It’s obvious by now that the United States isn’t a democracy. So says Jim Sandler in an email to John Podesta released by WikiLeaks. Sandler was referring to a Princeton Study from 2014 that said much the same.
“The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”
The Sandler Foundation, endowed by banker Herb Sandler, “invest[s] in strategic organizations and exceptional leaders that seek to improve the rights, opportunities and well-being of others, especially the most vulnerable and disadvantaged.” What this self-stroking description means in practice is funding left wing organizations.
Billionaire endowed foundations have long been a fixture of American politics, massaging democracy toward outcomes amenable to their interests. Since the days of the Ford and Rockefeller foundations nearly a century ago, our intellectual discourse has been the playground of economic elites and their private agendas.
Financial support in the form of grants largely determines the shape of political activity in certain communities, and academicians, always hard up for money and feeling under-appreciated, find grant money to be a strong motivator of their scientific interests and research outcomes.
That the public can manipulated in its political behavior isn’t exactly news. In his 1928 book, Propaganda, public relations wiz and pioneer of mass-marketing, Edward Bernays, wrote:
Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of… It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.
Bernays, nephew to Sigmund Freud, was the guy who doubled the cigarette market for Big Tobacco by convincing women that smoking was an expression of their sexual liberation. The flaming rolls were “torches of freedom,” per the ad campaign, and phallic symbols, per psychoanalytic conceit.
All this stated another way: democracy simply is that system of government whereby the public must be managed psychologically and informationally in order to obtain the ends of the few at the expense of the many, due to the simple fact that voting exists and can potentially be a source of public control over policy outcomes.
For interests that wish to control those outcomes, democracy means that they have their work cut out for them. It is battle of influence and information. Whether it is an uphill battle against headwinds or a downhill stroll with a tailwind depends on other factors:
Can the public effectively communicate among themselves without outside direction, monitoring, curation and social enforcement mechanisms (political correctness)?
Do work conditions and incomes permit citizens sufficient leisure time for civic engagement?
Are individuals encouraged by an ethos of study to become intellectually equipped, and to develop a sense of political identity and interests?
Are positive or negative behaviors promoted for the public?
- civic engagement vs. television watching;
- high investment parenting vs. daycare dump;
- capital accumulation vs. consumer debt;
- early marriage vs. sexual promiscuity;
- preventative healthcare vs. pharmaceutical treatment of conditions caused by lifestyle;
- personal morality vs. politically correct posturing
Etc.
In another email to Podesta released by WikiLeaks, political consultant Bill Ivey of Global Cultural Strategies writes,
“And as I’ve mentioned, we’ve all been quite content to demean government, drop civics and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry. The unawareness remains strong but compliance is obviously fading rapidly. This problem demands some serious, serious thinking – and not just poll driven, demographically-inspired messaging.”
Bill is referring to the dumbed-down celebrity culture that he believes enabled the Trump phenomenon, but the ‘we’ in the email refers to social and political elites, and that they have produced a compliant, ignorant citizenry is a fact.
The premise behind a century of social engineering has been the breakdown of social conglomerations above the individual level, except for those sanctioned by the effective governing establishment of the economic elite that manages democratic outcomes. The political and academic class are the middlemen who shape the public mind on behalf of economic elites and their interests.
The isolation of the individual from community, whether in the form of religion, labor organization, or simply the traditional urban neighborhood, had largely been achieved by the beginning of this century. Politically robust local cultures had been replaced by isolated individuals consuming a popular culture designed and distributed from the top down, full of standard tropes of political and social engineering.
What has changed that so worries Bill Ivey and others employed in elite middle management?
Technology has changed. The internet is a virtual analog to traditional community and communication. The rapid spread of information has helped foster a new sense of political identity and interests through alternative media and social networks.
While you won’t be seeing either of the WikiLeaks I mentioned on CNN or even Fox News, which prefer to regale their audiences with salacious sex scandals and other trivia, you will read about them online.
The technology of social control developed prior to the internet has been wounded, and the ongoing collapse of political correctness as an effective control is testament to that.
By ignoring the interests of the public and serving only the interests of economic elites, the establishment has created a crisis of legitimacy for itself, which is exacerbated by the uncontrolled spread of information.
What technology giveth, technology taketh away.
The emperor is naked, everyone knows it, and the only question now is how the crisis will be resolved, and at what cost to American society and its role in the world.