I began the previous post with a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), the German Christian theologian and anti-Nazi dissident, who said that stupidity is more dangerous than malice. Another famous aphorism often attributed to Einstein says that doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result is crazy. When someone can’t or won’t face face up to their own problems, we say they are in denial. 

Stupid, crazy, or in denial: Whatever you want to call it, we have come to the point where continuing to do the same thing just doesn’t make sense. The troubles we’re getting into are getting out of hand—whether it’s global problems like climate change and rising economic inequality; or ecological problems like species extinction and growing dead zones in the oceans; or social problems like rising anger, divisiveness, and susceptibility to demagogues who promise to reclaim lost greatness. We can’t keep on keeping on, and expect things to get better. 

Yet that is precisely what is happening. It’s time to ask why?We know better; and there are good ideas and programs for doing better. But it’s not happening. There’s something or someone in the way of the changes we need to make. Something’s keeping us from being smarter, from charting a more enlightened course or responding to widely-known problems. Some force or cultural impediment weighs us down. Some people are putting the brakes on needed change. 

Actually, it’s not just one thing; human social reality is complex, shaped on different levels by different actions: long-range historical forces, environment, individual activities, and so on. But one shaping force in American society presently is pretty straightforward, obvious, visible in the daily news, and directly linked to identifiable persons and institutions. Here’s where the issue of accountability takes a new turn.

We don’t act sooner, as a society, in response to growing public problems because powerful private interests, often those causing the problems, profit from what they’re doing and don’t want to quit. They tend to believe that humans are naturally self-interested—that everyone is or should be like them, always acting in competition with others to benefit themselves. They spin complex economic theories and often high-sounding ideological rationales to bolster these views. They turn their eyes away from mountains of anthropological and biological evidence to the contrary, and remain seemingly blind to countless everyday acts of kindness, cooperation, and generosity.

Our problem, as well as our richest gift, is that which makes us human. Humans, uniquely, are cultural animals: We make the culture that makes us. People who act and relate to others as if we all were self-interested “economic man,” become that kind of being. If we shape our culture around such beliefs, they become self-fulfilling. (See the earlier post on “self-fulfilling prophecies” and their limits). 

In some ways it’s that simple; and almost everyone knows it on some level. Those who would reconstruct our whole culture on the model of self-interested “economic man” often live their own lives as such. They don’t seem to care about the rest of us, about the planet, about future generations. Their eyes remain fixed on their own bottom lines (something almost too appropriate about that metaphor!). Pursuing their narrow interests, these sometimes brilliant (in some ways), immensely wealthy leaders and those who serve them with carefully framed and crafted arguments, behave like stupid, short-sighted, immoral criminally sociopathic bullies. 

“Just as the property rights supremacists would rather let people die than receive health care assistance or antismoking counsel from government, so they would rather invite global ecological and social catastrophe than allow regulatory restrictions on economic liberty.”

Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains, p. 216 (2017, Duke University Press).

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We don’t have to go far for timely examples.  For now, here’s just two: Particular persons—and the corporations they own and run—profit hugely from cigarettes and oil sales; and they spent, and spend, tons of money to sow confusion and doubt about the harms they cause. They invest fortunes to undermine and discredit good science.  Beyond succumbing to stupid ideas fueled by greed themselves, they work overtime to infect the nation as a whole with the same disease. 

They knowingly sow public discord and distrust of public institutions tasked with looking out for the public welfare. They intentionally nourish large-scale public denial of issues of which they themselves are aware. They willfully, undertake actions that result in ongoing loss of life and property—actions that cost the public billions of dollars, even as they themselves know the consequences of their actions. 

They do these things, laughing stupidly all the way to the bank.  And finally, with their gains they fund the think tanks, professors, and programs that help sell large sectors of the public on ideas like neoliberalism—which undeniably generates inequality (see the earlier post) and further drains the world’s wealth into their own pockets.  They seem to benefit, but in the end such actions make the world worse for everyone, themselves included. That’s stupid.

