The Short-Circuiting of the American Mind

For decades, American politics have relied on the same logic that polygraph machines do: that liars will feel some level of shame when they tell their lies, and that the shame will manifest—the quickened heartbeat, the pang of guilt—in the body. But the body politic is cheating the test with alarming ease. Some Americans believe the lies. Others refuse to. Some Americans recognize the lies’ falsity but have decided that some things—their own tribe, their vision for the country—are simply more important than truth. Regardless, the lies remain, unchecked by the old machinery. The polygraph is a measure of conscience. So, in its way, is democracy.

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A century ago, in his classic book Public Opinion, the journalist Walter Lippmann laid out a bleak argument: One of the threats to the American experiment was American democracy itself. The work of self-government, Lippmann thought—even back then—asked far too much of its citizens. It asked too much of our minds.

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Democracy is a task of data management; ours is premised on the idea that voters’ political decisions will be based on reliable information. But it is also a matter of psychology, and of cognition. The atomic unit of democracy is the human brain. Everything will come down to its capabilities, its vulnerabilities, its biases—for better and, definitely, for worse.

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The information people rely on to do the work of citizenship—voting, arguing, shaping a shared future—is data. But those data are processed by notoriously fickle hardware. The data inform our brains’ impressions of the world: the images that [Walter] Lippmann called “the pictures in our heads.” The pictures are subjective. They are malleable. And, perhaps most of all, they make little distinction between things that are true and things that are merely believed to be.

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[Lippmann] was reckoning with the beginning stages of the information environment that humans navigate today. As people consumed these media, he discerned that they would become reliant on images of the world rather than on the evidence provided by the world itself. They would become confused, he feared, by the preponderance of competing images. And the confusion would weaken them—making them susceptible to the advertisements, to all the stories, to information overwhelm. (To describe the effect of the images, Lippmann borrowed a term from the factory floor: They functioned, he argued, as “stereotypes”—a term he used not as an insult but as a simple description of images’ heuristic powers.)

In Public Opinion, Lippmann diagnosed how readily propaganda could make its way into a nation that was officially at peace. He outlined how seamlessly the false messages could mingle with, and override, true ones. He argued that Americans’ unsteady relationship with information made our democracy inherently fragile. The philosopher John Dewey, alternately impressed and horrified by Public Opinion, called it “perhaps the most effective indictment of democracy” ever written.

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With every lie Trump has told, from the petty to the consequential, he has eroded people’s ability to trust the pictures in their heads. Every time he condemns the pollsters who document his waning public approval, he further erodes that trust. The tethers that anchor people to their president—and to the ground truths of their politics—fray just a bit more.

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But political power can be narrative power as well. Falsehoods, issued repeatedly from the bully pulpit, threaten to become conventional wisdom, then clichés, then foregone conclusions. Attempts to challenge them, as crucial as those efforts are as matters of historical recordkeeping, take on a certain listlessness. For others to point out the truth is to do the right thing. It is also to bring paper straws to a gunfight.

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In February, responding to Trump’s ask-neither-permission-nor-forgiveness approach to presidential power, the New York Times journalist Ezra Klein published an essay titled, simply, “Don’t Believe Him.” The president’s strategy, Klein argued, is to perform a level of power he doesn’t have in the hopes that the performance might become, eventually, reality. Trump “has always wanted to be king,” Klein wrote. “His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.”

This is absolutely correct. It is also an encapsulation of the problem that Lippmann foresaw.

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The pictures we carry around with us, in our mind’s ever-revolving camera rolls, are much more than representations of the world as we understand it. The pictures are biases, too. They are assumptions and expectations. They are like brands, in their way: ever expandable, ever expendable. They can be shaped by lies as well as truths. Human brains have a hard time telling the difference.

Lippmann was a contemporary of Freud, whose nascent insights in psychology informed Lippmann’s theories of politics. Our minds make us what we are; they also make us, collectively, vulnerable to deceit. They are biased toward emotion over information. They tend to prefer the easy stories over the complicated ones. The pictures they hold might be informed by our interactions with physical reality, or by fantasy. Humans can try to separate the two—reality here, irreality there, stored in separate files—and can do so successfully. But the separation itself is work. And it is work made ever more taxing in a media environment where the human-generated lies mingle with the AI-generated ones, and where even the fact-checked news comes at people in endless feeds and floods.

In the flurry, people can lose control of the pictures in their heads. They can lose control of themselves. “For it is clear enough,” Lippmann wrote, “that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities, and that in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond.”

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Modern advertising works, generally speaking, by creating problems rather than solving them. It manufactures desires among the public; it also manufactures, in the process, discontent. Our politics are doing the same work as they sell our nation back to us. Trump is, too. He manufactures problems—the “rigged” elections, the invasion of “illegals,” the “woke mob,” the horrors of “American carnage”—to sell us the solution: Trump himself.

The word propaganda, in Lippmann’s era, had not adopted the negative connotations it carries today. It was a term of politics borrowed from Catholic practice: Propaganda shared a root with propagation and suggested the straightforward act of sharing and spreading the faith. In the 1920s, it meant something akin to what today we might call straightforward “publicity.” But Lippmann’s studies of psychology had chastened him. Our minds, for all their attunement to the nuances of the physical world—the subtle shifts in light, the micro-expressions that move on the faces of other people—are not terribly adept at perceiving those distinctions through the filters of airwaves and screens.

On the contrary, all the inputs people encounter, by choice or by circumstance—the news reports, the novels, the films, the celebrities, the radio shows, the billboards, the histories, the satires, the amusements, the truths, the lies—tend to end up in the same place. The inputs influence, then continually edit, the pictures in our heads. Those pictures might be accurate appraisals. They might be delusions. They are nearly impossible to categorize. They are also totalizing. “Whatever we believe to be a true picture, we treat it as if it were the environment itself,” Lippmann observed. The insight might seem simple: Of course we believe what we see. But the opposite is true as well: We see what we believe.

For Lippmann, that meant that the information people rely on to form their mental images would be the lifeblood, or the death, of American democracy.

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“Facts don’t care about your feelings,” as the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro put it, is a good slogan, but it gets things wrong: The guiding principle of Trumpism is “Feelings don’t care about your facts.” And once facts are discarded, anything can come in their place.