The Phantom Public

“The Voice of the People has been said to be the voice of God: and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact.”—Alexander Hamilton, June 18, 1787, at the Federal Convention (Yates’s notes, cited Sources and Documents Illustrating the American Revolution, edited by S. G. Morison).

“... _consider ‘Government by Public Opinion’ as a formula.... It is an admirable formula: but it presupposes, not only that public opinion exists, but that on any particular question there is a public opinion ready to decide the issue. Indeed, it presupposes that the supreme statesman in democratic government is public opinion. Many of the shortcomings of democratic government are due to the fact that public opinion is not necessarily a great statesman at all._”—From “Some Thoughts on Public Life,” a lecture by Viscount Grey of Fallodon, February 3, 1923.

Contents

PART I

Chapter Page

I. The Disenchanted Man 13

II. The Unattainable Ideal 22

III. Agents and Bystanders 40

IV. What the Public Does 54

V. The Neutralization of Arbitrary Force 63

PART II

VI. The Question Aristotle Asked 77

VII. The Nature of a Problem 81

VIII. Social Contracts 95

IX. The Two Questions Before the Public 107

X. The Main Value of Public Debate 110

XI. The Defective Rule 115

XII. The Criteria of Reform 125

XIII. The Principles of Public Opinion 143

PART III

XIV. Society in Its Place 155

XV. Absentee Rulers 173

XVI. The Realms of Disorder 187

Index 201

PART I

Chapter I

THE DISENCHANTED MAN

1

The private citizen today has come to feel rather like a deaf spectator in the back row, who ought to keep his mind on the mystery off there, but cannot quite manage to keep awake. He knows he is somehow affected by what is going on. Rules and regulations continually, taxes annually and wars occasionally remind him that he is being swept along by great drifts of circumstance.

Yet these public affairs are in no convincing way his affairs. They are for the most part invisible. They are managed, if they are managed at all, at distant centers, from behind the scenes, by unnamed powers. As a private person he does not know for certain what is going on, or who is doing it, or where he is being carried. No newspaper reports his environment so that he can grasp it; no school has taught him how to imagine it; his ideals, often, do not fit with it; listening to speeches, uttering opinions and voting do not, he finds, enable him to govern it. He lives in a world which he cannot see, does not understand and is unable to direct.

In the cold light of experience he knows that his sovereignty is a fiction. He reigns in theory, but in fact he does not govern. Contemplating himself and his actual accomplishments in public affairs, contrasting the influence he exerts with the influence he is supposed according to democratic theory to exert, he must say of his sovereignty what Bismarck said of Napoleon III.: “At a distance it is something, but close to it is nothing at all.”[1] When, during an agitation of some sort, say a political campaign, he hears himself and some thirty million others described as the source of all wisdom and power and righteousness, the prime mover and the ultimate goal, the remnants of sanity in him protest. He cannot all the time play Chanticleer who was so dazzled and delighted because he himself had caused the sun to rise.

For when the private man has lived through the romantic age in politics and is no longer moved by the stale echoes of its hot cries, when he is sober and unimpressed, his own part in public affairs appears to him a pretentious thing, a second rate, an inconsequential. You cannot move him then with a good straight talk about service and civic duty, nor by waving a flag in his face, nor by sending a boy scout after him to make him vote. He is a man back home from a crusade to make the world something or other it did not become; he has been tantalized too often by the foam of events, has seen the gas go out of it, and, with sour derision for the stuff, he is saying with the author of Trivia:[2]