Cruelty and democracy: Understanding Lippmann’s gambit

A paradox haunts Lippmann’s critique of democracy running through his early work in Public Opinion up through The Public Philosophy. Liberal democracies, despite their claim to securing space for human dignity and freedom, can be sites of incredible cruelty. From the racial prejudices cutting through American politics, to the way Americans treated adversaries during war, democracy appeared to do little to vitiate the human propensity to inflict suffering upon others. This article examines Lippmann’s understanding of cruelty as a recurring feature of democracy and how he grappled with the question of how to curb the democratic public’s worst impulses. I argue that while Lippmann offers an expansive understanding of cruelty his analysis continually gravitates towards the role of cruelty in democracy and how the existence of mobs and demagogues represent democracy’s ever-latent potential for cruelty. Exploring his thinking further, I suggest there are at least two distinct views on the origins and dynamics of cruelty in his work – what I designate ‘callous’ and ‘joyful’ cruelty – influenced by James and Freud respectively. Finally, I contend that recognizing the gravity Lippmann assigns to the problem of cruelty is important because it can help us understand his puzzling turn to natural law in The Public Philosophy. Here I suggest Lippmann’s turn to natural law should be read as a radical pragmatist gambit in which the myth of natural law is mobilized to create a ‘tradition of civility’ aimed at curbing democratic cruelty. When we attend to this side of Lippmann we see a version of him that is less a conservative reactionary and more an anxious critic desperate to ward off the darker impulses of democracy.