This is a well written essay, but I would note that it *maybe* misperiodizes and that mistake muddles the stakes. The “system” Lippmann and Dewey diagnose (mass opinion management, expert steering, centralized media and metrics) was not yet hegemonic in the 1920s. Through mid-century, America still had quite wide and dense lowercase “d” democratic governance structures such as mass member parties, ward and county committees, local press, local capital structures, state banking regimes, cooperatives, fraternal and labor lodges, a decentralized and pluralistic Academe, etc that was processing policy before anything even reached the national level, and far from all even did since the country was still quite decentralized.
The fully centralized, technocratic order you (rightly) worry about began to congeal after WW2 and then during the mid 1960s to mid 1980s, with the advent of the so called Neoliberal Era, actually came into power; this newer order has proven cognitively inferior to the pluralistic, democratic, and federated one it displaced (single-node bottlenecks, Goodhart-style measurement pathologies, agenda capture by donor/media/agency triads).
Framed that way, the Lippmann–Dewey set piece is a family quarrel within a still-plural system: Lippmann’s skepticism about “the public” and Dewey’s school-centered remedy both underweight the structural fact that democracy had worked because authority, capital, and knowledge were distributed across thousands of local nodes. Your conclusion repeats that underweighting. Elevating schools as “dangerous outposts” helps, but unless you also restore the surrounding civic-economic lattice, local capital formation and credit, regulatory variability, party/civic infrastructures, education alone will be poured back into the same centralized machine. Rebuild the broader architecture, and democracy reappears as lived practice, not aspiration.
And, to put it bluntly, the debate you reprise treated the public’s capacity as the problem but, in regards to Lippman, in many of his judgements, he was often proven wrong. He dismissed the capacity of ordinary citizens to deliberate meaningfully, yet the American Old Republic’s federated civic machinery showed that distributed, participatory governance worked effectively for over a century and indeed was cognitively superior to the one that replaced it. He also supported disastrously misguided policies such as the Vietnam War, and he got a bunch of other stuff wrong too. Maybe it was him that was the one that actually lacked the skills all along?
Thanks for such a thoughtful comment! A few responses:
1) You are quite right that I "misperiodize" the formation of "the system." The essay's implicit argument is that the system goes back at least to what Thoreau called "the machine." What you describe as small "d" structures are all aspects of an increasingly national political and social machinery that feels decentralized and democratic in retrospect, but was not experienced that way. Yes, it had local nodes, and those nodes, reconfigured and adapted, still exist.
The railway, telegraph, telephone and cheap printing press were congealing everything by the 1870s, and the complex adaptive systems (commons schools, global corporations, research universities, banks, global communication networks) that emerged to organize society were all fully in place by the 1890s. My view is that modern social systems never congeal into an iron cage or a single system, they work through constant adaptation with their environment, and so you might say they are always congealing. The World Wide Web, the digital computer, and the transformer (both kinds) cause ripples and adjustments. That's why I find Cooley's liquid metaphor for social media so compelling.
2)This periodization means I reject "bowling alone" and other imagined golden eras existing before neoliberals, boomers, Hamiltonian bankers, digital computers, or oligarchs drove us from eden. That's because the academic tribe to which I belong, cultural historians, is skeptical of such stories these days, despite having invented the genre.
3) I quite agree that schools alone will not save us, but my democratic faith tells me that there are not short cuts to a democratic culture. It will take mass education for liberal democratic individuals, not just the mass literacy that characterizes the modern era. That education includes building a shared understanding of scientific methods along with what Charles Peirce called contrite fallibilism about the truths science discovers.
4) Lippmann is not the hero that Dewey is to me for precisely the reasons you outline. It comes with the territory of being an opinion journalist that sometimes your opinions are terrible. That said, I think The Good Society is an excellent defense of liberalism and speaks to the role religion might play in a better social order a way Dewey could not. Niebuhr is another under appreciated writer from that period, with something to say about faith.
Thanks again. I think you effectively pointed out where my views differ from the mainstream, which has helped me sharpen the edges of my argument.
