Chaos Theory

A Butterfly Flaps Its Wings: From the Powell Memo to the Eastman Memo and January 6th

Published on by Brynne VanHettinga

Part 7 of a 10-part Series:

The Unholy Alliance Between Socio-economic Elites

and White Christian Nationalism

…the religious right has become more focused and powerful even as it is arguably less representative. It is not a social or cultural movement. It is a political movement, and its ultimate goal is power.”

Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers, 2019

Oligarchs, plutocrats, extreme inequality, the dominance of corporations and Wall Street in public life—all are not unexpected results (indeed they were the very purpose) of the Powell memo. Harder to connect is how all of this is related to January 6th, where it looked like a mob of “ordinary” Americans were fed up with a Congress that had lost touch with them. However, in their zeal to keep “the people” disconnected and distracted, the masters of the universe have created a population full of anger, angst, alienation, and anomie. Religion can fill the void of belongingness in such a system, and it can also be co-opted into the war against the people.

Anyone who has watched video footage from January 6th can see that Christian iconography was everywhere. Certainly, there were plenty of regular American flags and Trump regalia. There were also symbols that many of us would consider “un-American,” including Confederate flags and Nazi symbolism. But even more jarring was the juxtaposition of white supremacy and nationalist hate groups (Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, III Percenters) with Christian themes:  crosses, ichthys (the Jesus fish), along with Jesus-themed flags (“Jesus is my Lord, Trump is my President,” “Make America Godly Again,”  “GOD GUNS TRUMP”) and even a picture of a white Jesus wearing a red MAGA hat—images which many Christians find blasphemous (this writer included). 

 

One seeming paradox is the incestuous relationship between Christian nationalism and plutocracy. How can a greed-is-good, everyone-for-himself, winner-take-all ethos come wrapped in a religion which is purportedly all about loving one’s fellows and helping one’s neighbors?  So-called “Christian nationalism” however, is not merely a patriotic form of Christianity, but rather a very specific ideology that is authoritarian, patriarchal, and hierarchical. This is not the “Jesus loves you” Christianity that supports missions of feeding, healing, and teaching; but rather something more like 17th century Calvinism—which included practices of torture and witch-burning—or (farther back), the Holy Crusades.

According to Katherine Stewart in The Power Worshippers (2019), modern American Christian nationalism had roots in proslavery theology. Robert Dabney (1820-1898), a Presbyterian Pastor from South Carolina who had served as a chaplain in the Confederate army, turned to God in order to justify the ownership and enslavement of other human beings. Dabney began preaching the gospel of the “Redeemer Nation,” or the idea that slavery was divinely ordained, and that God would protect the white man’s property. Included in Dabney’s theology was the argument that God had also ordained the social subordination of women (based on the “first transgression” of Eve). Even after the Civil War and slavery was abolished, the “idea of the redeemer nation” persisted.

Fast forward to 1916, where an Armenian family who had fled the Turkish genocide arrived in America and bore a son they named Rousas John (R.J.) Rushdooney.  Rushdooney (1916-2001) grew up hearing stories of graphic persecution of Christians at the hands of Muslims, thus developing an intellectual and emotional attachment to the notion of Christian victimhood. Rushdooney attended the University of California at Berkeley, followed by the Pacific School of Religions (also based in Berkeley). Already, “all the distinctive features of his intellectual persona” were obvious: “a resolutely binary form of thought [which is a classic feature of authoritarianism], a craving for order, and a loathing for the secular world and secular education in particular.” Rushdooney became a disciple of Dabney’s works, including Dabney’s defense of slavery. Here we see the establishment of the dominionist movement, which takes up the theme of the Redeemer Nation: The United States was chosen by God, that its holy purpose is to become a Christian nation, where women are subordinated to men, education is wholly Christian-based, and no one pays taxes to support Black people.

Rushdooney found an ally in another Congregational minister named James W. Fifield, Jr. Fifield (1899-1977) can likely be credited for the marriage between big money and Christian nationalism. Fifield preached against the New Deal and the “social gospel” of helping those less fortunate. “With a talent for whispering into the ears of plutocrats,” Fifield was able to obtain corporate funding from the likes of Sun Oil, Chrysler and General Motors, who were happy to patronize a theology that “demonized labor unions and in general anything that required government to work on behalf of the people.” They teamed up with libertarian economists like Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Henry Hazlitt, who “warned that the modern welfare state would soon overwhelm the free market and put humanity on the road to serfdom….The fusion of hyper-capitalist ideology with hyper-Calvinist theology purveyed by the likes of Fifield …[and Rushdooney]…secured the financial future of Christian nationalism.”

