WHAT THE PUBLIC IS NOT
I borrowed Walter Lippmann’s definition of the public because I found it honest and unpretentious: “The public, as I see it, is not a fixed body of individuals. It is merely the persons who are interested in an affair and can affect it only by supporting or opposing the actors.” The philosophical assumptions underlying these words were typical for Lippmann, who possessed an almost mystical faith in experts and elites—the “actors” he mentioned. But taken baldly and innocently, the definition happened to fit the facts of the subterranean conflict which is the theme of this book.
There is no single body of the public. There are many publics, each of them embedded in a particular culture and circumstance. Nor is the public organized to endure as a permanent fixture of social life. If the interest in an affair which has brought a public into being somehow dissipates, the public itself, like the Marxist hope for the state, will wither away.
The difficulty for the analyst is that he must characterize this heterogeneous beast. The public is a protagonist in my story. In its multiple manifestations, it has exhibited common habits of behavior made possible by the conditions prevalent today: the Fifth Wave of information. To cite just one example, I noted the remarkable affinity with Border-sectarian loathing of authority described, in a different context, by Douglas and Wildavsky. Only those blinded by archaic categories will fail to see that that public, once synonymous with “the audience,” is no longer silent, no longer passive—that it has leaped onstage and become a leading actor in the world-historical drama.
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