Here I want to pick up this problem of the purposeful production of doubt and controversy that I also touched on in an earlier post. Politics, I wrote, is naturally conflictual. That can be healthy. And our economic system, too, is all about winning.  But any game needs rules and a sense of shared play, of fair play. Outright lies and cynically creating conflict to exploit it, or doubt when there should be none, overreach the rules (more or less implicit, but critically important) of a healthy democracy.

Yet key players in American political and economic life now openly resort to those unprincipled, unbridled, cynical, and stupefying strategies of lying and sowing discord. Such strategies have become business-as-usual, especially for large segments of the political right and corporate interests that Trump currently represents. Such open disrespect for truth and for the well-being of the nation as a whole on the parts of political and business leaders, any less the current President himself, is both a major cause of, and yet another sign of, American decline under the recent reign of what historian Nancy MacLean calls “The Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.” (I’ll come back to her important book in a moment). 

The Conspiracy of Confusion: Manufacturing Doubt, Creating Controversy 

Not all of the confusion and doubt in today’s public life in the United States arises innocently simply from different points of view. There are forces out there who have learned how to capitalize on conflict, who nurture untruth, who thrive in disruption, who happily pick up the pieces and re-order them in their own interest—as Naomi Klein astutely documented in her important book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

George Packer, in The Atlantic, attributes the problem specifically to the kind of corrupting ideological fanaticism that has taken over the Republican Party. But it also has roots in more calculated corporate practice—as we’ll see further below. With particular reference to the extinction crisis, blogger and commentator Ken Orphan eloquently writes: “The magicians and merchants of corporate consumerism have fostered [our] pernicious disconnection from the natural world and have created a labyrinth of distractions and doubts that numb the senses to our own looming demise.”  

Political discourse in the U.S. has been made a disaster area.  Let me just briefly remind you of a couple or three more widely-known examples of special interests who find profit in division, doubt, confusion, and tragedy for the rest of us, and are all too happy to stir the pot.  

1. Trump’s Lies.

Political discourse in the U.S. didn’t just fall into the morass of divisive partisanship, “post-truth” arrogance, “fake news” and “alternative facts.” It was pushed. 

Trump fits the current sorry state of U.S. politics and political discourse to a “T.” He plays the role of bad boy—lying, cheating, groping, tweeting so openly that people have trouble taking him seriously. Yet oddly that same bad-boy image appeals to many of his one time “Moral Majority” supporters. Carlos Lozada, in the Washington Post, writes “There is a pattern and logic behind the dishonesty of Trump and his surrogates.”

When I first saw The Washington Post “Fact Checker” on Trump’s lies on Aug. 1, 2018, the Fact Checker team had found that “President Trump has made 4,229 false or misleading claims in 558 days.”  Looking again at the most recent (February 3, 2019) update, the President has now logged an astonishing 8,459 false or misleading claims in his 745 days in office.  By now it must be closing in on 10,000.

That’s lying on a monumental scale.  Susan B. Glasser concludes in the New Yorker Magazine (Aug. 3, 2018), that “The [Trump] White House assault on the truth is not an accident—it is intentional.”  

Lying’s not nice.  It’s not Christian.  It’s not smart. Why doesn’t someone—Congress, maybe—at least slap his wrist?  

But could Trump really be lying intentionally, deliberately, so openly, so much?  No business man, no President for gosh sakes, would really act that way, would they?  He’s the schoolyard bully who gets away with it, blaming the other guy, hiding behind the mayhem he creates.  Is it political tactics, a negotiating ploy, or is it really just who he is?  Maybe all the above?  Who knows?  Does he even know when he’s lying, or does he just not care so long as it works for him?  Who knows!  But what better way to sow doubt in public institutions (a long-term goal of the radical right), than to have a U.S. President, leader of the free world, who consistently and openly lies to the world.

