The early Walter Lippmann was a democratic socialist, very much like Dewey. After World War I, he loses his faith in the demos. I mean, he almost agrees with Plato that every democracy is eventually shattered by unruly passions and pervasive ignorance, and therefore democracies always lead toward a tyrant and hence the need for the philosopher-king. […] And Dewey comes along and says, ‘Walter, I understand your pilgrimage and your journey. I understand why you’ve lost faith in the demos.’ I mean, Dewey gets that it’s a challenge. […] You read [Dewey’s] poetry when his wife dies and it’s pretty dim stuff. So it’s not as if he didn’t have any sense of the tragic. It’s just that he believed that human beings had been so obsessed with their limits that they had to be released from that obsession, and recognize those limits being contingent and provisional rather than eternal and universal. I do resonate with that, because a lot of times what people think are limits are not limits at all. They’ll say, well, there’s no way we could really provide support for the poor because the market-driven economists tell us that this is the only way we can arrange society. But I say no, you just don’t have enough imagination or enough empathy. And we like to rationalize domination and oppression. Dewey’s right about all that.1
© 2024 Jonathan Keir
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