Stewart argues that Rushdooney and Fifield did not necessarily create anything new, but they were able to tap into the darker side of humanity that had much deeper roots in American history—not just slavery, but the whole anti-democratic notion that certain people are intended (by God) to rule, and others are intended to serve or submit. The goal of government was to preserve the privileges of the rulers and keep everyone else in line. Democratic goals like equality—especially when applied to non-Whites or non-Christians—were heresy.

Stewart argues that Republicans were not always anti-abortion. Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, yet there was no immediate “pro-life” uprising. Indeed, then-First Lady Betty Ford actually praised the decision, and many Catholic Democrats opposed it. The anti-abortion “strategy” (yes, it started as strategy and not as a visceral reaction based on faith) began with the formation of a group associated with the ascendance of the New Right: Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie, a few members of the former Nixon administration, and the Southern Baptist pastor Jerry Falwell.  

This group of right-wing evangelicals were searching for a spiritual bogeyman they could rally people against. At this time, one of the primary objectives was raising money and advocating for tax exemptions to support “Christian” schools. Although there was an urge to proselytize children, Christian schools were the right’s “solution” to avoid desegregation. Obviously, one could not make a moral argument in favor of segregated schools and tax exemptions for rich people, no matter how “religious” they were presented to be. Using focus group techniques more often associated with marketing and political campaigns, they came up with the name “Moral Majority.”

Now that they had a name that resonated with the voting public, the next step was to find (or manufacture) an emotional “hook” that was consistent with issues of faith. Someone suggested taking on “women’s liberation,” but this was the late 1970s and the Equal Rights Amendment was going nowhere. Another suggestion was abortion. Here they found both a foil for victimhood (nothing could be more blameless and helpless than an unborn baby) as well as a convenient way to demonize your adversaries as “baby killers.”

In order for abortion to work as a rallying cause, it had to be presented as a moral issue of utmost urgency rather than a matter of reproductive medical care. Thus, a decision was made to reframe abortion as being about “life,” essentially ignoring the science of reproduction. An alliance was forged with a group of Catholic conservatives, along with a message of “rebuilding America on the basis of Christian principles.” As this tactic began to solidify and produce converts, it also served as a convenient distraction from the erosion of workplace rights and the fact that most folk were working harder for less. Not to mention the immoral acts of certain pastors.

All Christians are exhorted (with varying degrees of coercion) to evangelize (bring the “good news” of Jesus), proselytize, and convert. For Christian nationalists, this exhortation not only comes with the urgency of holy war, it also comes with the opportunity for the enterprising to make a lot of money. So-called “prosperity gospel” ideology gained popularity in post-World War II America. An offshoot of Pentecostal revivalism, prosperity gospel proclaims that God wants people to be rich, and wealth is a sign of both one’s own degree of faith and God’s grace. One can see how this is an easy segue to an apologetics for the very rich. The message is that anyone can become a millionaire through faith and hard work—which distracts from suggestions that fortunes might have been made through exploitation, expropriation, corruption, and opportunism.

Prosperity gospel also gave the ministers who preached it a new way to increase their own fortunes. The amount one gave to the church was directly correlated with one’s own degree of faith, so the more you gave, the more that God would reward you.  One site has compiled a list of the 15 richest pastors in America, along with an estimate of their net worth. This group apparently does not strictly adhere to the more patriarchal and white supremacist wing of Christian nationalism, as four of the richest fifteen pastors are African Americans and two are women. But we see a few names that we recognize from the radical right:  Franklin Graham (heir to the Billy Graham dynasty), Pat Robertson, and Paula White (who has been connected with Trump).

