Walter Lippmann

Abstract Walter Lippmann was the most recognized political journalist of the twentieth century. His “Today and Tomorrow” columns attracted a global readership of over ten million daily. Lippmann was the author of numerous best-selling books, and his Public Opinion (1922) remains a classic text within American political philosophy and media studies. Befriended by U.S. presidents and by America’s rivals around the world, Lippmann became one of democracy’s most faithful proponents and harshest critics. Yet few people have encountered the “real” Walter Lippmann. His extensive commentary on politics and foreign affairs was bounded by his sense that America had to adjust to the loss of a common faith and morality. Over the course of his life, Lippmann traded in his fame as a happy secularist for the stardom of a grumpy Western “post-Christian” intellectual. Yet he never committed himself to any religious system, especially his own Jewish heritage. This book is an examination of Lippmann’s eclectic spiritual development hiding in plain sight of his massive volume of writings and correspondence. It forefronts Lippmann’s paradoxical critique and embrace of Christian nationalism. It also yields fresh insights into the religious and philosophical origins of strong-state American liberalism, including liberalism’s shortcomings in the areas of sex, race, and class. For Lippmann, the good life in the good society was lived in irreconcilable tension: the struggle to be free from yet loyal to a way of life; to see the dangers but necessity of a civil religion; and to strive for a just and enduring world order that can never be.