Totalitarianism, American Style

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/activism/totalitarianism-american-style

Chris Hedges made these remarks Saturday at a panel discussion in New York City titled “The Climate Crisis: Which Way Out?” The other panelists were Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein, Kshama Sawant and Sen. Bernie Sanders. The event, moderated by Brian Lehrer, occurred on the eve of the People’s Climate March in New York City. For a video of some of what the panelists said, click here.

We have undergone a transformation during the last few decades—what John Ralston Saul calls a corporate coup d’état in slow motion. We are no longer a capitalist democracy endowed with a functioning liberal class that once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible. Liberals in the old Democratic Party such as the senators Gaylord Nelson, Birch Bayh and George McGovern—who worked with Ralph Nader to make the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Mine Safety and Health Act, the Freedom of Information Act and the OSHA law, who made common cause with labor unions to protect workers, who stood up to the arms industry and a bloated military—no longer exist within the Democratic Party, as Nader has been lamenting for several years. They were pushed out as corporate donors began to transform the political landscape with the election of Ronald Reagan. And this is why the Democrats have not, as Bill Curry points out, enacted any major social or economic reforms since the historic environmental laws of the early ’70s.

We are governed, rather, by a species of corporate totalitarianism, or what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin describes as “inverted totalitarianism.” By this Wolin means a system where corporate power, while it purports to pay fealty to electoral politics, the Constitution, the three branches of government and a free press, along with the iconography and language of American patriotism, has in fact seized all the important levers of power to render the citizen impotent.

The old liberal class, the safety valve that addressed grievances and injustices in times of economic or political distress, has been neutered. There are self-identified liberals, including Barack Obama, who continue to speak in the old language of liberalism but serve corporate power. This has been true since the Clinton administration. Bill Clinton found that by doing corporate bidding he could get corporate money—thus NAFTA, the destruction of our welfare system, the explosion of mass incarceration under the [1994] omnibus bill, the deregulation of the FCC, turning the airwaves over to a half dozen corporations, and the revoking of FDR’s 1933 Glass-Steagall reform that had protected our banking system from speculators. Clinton, in exchange for corporate money, transformed the Democratic Party into the Republican Party. This was diabolically brilliant. It forced the Republican Party to shift so far to the right it became insane.

[loudsue]

1. And the INTENTIONAL PLANS for this transformation are all contained in the Powell Manifesto

of the 1970's that started the political takeover of churches, universities, the media ownership and consolidation, and rule by an ever right-shifting Chamber-of-Commerce and right wing "foundations".

It was

1) Written down
2) Intentional
3) Well organized
4) VERY VERY VERY well financed

[OnyxCollie]

2. +1. nt

[rurallib]

7. That has to be one of the most important documents in American history

yet one of the least known.
Its influence in everyday life is right up there with the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

[woo me with science]

15. Thank you.

[hifiguy]

16. The Powell Memorandum

is one of the most influential document of the last 50 years. And not influential for the good. Odd that he turned out to be an above-average SCOTUS Justice.

[GliderGuider]

21. Bingo! When I first read it some years ago, I was both stunned and enlightened.

It's the cornerstone of today's America, along with much of the Western world.

[OnyxCollie]

3. "Totalitarianism"

Totalitarianism is a system where technologically advanced instruments of political power are wielded without restraint by centralized leadership of an elite movement, for the purpose of effecting a total social revolution, including the conditioning of man, on the basis of certain arbitrary ideological assumptions proclaimed by the leadership, in an atmosphere of coerced unanimity of the entire population (p. 754).

Brzezinski, Z. (1956). Totalitarianism and rationality. The American Political Science Review, 50(3), 751-763.

[Scuba]

4. K&R

[dotymed]

5. I am sure that many are very tired of this comment,

BUT.....I think our salvation was a member of that panel...BERNIE SANDERS, come on down.

[woo me with science]

9. The Bernies and the Elizabeths will be welcomed to speak

for as long as they are useful to sustain the illusion that we still have debate and democracy.

The PTB will dispose of any who begin to present a serious threat to the oligarchy.

[hifiguy]

14. You are correct.

Frank Zappa saw this decades ago:

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”

TPTB have been taking down the scenery for the last 20 years.

[dotymed]

20. George Carlin

also said that if voting really mattered, we would not be allowed to do it or something to that effect...

[woo me with science]

6. Yep, this is where we stand,

all the propaganda notwithstanding.

[H2O Man]

8. Recommended.

Thank you for this.

[gregcrawford]

10. It is gratifying...

... to hear someone whose work I greatly admire eloquently articulate what I've been been trying to convey for some time now. But even someone with the recognition and gravitas that Mr. Hedges has earned is trying to turn the tide with a teaspoon. Getting corporate money out of politics altogether is our only hope, but Sisyphus had it easy compared to the task we face.
Those who get all mushy and starry-eyed at the prospect of another Clinton presidency had better be careful what they wish for. But then, look at the alternatives...

[Octafish]

11. ''Friendly Fascism'' is how Bertram Gross put it.

The professor served FDR and the New Deal Democrats and is remembered today for his work to reduce poverty. Among his accomplishments, he helped author the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act. Later he taught at CUNY and Wayne State University in Detroit, where he founded the Center for Urban Studies.

Friendly Fascism

The New Face of Power in America

by Bertram Gross
South End Press, 1980, paper

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/Friendly_Fascism_BGross.html

INTRO EXCERPT...

Friendly fascism portrays two conflicting trends in the United States and other countries of the so-called "free world."