Carrying forward Rushdooney’s condemnation of secular education, Christian nationalists have been instrumental in the school voucher and school privatization movements. Snagging public money to support religious schools (and thereby depriving same to secular education) is certainly one of the primary objectives. But, of course, there are always opportunities to make money. A number of Michigan-based cronies of the DeVos family have made fortunes on religious-based charter schools and private colleges: National Heritage Academies, Cornerstone Education Group, Hillsdale College. These schools serve the dual purpose of indoctrination into right-wing ideology as well as pumping money into the political system to further erode the separation of church and state.

Leonard Leo, an ultra conservative Catholic, has served in a leadership capacity at the Federalist Society for over 25 years. Realizing that the Christian right had little hope of winning the culture war at the ballot box, Leo has forged connections with big money, and was instrumental in growing Federalist Society membership and influence. The Federalist Society has connections to many of the “usual suspects” of dark money: the John M. Olin Foundation, the Scaife Foundation, the Prince and Devos Foundations, Rebekah Mercer (who is known for connections to Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica), as well as religious groups like Focus on the Family, Campus Crusade for Christ and the National Christian Foundation. In addition to money, Leo is connected to the dominionist movement, who believes that Christians must take control of all aspects of government, business and culture in order to prepare for the return of Christ. The six Federalists on the U.S. Supreme Court seem hell-bent on installing a theocracy.

The irony of the Dabney-Rushdooney-Fifield dogma is its obvious and ongoing hypocrisy. An early form of this was the insistence on “states rights,” while at the same time demanding that the Federal government help with the return of escaped slaves (a reason many Southerners opposed secession—slaves would now have a safe place to escape to). Government support for the underprivileged, or what is condescendingly termed “welfare,” is vilified as enforced theft from hard-working Americans (i.e., rich white people), yet there is all manner of grift and con to extract taxpayer money to fund their own schools of indoctrination. But the biggest hypocrisy of all is the flouting of purported moral superiority at the same time one is flagrantly engaging in at least three of the seven deadly sins: Pride (more accurately described as arrogance, hubris, and entitlement), greed, and lust (especially for power).

A Butterfly Flaps Its Wings: From the Powell Memo to the Eastman Memo and January 6th

Published on by Brynne VanHettinga

Part 5 of a 10-part Series:

Big Money and the Corporatocracy Captures the Media

Indeed, whether such extreme inequality is or is not sustainable depends not only on the effectiveness of the repressive apparatus but also, and perhaps primarily, on the apparatus of justification.”

Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, (2014)

Gaining a stranglehold on elected representatives, the legislative process, and appointed officials and judges was still not enough. In a democratic system, there is always the danger that the people will tire of working harder for less year after year or otherwise rebel against obscene levels of inequality. Therefore, the elites had to capture the apparatus of intellectual discourse and cultural transmission; i.e., educational institutions and popular media. 

The war on American workers has been going on since the middle 1800s. In the early days, striking workers would sometimes receive sympathetic attention in the press.  The machinery of the U.S. Congress finally responded to the plight of workers when it passed the National Labor Relations Act in 1935. What followed was growth in the American middle class that made it the envy of the world. Although nearly undiscernible at the time, this phenomenon was already starting to wane—guess when?—the middle to late 1970s—as the Powell memo was put into operation.

The full operation of the Powell memo did not become readily measurable until the Reagan Presidency. Reagan launched the first major salvo against labor when he broke the PATCO strike in August 1981. Throughout the 1980s, media coverage of unions grew increasingly negative. The 1980s were also a period where the media and popular culture was promoting a “greed is good” ethos. But, ironically, it was auto workers and teachers—who only wanted to have enough resources to do their jobs and be paid enough to support their families–who were portrayed as greedy (in the bad sense).

Although it had been noted in obscure academic publications and occasional news articles, only around the turn of the 21st century did serious and sustained media attention become focused on the yawning gap of income and wealth inequality. Mainstream economists began to challenge the prevailing “trickle-down” theory of supply side economists, or the notion that allowing a few fat cats to become obscenely wealthy would somehow (??) inure to the benefit of the rest of us. In 1996, the economist Ravi Batra accused his mainstream colleagues of “napping in their ivory towers” for totally missing the “wage blight” that had been afflicting American workers since 1982. Others finally began making a connection between the decline of labor rights and power and increasing inequality.