Thanks for the interesting reply! But, respectfully, I think some important distinctions may be getting blurred away here. It’s one thing to note that railroads, telegraphs, and mass print began linking the country in the late 19th c; it’s another to say that the institutions of that era were fundamentally the same as those that later consolidated after WW2. A polytechnical school in the 1890s, for instance, was embedded in a civic and industrial ecosystem, locally governed, regionally funded, oriented toward practical uplift, and had genuinely lower case "d" democratic governance structures connected to its decision making processes. That is structurally different from the centralized, centrally captured research universities of the post-Bayh-Dole era. The same goes for local banks under local state regimes versus nationally harmonized finance, or for mass-member ward and county parties versus today’s donor-media-agency triads.
You describe these as “nodes” of a larger system congealing since the 1870s, but many of them were not merely passive nodes, they were semi-autonomous, participatory institutions with real discretion. They were enmeshed in party-civic machinery that allowed credit, knowledge, and policy to be processed locally before anything reached the national level. That publicly accessible federated density is what made the system genuinely democratic in practice. To collapse that into “already national machinery” risks missing the lived pluralism, the real policy variability, and diffused and distributed governance that existed
And yes, systems are always adapting, they always have been, but the stakes of what “congealed” by the mid 20th century were qualitatively different. Postwar centralization eliminated redundancy and variability; single-node bottlenecks, Goodhart-style pathologies, and elite capture followed. That’s why schools today cannot substitute for the wider civic lattice, they are poured into a centralized machine. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, schools, cooperatives, fraternal lodges, local press, local finance, local industry, local science, and more all reinforced one another within a decentralized architecture.
So I say that the key inflection is certainly not technological (rail, telegraph, web) but institutional design. Whether authority and discretion remain genuinely plural and publicly accessible, or whether they are structurally centralized and publicly inaccessible, is a design choice, not a predetermined outcome. The former describes the Old Republic through mid 20 century; the latter describes us since the advent of the so called the Neoliberal Era
This is a well written essay, but I would note that it *maybe* misperiodizes and that mistake muddles the stakes. The “system” Lippmann and Dewey diagnose (mass opinion management, expert steering, centralized media and metrics) was not yet hegemonic in the 1920s. Through mid-century, America still had quite wide and dense lowercase “d” democratic governance structures such as mass member parties, ward and county committees, local press, local capital structures, state banking regimes, cooperatives, fraternal and labor lodges, a decentralized and pluralistic Academe, etc that was processing policy before anything even reached the national level, and far from all even did since the country was still quite decentralized.
The fully centralized, technocratic order you (rightly) worry about began to congeal after WW2 and then during the mid 1960s to mid 1980s, with the advent of the so called Neoliberal Era, actually came into power; this newer order has proven cognitively inferior to the pluralistic, democratic, and federated one it displaced (single-node bottlenecks, Goodhart-style measurement pathologies, agenda capture by donor/media/agency triads).
Framed that way, the Lippmann–Dewey set piece is a family quarrel within a still-plural system: Lippmann’s skepticism about “the public” and Dewey’s school-centered remedy both underweight the structural fact that democracy had worked because authority, capital, and knowledge were distributed across thousands of local nodes. Your conclusion repeats that underweighting. Elevating schools as “dangerous outposts” helps, but unless you also restore the surrounding civic-economic lattice, local capital formation and credit, regulatory variability, party/civic infrastructures, education alone will be poured back into the same centralized machine. Rebuild the broader architecture, and democracy reappears as lived practice, not aspiration.
And, to put it bluntly, the debate you reprise treated the public’s capacity as the problem but, in regards to Lippman, in many of his judgements, he was often proven wrong. He dismissed the capacity of ordinary citizens to deliberate meaningfully, yet the American Old Republic’s federated civic machinery showed that distributed, participatory governance worked effectively for over a century and indeed was cognitively superior to the one that replaced it. He also supported disastrously misguided policies such as the Vietnam War, and he got a bunch of other stuff wrong too. Maybe it was him that was the one that actually lacked the skills all along?