The first is a slow and powerful drift toward greater concentration of power and wealth in a repressive Big Business-Big Government partnership. This drift leads down the road toward a new and subtly manipulative form of corporatist serfdom. The phrase "friendly fascism" helps distinguish this possible future from the patently vicious corporatism of classic fascism in the past of Germany, Italy and Japan. It also contrasts with the friendly present of the dependent fascisms propped up by the U.S. government in El Salvador, Haiti, Argentina, Chile, South Korea, the Philippines and elsewhere.

The other is a slower and less powerful tendency for individuals and groups to seek greater participation in decisions affecting themselves and others. This trend goes beyond mere reaction to authoritarianism. It transcends the activities of progressive groups or movements and their use of formal democratic machinery. It is nourished by establishment promises-too often rendered false-of more human rights, civil rights and civil liberties. It is embodied in larger values of community, sharing, cooperation, service to others and basic morality as contrasted with crass materialism and dog-eat-dog competition. It affects power relations in the household, workplace, community, school, church, synagogue, and even the labyrinths of private and public bureaucracies. It could lead toward a truer democracy-and for this reason is bitterly fought...

These contradictory trends are woven fine into the fabric of highly industrialized capitalism. The unfolding logic of friendly fascist corporatism is rooted in "capitalist society's transnational growth and the groping responses to mounting crises in a dwindling capitalist world". Mind management and sophisticated repression become more attractive to would-be oligarchs when too many people try to convert democratic promises into reality. On the other hand, the alternative logic of true democracy is rooted in "humankind's long history of resistance to unjustified privilege" and in spontaneous or organized "reaction (other than fright or apathy) to concentrated power...and inequality, injustice or coercion".

A few years ago too many people closed their eyes to the indicators of the first tendency.

But events soon began to change perceptions.

The Ku Klux Klan and American Nazis crept out of the woodwork. An immoral minority of demagogues took to the airwaves. "Let me tell you something about the character of God," orated Jim Robison at a televised meeting personally endorsed by candidate Ronald Reagan. "If necessary, God would raise up a tyrant, a man who may not have the best ethics, to protect the freedom interests of the ethical and the godly." To protect Western oil companies, candidate Jimmy Carter proclaimed presidential willingness to send American troops into the Persian Gulf. Rosalyn Carter went further by telling an lowa campaign audience: "Jimmy is not afraid to declare war." Carter then proved himself unafraid to expand unemployment, presumably as an inflation cure, thereby reneging on his party's past full employment declarations.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/RiseFall_Friend_Fascism_FF.html

The good professor painted an accurate picture of what was to come.

James Madison

EXCERPT...

Despite the sharp differences from classic fascism, there are also some basic similarities. In each, a powerful oligarchy operates outside of, as well as through, the state. Each subverts constitutional government. Each suppresses rising demands for wider participation in decision making, the enforcement and enlargement of human rights, and genuine democracy. Each uses informational control and ideological flimflam to get lower and middle-class support for plans to expand the capital and power of the oligarchy and provide suitable rewards for political, professional, scientific, and cultural supporters.

A major difference is that under friendly fascism Big Government would do less pillaging of, and more pillaging for, Big Business. With much more integration than ever before among transnational corporations, Big Business would run less risk of control by any one state and enjoy more subservience by many states. In turn, stronger government support of transnational corporations, such as the large group of American companies with major holdings in South Africa, requires the active fostering of all latent conflicts among those segments of the American population that may object to this kind of foreign venture. It requires an Establishment with lower levels so extensive that few people or groups can attain significant power outside it, so flexible that many (perhaps most) dissenters and would-be revolutionaries can be incorporated within it. Above all, friendly fascism in any First World country today would \ use sophisticated control technologies far beyond the ken of the classic fascists.

p177
Although American hegemony can scarcely return in its Truman-Eisenhower-Kennedy-Johnson form, this does not necessarily signify the end of the American Century. Nor does communist and socialist advance on some fronts mark American and capitalist retreat on all fronts. There are unmistakable tendencies toward a rather thoroughgoing reconstruction of the entire "Free World." Robert Osgood sees a transitional period of "limited readjustment" and "retrenchment without disengagement," after which America could establish a "more enduring rationale of global influence." Looking at foreign policy under the Nixon administration, Robert W. Tucker sees no intention to "dismantle the empire" but rather a continued commitment to the view that "America must still remain the principal guarantor of a global order now openly and without equivocation identified with the status quo." He describes America as a "settled imperial power shorn of much of the former exuberance." George Liska looks forward to a future in which Americans, having become more mature in the handling of global affairs, will at last be the leaders of a true empire.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/Specter_FriendlyFascism_FF.html

If you can't afford to play unless your rich, it isn't democracy. Cough newworldorder.

[woo me with science]

12. Thank you for this post.

[hifiguy]

13. Sheldon Wolin is essential reading

and I mean that in the most forceful sense possible. Start with "Democracy, Inc."

[woo me with science]

17. Thank you.

[Kermitt Gribble]

18. Huge K&R!

"Obama’s election did nothing to halt the expanding assault on civil liberties—in fact Obama’s assault has been worse—the Bush bailouts of big banks, the endless imperial wars, the failure to regulate Wall Street, the hiring of corporate lobbyists to write legislation and serve in top government positions, the explosion of drilling and fracking, the security and surveillance state as well as the persecution of government whistle-blowers."

Same agenda for the last 3 decades.

[hifiguy]

19. Since 1/20/1981.

Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

[malaise]

22. In other words

Fascism

[woo me with science]

23. It's about time we start using that word. nt