While appearing as something of a bad clown, Trump’s rhetoric, and his actual policies, have more sinister overtones.  Here Bonhoeffer’s stupid and evil come together.  Carlos Lozada, in the Washington Post article mentioned above, recognizes that the degradation of truth “predates current management,” and cites other authors who explore “the death of truth” (to quote the title of one of the books) more deeply.  He himself points to the interweave of stupidity and selfishness that reaches the level of malice, attributing the storm of lies that blankets our political landscape to “the simple subordination of reality to political and personal ambition.” 

But the problem also has deeper and more troubling historical roots and social significance.  The Nazi propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, is often misquoted as saying, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” The idea actually probably comes from Hitler: If you tell a great lie, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, people will believe it because they believe in truth and can’t imagine “that anyone could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” 

Even beyond the lying, Trump’s words and policies scarily echo those of Nazi Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, says Bill Moyers, who adds his own observations to those of economist Robert Reich. While Trump’s “National Capitalism” differs in some ways from Hitler’s “National Socialism,” says economist Ken Peres, it parallels it in many others.  You can easily find other observers on line who draw similar conclusions.  That sober, perceptive commentators openly draw such comparisons—even given that some are on the other side of the fence politically from Trump—should concern us all.

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2. The Tobacco Industry

I did mention this earlier, but it’s worth another word or two.  A 1969 tobacco industry document famously stated, “Our product is doubt… Doubt is our product [because] it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’… and establishing controversy.”  Never mind that many thousands of people died painful, unnecessary deaths while the industry and its lobbyists manufactured doubt about the carcinogenic effects of tobacco smoke.  Other industries have since followed the tobacco industry’s playbook, as documented in the 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt, among others.

Manufactured conflict and confusion, doubt and disorder, certainly do not serve the public interest at large.  But then, maybe that’s precisely the idea—for those who don’t believe in public goods; who put their own private commercial interest and will to power above the public interest; who want to spread cynicism and doubt about, and diminish, the public sector; and who want to privatize everything—“every conceivable public service, from sanitation to toll roads,” from schools to parks, says historian Nancy MacLean (2017, p. 145). We’ll look further at her recent important book below).

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3. The Powell Memorandum

Finally, one relatively early, most telling and sweeping illustrations of the purpose-driven assault on truth can be found in a relatively obscure memorandum written by Lewis Powell, a prominent lawyer. Powell penned this memorandum to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1971. President Nixon later appointed Powell along with Antonin Scalia to the U.S. Supreme Court. 

The Powell Memorandum, as it became known, views corporations and the laissez-faire economy as identical with America. Again, we confront the simplistic, even stupid, idea that all of American society and culture is or should be simply an extension of the capitalist economy. But now there is a new or expanded element—to the extent that American society isn’t wholly consumed within the economy, Powell expresses the driving intent to remake it so that it is. 

That, of course is an extremely simplistic and reductionistic viewpoint: American society is much richer and more diverse than that. Nevertheless, from that position Powell takes a strongly polarized, victimized stance, painting the American “government, our system of justice, and the free enterprise system” as being under “frontal assault” by those who want to destroy them. 

Powell calls for corporations and their wealthy owners to mobilize their resources to wield political power, and to develop strategies to roll back public-interest legislation that, as Powell sees it, hamstrings business and threatens the “free enterprise system, and all that this means for the strength and prosperity of America and the freedom of our people.” The time for “appeasement” is past, Powell writes (p. 6). “the time has come…indeed it is long overdue—for the wisdom, ingenuity and resources of American business to be marshalled against those who would destroy it.” Bill Moyers calls the Powell Memorandum “a call to arms for corporations.”

Here we see a persistent theme: Among the most powerful and privileged segments of American society, a radical movement that paints its leaders and participants as victims to justify what is in effect an outright attack by them on American institutions, American culture, and American democracy.

