The Manufactured Consensus: The Reasoning Public and a False Consensus about an Alleged Genocide in Gaza

by Verena Buser

Much of German philosopher Jürgen Habermas’s idea of a räsonierende Öffentlichkeit, a reasoning public, is that citizens argue openly, status does not count, every claim can be questioned, and in the end only “the unforced force of the better argument” should prevail. A consensus that comes about in this way deserves our trust. Habermas, however, also insisted on the opposite case. If agreement is produced through exclusion, through pressure, or by silencing objections, it is not a rational consensus, no matter how broad it may be. It is what he calls a false consensus, a merely factual agreement that only looks as if it were the result of reasoning.

On most controversial questions, the reasoning public works better than its critics would admit. In Western democracies people have fought bitterly over issues like climate change, nuclear power, migration, and the pandemic restrictions, and the tone has often been harsh. Still, both sides were heard, counter-studies were reported, mistakes were corrected, and over time positions shifted. Where agreement emerged, it had been earned. Civil debate is imperfect, but it is still possible.

There is one exception—namely, Israel and the Jews. Here the reasoning public stops reasoning, and what we get is a textbook case of a false consensus. Information from Israeli sources is disparaged, and excluded claims coming out of Gaza have been disseminated almost without any critical scrutiny. Everyone seems to “know” already that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza: New York’s mayor Zohran Mamdani says so, and so does the Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov. The alleged authority of such voices alone immunizes the claim against doubt or criticism. Agreement on this scale would be impressive if it were based on a corresponding consensus among experts. But that is not the case. What looks like a consensus informed by critical debate was in fact manufactured step by step by a circle of progressive academics, with the support of human rights organizations, the United Nations (which is known for its deep anti-Israel bias), and large parts of the international media—exactly what Noam Chomsky denounced as the manufacturing of public opinion.

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