume the land. Thus reforms needed to be implemented. The social-sciences fused with postmillenialist ecumenical protestantism into a new kind of secular theology of humanitarian global liberalism. Compassion and concern drove many activists, but efforts were to remake the world into a fundamentally rational, free, and market-oriented world. Rockefeller money flowed into churches, parachurch missionary agencies, social scientific departments (University of Chicago was basically a creature of Rockefeller money) became a means to realize this goal. It was cosmopolitan in the sense that it had a global vision of unity, however it was through remaking the world into the vaguely Christian modernist protestantism. Some missionaries did indeed seek to convert the heathens to the faith, others saw "conversion" more in terms of adapting Anglosaxonism and its technological bounty. To be Christian was to act Christian within one's own traditions and religions. And, of course, this meant banishing superstition, embracing technology, and socially organizing to link capital to the poles of power in London and New York. These charitable NGOs were not simply an effort to bring relief to the destitute, sick, and degraded peoples of the world. They were also part of building a global network that could adjust to market conditions.
The old dogmatism that saw a Liberal India exporting grain during a famine (following market orthodoxy) needed to be scrapped. In its place, governments operated as technical operators to manage a nation's affairs according to these scientific readouts. Lippmann is quite clear that the defense of free-markets meant government intervention and welfare were necessary props for a free-trade regime. It was precisely how Woodrow Wilson emerged as successor to the Bourbon Democrats, who often languished in old laissez-faire orthodoxies that many Americans found repugnant. The New Freedom was the way to instantiate liberalism within the American political economy. It was a shift away from the old American System or from its progressive corporate/Bismarckian socialism of Teddy Roosevelt.
Some of these new liberals, like John Dewey, believed this system was possible through a kind of national populism. Let a hundred flowers bloom, so to speak, and the best way forward would emerge. Lippmann famously disagreed with Dewey. Per many Progressive theorists and social scientists of the era, Lippmann thought democracy had failed. The Jacksonian ethos that motivated the support for Eugene Debs' prairie socialism and the Farmer Alliance's support for William Jennings Bryan (who had taken over the party machinery of the DNC for a decade) was a sign of sickness. What did an unlettered farmer from Kansas know about monetary policy? He could easily doom the nation's well-being in a fit of xenophobic economic protectionism. Yet, unlike some would-be aristocrats, Lippmann believed democracy had a role to play. The new social-science of journalism could become a mechanism to wield democracy as a support for administrative policies. The electrical energy of popular mobilization made a nation far more powerful than an oligarchic clique sitting over their dominion. People needed to believe, but believe the right things.
Journalism, as it had been, was quite easily dominated by demagogues, profiteering muckrakers, and unlettered villagers. If journalism is controlled by interests (whether corporate or parochial) why not control it for the good? In other words, if journalism became a "science" to distill the news into popularly digestible symbols, then people would have the enthusiasm of making their own choices, but these choices would be guided. Lippmann saw journalists, along with the other social scientists, as a new clerical class. He did not believe they should make decisions, but determine the parameters of decision-making. Politicians and the electorate should not be allowed to come to any random conclusion, that would be destabilizing and dangerous. Instead, the clerical social-scientists would guide outcomes through learning. Although Lippmann does not see it in these terms, it was a new secular clerical class, cosmopolitan in the same way the clergy of Rome saw beyond national boundaries. Unlike the unreliable theology of mystical experience, watching omens, and pouring over ancient texts, the new clergy would apply the rational methods of the scientific method to human endeavors. Politics, economics, social policy, all of these could be mastered as part of a technical discipline and applied in service of Freedom. As an aside, this kind of technical mastery is not in itself a bad thing within limits. Hatred of Stalin emerged not so much from his brutality, but because this technical mastery took a turn towards national autarky within a communist paradigm. Stalin, cunning as he was, rode this fence to lure investors. His shock at Hitler's betrayal of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was because the USSR was not ready to go its own yet. It still depended on foreign capital (like Henry Ford's manufacturing) and foreign technique (German industrial technology). But I digress.
Hence, Lippmann believed the journalist's objective was to "manufacture consent", to sell the policies in a way to constrain the form democratic action would take. On the surface, maybe this doesn't seem so bad. The social-scientist would replace the pulpit, the village demagogue, the party bosses, and industrial propaganda. Freedom to follow curiosity and abandon superstition would replace old and musty orthodoxies. Framed in these terms, many would embrace this method as the hallmark of civilization and progress towards a better world. But the question remains: at what cost? Do these social-sciences really work any better than other regimes of knowledge and hermeneutical interpretation? Do ethics simply reflect the dynamics of the market? Should any idea be open for debate? Should any thing be up for sale if the parties are willing? Does human rationality operate at this linear rate of information collection/collation? Is man homo economicus, even if he deals in spiritual/ideal wares? And truly: is man's telos to be naturalized or nature's goal to be humanized (divinized)?
