a new art in the practice of democracy," the "manufacture of consent" -- the "engineering of consent"
Daily dose of Chomsky:
"Popular struggles have won a great many rights, but concentrated power and privilege clings to the Madisonian conception in ways that vary as society changes.
"Popular struggles have won a great many rights, but concentrat
By World War I, business leaders and elite intellectuals recognized that the population had won so many rights that they could not be controlled by force, so it would be necessary to turn to control of attitudes and opinions.
Those are the years when the huge public relations industry emerged -- in the freest countries of the world, Britain and United States, where the problem was most acute.
The industry was devoted to what Walter Lippmann approvingly called "a new art in the practice of democracy," the "manufacture of consent" -- the "engineering of consent" in the phrase of his contemporary Edward Bernays, one of the founders of the public relations industry.
Both Lippmann and Bernays took part in Wilson's state propaganda organization, the Committee on Public Information, created to drive a pacifist population to jingoist fanaticism and hatred of all things German. It succeeded brilliantly.
The same techniques, it was hoped, would ensure that the "intelligent minorities" would rule, undisturbed by "the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd," the general public, "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders" whose "function" is to be "spectators," not "participants."
This was a central theme of the highly regarded "progressive essays on democracy" by the leading public intellectual of the twentieth century (Lippmann), whose thinking captures well the perceptions of progressive intellectual opinion.”
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