Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

late-night thoughts about democracy S 51
believed that the appeal to our lesser side was essential both to
the art of selling and to the “engineering of consent” that he
considered necessary to maintain the stability of democracy in
mass societies. 2 People distracted by consumption, which is to say
the thoroughly infantilized, seldom disturb the public order or
become zealous revolutionaries. Bernays’ methods—the appeal to
fear and resentment above all—have been adapted to U.S. politics
with a degree of artfulness that might have surprised even
Bernays. 3 But it would not have astonished the many critics of
democracy from ancient Athens to the present who believe that
people in general are ignorant, foolish, gullible, selfi sh, and incapable
of sustained rationality. Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter,
for example, believed that “the typical citizen drops down
to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the
political fi eld” (1962, p. 262). The American voter, according to
Rick Shenkman, is pretty stupid—distracted by consumption, ill
informed, lazy, and mentally defi cient—and ripe for the plucking,
but he proposes only more civic education (2008, pp. 177–179).
Other observers blame the lack of leadership. Classical scholar
Loren Samons, for example, asks: “When was the last time modern
Americans heard a politician, journalistic commentator, or
even a character in a popular fi lm openly claim that what the
majority—what ‘the American people’—want or think is either
morally wrong or intellectually bankrupt? But that’s what real
leaders must do, especially in a democracy” (2004, p. 201).
Whatever the various causes, the skeptics of democracy seem
to be vindicated by our political life in recent decades. The depth
of our political discourse has been mostly inversely proportional
to the gravity of the issues. Abortion, for one, has generated great
controversy and media attention, while issues having to do merely
with the mutilation of life on the Earth, which is to say the abortion
of the human prospect, have been mostly greeted by something
ranging from awkward silence to ridicule. Sigmund Freud
and Carl Jung thought that our political behavior refl ected the