The Idea Of Democracy In Walter Lippmann's Participatory Democracy

Walter Lippmann explains the ideal of democracy using a few key descriptors. He argues that the root of the mythic notion of democracy is that participatory democracy places too much faith in the hands of the public. Lippmann categorizes the mythic notion of democracy as the individuals who take advantage of the masses and their ignorance. Lippmann challenges this form in Public Opinion because an ineffective and leeching form of government will cripple the world’s economy. Lippmann focuses on the effect that stereotypes have on the public perception of the world, and says this about his stereotype of democracy.

“The stereotype of democracy controlled the visible government; the corrections, the exceptions and adaptations of the American people

He also explains that the public succumbs to the stereotypes that support the government: news, law enforcement, and politicians. Lippmann then points out that the “visible government” is the aftermath of the assumptions made by the public about democracy. Lippmann argues, “the substance of the argument is that democracy in its original form never seriously faced the problem which arises because the pictures inside people’s heads do not automatically correspond with the world outside” (Lippmann 19). This argument makes sense because the interpretation of symbols and fictions, as well as propaganda and stereotypes, differentiates person to person. As democracy has developed, the pictures inside people’s minds have pushed it from its original form. Concurrently, the people in power have the same distorted picture in their head. He continues this evaluation by saying, “for in each of these innumerable centers of authority there are parties, and these parties are themselves hierarchies with their roots in classes, sections, cliques and clans; and within these are the individual politicians, each the personal center of a web of connection and memory and fear and hope” (Lippmann 13). This places the public at risk because their leaders are acting with a pre-disposition to certain stereotypes and the effect trickles down to plague the

In Part Three, he focuses on how irrational stereotypes effect how we come to know things.

“The subtlest and most pervasive of all influences ere those which create and maintain the repertory of stereotypes. We are told about
the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception. They mark out certain objects as familiar or strange, emphasizing the difference, so that the slightly familiar is seen as very familiar, and the somewhat strange as sharply alien” (Lippmann