Lippmann's vision sees beyond the crudities of capitalism/socialism, just as most financiers saw it. Henry Ford and Koch Sr. dumped money into the Soviet Union. Wall St. profited handsomely from Nazi Germany. These regimes were ostensibly against the decadence of liberal capitalism, yet they gained a kind of niche in a budding world-order. Anglosaxonism had become more dynamic than a temporary rule of barbaric conquest and absorption. It had become a new religion. It defined the axes of the political compass. It balanced dictatorship and parliamentary democracy. The ideological polarization allowed both Keynsian socialism and free-marketeer anti-government. It's not so much a question that neoliberalism, like a ghost in the shell, could corrupt or possess either of these moments (as partisans both left and right might complain). Rather, it defined them. Welfare represented technical adjustment, which could operate as a temporary salve to eventually privatize and return to the market. Unlike the rigid dogmatism of laissez-faire liberalism, which left the streets of London covered in the scabbed and starved, the new liberalism would hospitalize them. In other words, market adjustment was to keep the order functioning. It did not require an all-or-nothing war. Rather, these changes could be done incrementally in response to pressure. It's this technical methodology that informed British Fabianism, which could adopt to any condition (tory-ultra, liberal, and eventually labour).
This ability to adapt several masks may seem like a sheer negativity: how can neoliberalism exist as both socialist and capitalist, authoritarian and democratic? Because the ultimate purpose is not any of these regimes but the telos of Market freedom. Regimes that threaten this arrangement are often targeted for destruction. However, this ghostly framework can possess most forms, reorienting them for market-integration. Regime adjustments simply reflect the on-the-ground demands. The threat of Chilean Allende needed harsh course-correction: Pinochet was a battering ram, whose brutality was a means to ease the transition of the social democracy of the Christian Democratic party. The Strategy of Tension (a term coined from Operation Gladio and its Years of Lead in Cold War Italy) is in full-effect: create instability to service a more subterranean instability, keeping people on their toes as a regime remains in control. The illusion of choice ends up cementing power dynamics as much, if not more, than brutal crackdowns. Neoliberalism isn't just free-markets, as if Reagan/Thatcher were paragons of that (which, in someways, they weren't). It's about management of a complex system, a hyperbeast named the Market, who is the enhypostatization of Nature. All religions can flourish in this environment because they're all equally meaningless, or, perhaps better phrased, all equally meaningful through their shared enshrinement. Liberal theology open embraces worship of the shrine, while parochical (yet subordinated) exclusivist creeds involve a cryptic guidance into the light.
Evangelicals in the United States are the primary vehicle. Vatican 2 Roman Catholicism has embraced this role for itself. Political Islamism (whether pan-Turkic, Salafist, etc.) has served a similar role. All end up supporting liberalized markets and privatization, while also advancing levels of social conservatism. The Moral Majority kulturkamf was part of negotiating how the market-share would be divided, but not fundamentally questioning the regime itself. The Gospel Coalition provides a platform for these adjustments within the mainstream. Bircherite Trumpists denounce TGC as leftist, but they play a part as well. Often rightwing and leftwing idealogues are put on the payroll as a battering ram of access. Militarization and open imperialism become mechanisms to justify a certain regime to access new territories, only to shrivel up when they're no longer necessary. Moral Majority were half of a dialectical process to make "the bedroom" a marketable commodity. Now that it's open, not only is sex sold (as porn), but sexual lifestyle is sold. But the market-place ideology, whether to sell the traditional American family or the transgendered liberated anarchic liberalism, remains. It's hard to even imagine people thinking outside of this box, where everything is part of a public-relations coup to manage every aspect of life. It's not totalitarian in the sense of 1984, but in the sense that the Market demands complete access. Everything should be bought and sold. This is man conformed to Nature. This is man enthrall to the Market. This is freedom.
As an aside, I think Trumpism is a double-edged phenomenon. On the one hand, it operates as the Birchers did, which is a controlled opposition to agitate. It produces the psychic criminals which prove the wisdom of liberal clerics, the way inquisitions helped justify the Roman church's expansion into more spheres of life when they found heretics. However, Trumpism has also opened up the possibility for some to begin to question this entire regime. Trump's open criticism of the Bushes and the Republican party has made some Evangelicals hostile to this Anglosaxonism. For most, it will amount to nothing, being a means to roll people back into a Trumpist Republican party that will adapt this rage-against-PMC to get votes. Such was how Reagan revived the GOP after Nixon and Watergate. This kind of management of dissent is an imperfect process, and so I always have hope some will wake up (the same way some Bush-era liberals woke up, instead of falling back asleep when Obama won in 2008).
This is a very loose and skeletal sketch of neoliberalism. It's an elusive and powerful order. It exudes, just as the Medieval Roman church did, the ethos of TINA (There Is No Alternative). It demands a comprehensive transnational obedience, invisibly present as simply the divine/natural order of things. It holds together fractious and competing nations, various corporations, and many peoples under a cosmopolitan umbrella. It manages dissent, it can hold several contradictions, as long as the fundamentals are not questioned. But unlike the papacy, it is far less rigid and polyvalent. It lacks any single head or any outward face. It is submerged, with institutions operating and acting in accordance with a gravitational pull. It is Leviathan.
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