Powell identifies colleges and universities as “the single most dynamic source” of “the assault on the enterprise system.” Powell might have wondered why criticism of the “enterprise system” he defends was coming from the institutions in our society that perhaps most foster learning, freedom of inquiry and speech, creative thinking, and expansive perspectives; but apparently he didn’t. Instead, he develops a blueprint for narrowing all of those by extending business control over education (pp. 7-12). Powell’s agenda includes financial support for business-friendly scholars, and the creation of a staff of such scholars to review “social science textbooks, especially in economics, political science and sociology” (p. 9). 

Universities, of course, don’t just “assault the enterprise system.” They also provide the environment in which the growth of knowledge, deeper insights, broader visions, and critical thought best flourish. Gus Bugakis has written a cogent short essay that looks at the Powell Memorandum as a foundation stone in “Neoliberalism’s Decades-Long Attack of Public Universities.” Powell, a prominent attorney, also not surprisingly urged the mobilization of corporate political power he advocated to focus on the courts, which he called perhaps “the most important instrument for social, economic and political change.” 

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In short, Powell’s memorandum and the whole radical right-wing movement it represents culminating in the Trump presidency, is at its base a program for protecting the property rights of the wealthy few against the broader interests of an informed and democratic public. It is a curriculum for corporate control of America.  One of its major taproots nourished by fear and bigotry, goes directly to the slave-based economy and culture of the South and its reaction against federal mandates for emancipation and integration. 

The ideas and emotions nurtured there in a defeated South set “individual liberty” or “economic freedom” (for privileged propertied Whites) against democratic ideals and broader public goods. Those ideas also well fit the purposes of powerful corporations and some super-wealthy billionaires who control them, and their political allies, who later picked up and energetically followed them in their fights against taxation and regulation in the public interest. 

The original Powell Memorandum in pdf format can be downloaded here. Bill Moyers has an easily accessible on-line review of the Powell Memorandum. It’s an excerpt from Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson (2011).  Greenpeace also has done an analysis of Powell’s “corporate blueprint to dominate democracy,” that also includes further links to other sources. 

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The Root of the Matter: Who’s Responsible? 

Powell and his memorandum are but one instance in a much larger, longer, and more comprehensive, well-thought-out campaign to permanently alter, incrementally undo even, American democracy. Where did his ideas come from to begin with?

Troubling Questions.

As an anthropologist, I wonder about the interplays between human nature and human history. Like many others, I’m curious about what dynamic persistently results in the decline and fall of civilizations—in the cycles of expansion and growth of hierarchy and inequality followed by collapse (see earlier posts in this blog, like here, and here, and here). But that’s the big picture. What about the little pictures in the big picture? What about the specifics that impinge on our short human lives now, at this moment?

Having grown up in the 1950s, and participated in the’60s, I have long wondered what and who so successfully dampened the spirit of American democracy from the later 1970s and 1980s on. What dimmed our nation’s spirit of hope and optimism. What sent the flame of America’s deeply held (however imperfectly realized) democratic ideals to guttering and flickering so perilously as they are now? What happened? Who’s responsible?

Such questions gradually have gone from general to more specific. What are the roots of the deep distrust and dislike of democracy so evident in the growing radical-right influence in American society and politics? Who concluded that democracy is the enemy of capitalism—that the free society is inherently hostile to the free market? Who masterminded policies and laws to debilitate or destroy unions? What or who perversely sows cynicism about democratic government and its core institutions and programs as a political tactic? Who promulgates doubt and denial regarding science, and works to force universities to function and think like private corporations? Who pushes the notion that only the private sector is the domain of freedom (without specifying freedom for whom)?

Who, in particular, developed stealth political agendas now in play that are consciously designed to make the free market capitalist economy rather than humane democratic ideals the core governing principle for every nook and corner of American society and culture? Who hatched, built on, and developed plans to subvert the popular will toward these aims? Who had the deep pockets and ideological commitment to make it happen?

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Fortunately, there has been some good work recently on these questions. One of the best and most comprehensive I’ve seen so far is by the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University, Nancy MacLean.

