How the Left’s Lies Undermine Democracy
Editor's Note
In the contest between American constitutional government and administrative rule by unelected experts, as much depends on the control of information and the public square as on the balance of hard power. Chris Bray looks to Walter Lippmann, one of the leading lights of the Progressive era, to explain how the distinctive propaganda of the destructive Left traces back to the very origins of administrative rule — and how it is used to advance the interests and ascendancy of the supposed experts.
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.
Congressional Democrats descended into explosive anger over the intervention of the supposed monster Elon Musk, who used his social media platform to discuss the content of the bill — and to bring others into that discussion. X users posted screenshots of sections, describing the actual purpose of the legislation.
This is wrong. This is being mean. Elon Musk, Democrats explained, is becoming a puppetmaster, seizing power over the government. He spoke.
For Democrats, the boundaries of the debate permitted to the public were those that Jeffries defined, over and over again, in a relentless stream of public statements: helping or hurting. For the bill, helping; against the bill, hurting. No further discussion was appropriate.
Jeffries performs this maneuver with obvious calculation and willfulness. Scroll through his posts on X. Look for commas, which you mostly won’t find. Democrats are for kindness. Republicans are for being mean. Are you for meanness?
In 1858, Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln campaigned for a Senate seat with a series of seven debates, traveling around Illinois and speaking without a moderator. The format: “In each debate either Douglas or Lincoln would open with an hour address. The other would then speak for an hour and a half. The first then had 30 minutes of rebuttal.” They expected an informed and alert public to know the background of the topics they discussed, to analyze the differences in their views, and to catch the meaning of their rhetorical maneuvers. Their opening assumption was a shared respect for the public they wished to serve.
Quaint, right?
We live, now, with a set of rhetorical tools that mimic the form of debate while discarding the substance. Question: What’s the strategy in Ukraine, and what’s the likelihood that a prolonged war will end in Russian defeat? Answer: Why do you love Putin?
Manipulating the pictures in our heads, Democrats warn (for example) that a ban on transgender military service will devastate the armed forces. Sample claim:
“President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team is developing an executive order that would medically discharge the estimated 15,000 transgender service members from the military, according to several international news outlets. The sudden dismissal of so many troops would prove chaotic, advocates supporting LGBTQ+ service members say, and the military services would be forced to fill gaps and compensate for a loss of experience at a time when recruiting remains a struggle.”
Walter Lippmann would be proud of the effort, which creates shocking pictures in your head: huge gaps, lost experience. Warships that can’t sail, fighter planes trapped on the runway as their many brave transgender pilots are frogmarched away from their posts.
But the estimate of 15,000 transgender servicemembers is impossible to run down to a real source and a reliable method, and the military refuses to provide actual numbers. Real evidence suggests that the estimate is not just fake but ridiculously fake: a 2024 report from the Congressional Research Service suggests that fewer than 2,000 service members have received any form of medical care for gender transition, with an unknown number of those actually remaining in uniform now.
So we debate the removal of transgender servicemembers: Do you want to shut down our ships and airplanes? Do you want to drain our infantry battalions? Do you want a mass purge of 15,000 troops?
The debate isn’t a debate. It’s an emotional performance of an invented symbol.
We do this over and over again, debating without debating. If you want to see this process at its apogee, watch any meeting of a state legislative committee in California, where elected officials limit debate to a pair of two-minute for and against opening statements, which are then followed by a parade of “me-toos.” They actually call it that: “We’ll now have the me-toos.” That process allows individuals and organizations to identify themselves, walking to a microphone to give their names and their position on a bill: Chris Bray, parent, in favor. Jane Doe, Federation of Social Workers, opposed. No other discussion is permitted.
The forms of democratic participation, drained of substance.
Partisan polarization begins, then solidifies, with the emptying of discussion into meaningless noise. We’re there, and politicians mean for us to be there. The eruption of anger over Elon Musk’s intervention in the continuing resolution is an expression of discomfort with the appearance of substance in a process that was supposed to be entirely performative. That uncomfortable process urgently needs to continue.