Walter Lippman: Crime and the Underworld

  

Walter Lippman: Crime and the Underworld

Peter Schultz

 

                  In 1931, Walter Lippman wrote an article entitled “The Underworld as Servant.” In it, he distinguished between crime and “the underworld,” arguing that while “the criminal as such is wholly predatory, … the underworld offers something in return to … respectable members of society.” [59, Tyler Organized Crime in America] In a key passage, Lippman wrote: “The issues that are most perplexing and ominous are those presented by the underworld which defies the law, establishes a regime of terror and violence, and draws profit for services performed from conventionally respectable members of society.” [59]

 

                  Not a bad description of government and politics, right? Government and politicians often, even commonly, “defy the law.” At times, they defy the law by cancelling it, e.g., by issuing pardons. But informally, everyone knows that politicians defy the law often on behalf of supporters and allies. Such defiance could even be called providing “services [for] conventionally respectable members of society.” And that defiance is as acceptable politically as criminal defiance is in the underworld.

 

                  “A regime of terror and violence?” What are prisons? What is war? What does the FBI do? The CIA? NSA? Navy Seals? All engage regime-motivated, regime-justified terror and violence.

 

                  “Draws profits for services performed?” Can you name a politician who ended up poorer or less wealthy after his/her government service? I cannot. Just the opposite: Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, the Clintons, Obama, Nixon, Trump, T. Fauci. Politicians resemble underworld figures in this regard, profiting despite their defiance of the law. And they also resemble such figures in avoiding punishment for the ways, often suspect, in which they have acquired their wealth, acquisitions that often required defying the law.

 

                  So, “the issues … presented by the underworld” are also the issues presented by government and the political. Lippman, and almost everyone else, even or especially “realists,” avoid or “disappear” this phenomenon by embracing the idea, the myth, of two worlds, an underworld that is distinct from an upperworld. This is a comforting myth; but it is not one that clarifies the character of the political as, e.g., Machiavelli, et. al., illuminated it.