Thanks for such a thoughtful comment! A few responses:
1) You are quite right that I "misperiodize" the formation of "the system." The essay's implicit argument is that the system goes back at least to what Thoreau called "the machine." What you describe as small "d" structures are all aspects of an increasingly national political and social machinery that feels decentralized and democratic in retrospect, but was not experienced that way. Yes, it had local nodes, and those nodes, reconfigured and adapted, still exist.
The railway, telegraph, telephone and cheap printing press were congealing everything by the 1870s, and the complex adaptive systems (commons schools, global corporations, research universities, banks, global communication networks) that emerged to organize society were all fully in place by the 1890s. My view is that modern social systems never congeal into an iron cage or a single system, they work through constant adaptation with their environment, and so you might say they are always congealing. The World Wide Web, the digital computer, and the transformer (both kinds) cause ripples and adjustments. That's why I find Cooley's liquid metaphor for social media so compelling.
2)This periodization means I reject "bowling alone" and other imagined golden eras existing before neoliberals, boomers, Hamiltonian bankers, digital computers, or oligarchs drove us from eden. That's because the academic tribe to which I belong, cultural historians, is skeptical of such stories these days, despite having invented the genre.
3) I quite agree that schools alone will not save us, but my democratic faith tells me that there are not short cuts to a democratic culture. It will take mass education for liberal democratic individuals, not just the mass literacy that characterizes the modern era. That education includes building a shared understanding of scientific methods along with what Charles Peirce called contrite fallibilism about the truths science discovers.
4) Lippmann is not the hero that Dewey is to me for precisely the reasons you outline. It comes with the territory of being an opinion journalist that sometimes your opinions are terrible. That said, I think The Good Society is an excellent defense of liberalism and speaks to the role religion might play in a better social order a way Dewey could not. Niebuhr is another under appreciated writer from that period, with something to say about faith.
Thanks again. I think you effectively pointed out where my views differ from the mainstream, which has helped me sharpen the edges of my argument.
Thanks for the interesting reply! But, respectfully, I think some important distinctions may be getting blurred away here. It’s one thing to note that railroads, telegraphs, and mass print began linking the country in the late 19th c; it’s another to say that the institutions of that era were fundamentally the same as those that later consolidated after WW2. A polytechnical school in the 1890s, for instance, was embedded in a civic and industrial ecosystem, locally governed, regionally funded, oriented toward practical uplift, and had genuinely lower case "d" democratic governance structures connected to its decision making processes. That is structurally different from the centralized, centrally captured research universities of the post-Bayh-Dole era. The same goes for local banks under local state regimes versus nationally harmonized finance, or for mass-member ward and county parties versus today’s donor-media-agency triads.
You describe these as “nodes” of a larger system congealing since the 1870s, but many of them were not merely passive nodes, they were semi-autonomous, participatory institutions with real discretion. They were enmeshed in party-civic machinery that allowed credit, knowledge, and policy to be processed locally before anything reached the national level. That publicly accessible federated density is what made the system genuinely democratic in practice. To collapse that into “already national machinery” risks missing the lived pluralism, the real policy variability, and diffused and distributed governance that existed
And yes, systems are always adapting, they always have been, but the stakes of what “congealed” by the mid 20th century were qualitatively different. Postwar centralization eliminated redundancy and variability; single-node bottlenecks, Goodhart-style pathologies, and elite capture followed. That’s why schools today cannot substitute for the wider civic lattice, they are poured into a centralized machine. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, schools, cooperatives, fraternal lodges, local press, local finance, local industry, local science, and more all reinforced one another within a decentralized architecture.
So I say that the key inflection is certainly not technological (rail, telegraph, web) but institutional design. Whether authority and discretion remain genuinely plural and publicly accessible, or whether they are structurally centralized and publicly inaccessible, is a design choice, not a predetermined outcome. The former describes the Old Republic through mid 20 century; the latter describes us since the advent of the so called the Neoliberal Era