position could be sustained only by pretending that corporations were really individuals, and as Arnold pointed out, this was more than a reasonable person could be expected to believe. By ignoring the plain facts of modern organization, conservatives discredited the language of civic republicanism and thus contributed to the impoverishment of public debate. But liberals like Arnold trivialized public debate in their own way, not only by directly questioning the need for it but by reducing all political questions to the production and distribution of goods. Any other considerations, according to Arnold, belonged to the realm of "metaphysics," not government. The "practical comfort of the moment" outweighed the "great moral issues of the future." The question of how to provide "practical comfort" was a technical question, not something that could be settled by an appeal to first principles. It was a question for "experts," not for "orators."

As a lawyer, Arnold might have been expected to recognize the intractability of conflicting interests and to doubt the possibility of making politics an exact science. His faith in expertise, however, exceeded even that of many social scientists. He measured intellectual progress precisely by the absence of debate. Doctors, he argued, no longer engaged in pointless controversies about the rival claims of homeopathic and allopathic schools of medicine. The medical profession had been "taken over by men of skill rather than men of principle," with the result that there was "little left in medicine for thinking men to debate." Whereas medical learning had become "technical rather than philosophical," however, economic and legal learning remained "predominantly philosophical"—a sure sign of cultural lag. Arnold's explanation of the pointlessness of debate echoed Lippmann's. Although Lippmann, like Mencken, vehemently opposed the New Deal, Arnold saw nothing incongruous in a defense of the New Deal that drew so heavily on the ideas of those explicitly critical of democracy. He too dismissed as "irrational" the notion that "the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy." "Public argument never convinces the other side," he wrote; its only function was to rally the true believers. The "noise of competing theories" drowned out the voice of the expert. To submit social questions to the "feeble judgment of the common herd" was the height of folly. Democracy consisted of giving the people what they wanted—more of everything, presumably—but not in listening to their advice about how to get it. Their ideas

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