Justice & Law Quote by Walter Lippmann

Democracy, Lippmann implies, runs on the same awkward fuel as monarchy: someone has to risk being disliked. By pairing “servants of the people” with “valets,” he yanks lofty civic language back into the cramped backstage of power, where real governance happens in whispers, not slogans. The compliment is barbed. A public official may be elected, but the job still resembles service to a “master” - the electorate, the office, the state’s machinery - and service becomes meaningful only when it includes contradiction.

The line about “unpleasant truths” is doing more than praising honesty. It sketches a theory of political accountability: leaders drift toward flattery because flattery is efficient, career-safe, and contagious. Truth is inefficient; it takes time, evidence, and social cost. That’s why Lippmann elevates the “court fool.” The fool’s power is rhetorical, not formal: a licensed deviant who can say what everyone else calculates away. In modern terms, it’s the advisor who brings bad polling, the civil servant who won’t launder a decision into good news, the journalist who refuses access journalism.

Context matters: Lippmann watched mass media, propaganda, and party machinery professionalize persuasion in the early 20th century. He was skeptical that “the people” could reliably steer policy without intermediaries, and equally skeptical of the intermediaries’ incentives. This aphorism is his pressure point between technocracy and democracy: expertise without candor becomes courtier craft; popular rule without truth-tellers becomes pageantry. The king can lose a sycophant and replace him easily. Lose the one person allowed to puncture illusion, and the entire court starts believing its own press releases.