In particular, MacLean tells the story of a long-term collaboration between a radical right-wing southern economist, James McGill Buchanan, and the billionaires who through funds they established and private donations poured hundred of millions of dollars into forming and supporting right-wing university institutes, activist individuals, and think-tanks.

Charles Koch alone funnelled hundreds of millions of dollars to Buchanan’s cause. As MacLean explains, Koch’s aim in funding Buchanan and a long list of other radical right-wing scholars and think-tanks was “to save capitalism from democracy—permanently.”

The movement that evolved with massive financial support from such funders was decades in the making. In it Buchanan’s ideas, both strategic and substantive, played a foundational role. Knowing all along that their agenda could never win majority support, its key figures, Buchanan prominently among them, developed their plans behind the scenes. They built their stealth program for shackling democracy to protect extreme private wealth from public interest regulation and taxation along the lines of a “secretive, infiltrative fifth column.”

This concept seems, MacLean says, “the best one available for capturing what is distinctive in a few key dimensions about this quest to ensure the supremacy of capital.” It finally became crystal clear to Buchanan that economic freedom for the wealthy required the permanent suppression of popular democracy: “There was no sense glossing over it anymore,” writes MacLean, summarizing Buchanan’s thinking (p. 152): “democracy was inimical to economic liberty.”  At least for men like Koch.

One of the scariest chapters of MacLean’s book for me is Chapter 10, “A Constitution With Locks and Keys.” It tells how James Buchanan worked closely with Pinochet after his 1973 coup in Chile to set up a constitution “to forever insulate the interests of the propertied class they represented from the reach of a classic democratic majority” (p. 155). The Pinochet regime also followed Buchanan’s ideas by privatizing universities, health care, and other services.

In the view of Buchanan’s friends in the Mont Pelerin society and like-minded colleagues, “Chile [under Pinochet] was a beacon,” in that it “removed major social questions…from democratic influence” (p. 162). That’s the agenda these same people have and are actively pursuing for the United States.

And, says MacLean, they already have built a huge coordinated, massively funded network of key players in government, industry, and academia to advance their cause.  The conscious, purpose-driven, large-scale coordinated nature of this effort has been a key missing piece in own understanding—and probably that of many others as well—of why and how the takedown of key institutions and ideals of American democracy has gained so much ground in recent decades. 

Following the whole history of the collaboration between Buchanan and other thinkers on the radical right and corporate billionaires, from its roots in the South’s reactive outrage at desegregation, MacLean (2017: xv) characterizes it as “the utterly chilling story of the ideological origins of the single most powerful and least understood threat to democracy today: the attempt by the billionaire-backed radical right to undo democratic governance.”

Exhaustively documented with published and primary sources, yet easy reading, this is an especially important book for anyone who wants to better understand how the United States has become so divided and unequal—how it finds itself floundering on the brink oligarchy, and even raising fears of fascism. (See also here and here.)

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Through MacLean’s work and that of others, some of whom I’ve referenced above, it’s possible to see precisely who’s responsible; to trace their intellectual and ideological roots; look objectively at their stated goals and aims for the United States; and review almost step-by-step how they have pursued their agenda over the last half-century or so. And looking around where their policies have been implemented—such as Chile under Pinochet, and America’s own ever more divisive politics, unequal society, and our nation’s falling standing in the world—we can assess their results. As the old adage says, “the proof’s in the pudding.”

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I don’t believe that the neoliberal program to turn America into such a one-dimensional capitalist oligarchy will be successful in the end; but it has made more headway to date than I would have thought possible, and has done great damage already, in the process. It’s important to understand how that was done.  The stakes in resisting this campaign are large, and are real. 

We make the culture that makes us. What’s at stake is the kind of world we’ll have, the kind of people we will be. 

Will we become the mean-spirited, hyper-hierarchical self-serving “economic man” of the neoliberal vision embodied in Koch’s and Buchanan’s programme, or will we respect and nurture everyone’s human potential? Will we restrict real opportunity only to the “haves,” or will we instead get back on track to build a culture with institutions that bring out the best and most humane in everyone? 

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