In 2017, a pair of researchers at the Vienna University School of Economics and Business analyzed how the media framed issues of economic and social inequality “after decades of benign neglect.” How inequality is presented is “not discussed in economics at all, and hardly mentioned in communication studies.” The authors suggest that economic inequality has only recently been “rediscovered,” likely because it has become so extreme—especially in the U.S. They allege that the “interdependencies between economics and the media” exert an important influence over “the contested sphere of preference shaping,” including political opinions.

The scholarship that has examined this issue has found that business and financial news “tends to be framed by pro-market explanations” and rarely, if ever, “question the overarching economic philosophy of free-market capitalism.” Any one of us can conduct our own informal review and easily discern that most stories are framed around the interests of corporations and employer groups. This bias is “further intensified by the growth of public relations, sponsorship, and other subsidized information flows favoring wealth and powerful interests.” 

  • Coverage of poverty is portrayed as a threat to the community, linking the poor to crime, drug and alcohol addiction, reinforcing the trope that the causes of poverty are due to individual faults rather than structural deficiencies.

  • Welfare “reform” is portrayed as something that reduces dependency and fosters self-reliance. Stories seldom cover the “working poor”—the folks who work sometimes two and three jobs and are still unable to make ends meet—because this would not be consistent with the mythology that the poor are lazy and lacking in work ethic.

  • Taxes on wealth—most of which fall on a very small portion of the population—are portrayed as an issue of general concern affecting all Americans. This is tied into meritocratic notions of “deserts,” that individuals should keep what they earn. The stories hardly ever delve into the fact that the very wealthy “earn” most of their income from things like stock options, carried interest, and capital gains rather than the kinds of “work” that most of the rest of us do.

  • In stories about shareholders challenging executive pay, the shareholders are portrayed as “rebels,” although sometimes the executives are shown dining and drinking in luxury. The authors suggest that this “strong conflict frame” ignores wider themes around capitalist structures, austerity, shareholder agency and inequality.

The authors next examine the causes of this bias/neglect. First is the “hegemonic structure” of media ownership, which has become increasingly concentrated (as have many other industries). This concentration has affected both the elite (mainstream) traditional media like newspapers as well as newer online social media platforms.  Added to this are increasing “commercial pressures,” which result in fewer investments in investigative reporting and more sensationalized stories. The authors suggest that information should be “reconceptualized as a public good and not a commodity.”

The authors then address a more controversial issue, which they term “manufacturing consent.” They cite at least one study of stories about tax reform, which found a definite “pro-rich (or pro-corporate) bias” being promoted by “the propaganda function of institutions such as the mass media and advertising industry.” The authors conclude,

“The one-sidedness of sources already came clear in the studies we analyzed….For our topic of economic inequality and redistributional policies, this would presumptively mean that certain ways of talking about economic inequality… [and efforts to remedy it] are disregarded. Marked as unrealistic or utopian, leaving it—once again—to the market, in its wonderful magic, to do the trick, seeing growing inequality only to be explained by meritocracy…”

On one front, the strategy was to simply keep most people’s noses to the grindstone—where they have neither the inclination nor the energy to look up and ask WHY things are the way they are. On a second front was a complete lack of discourse or public consciousness of what was happening to work, wages, tax loopholes for billionaires, corporate welfare, and connection to political power. The third front involved demonizing government—or any form of collective action where working people could assert themselves. The teaching of civics in American classrooms (especially working class and minority classrooms) has been all but abandoned.

The right-wing media ecosystem was more than a platform for the propaganda of billionaires, but fomented divisiveness and distrust that has destroyed any sense of community or solidarity. The very notion of “we the people” was rebranded as “socialism.”  The system is deliberately designed to keep people tired, irritable, broke, and desperate to find a scapegoat. With the help of psychological and social sciences, messages are tailored to induce ever-increasing wants. Other messages are directed at the survival responses of the limbic system, designed to induce fear and rage.  

A Butterfly Flaps Its Wings: From the Powell Memo to the Eastman Memo and January 6th

Published on by Brynne VanHettinga

Part 3 of a 10-part Series:

The Powell Memo Let Loose

“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”

Adam Smith, 1776

The wealthy, business elites and the corporatocracy took the advice from Powell’s memo and ran with it. The most obvious strategy was to exert influence in the places of power—where decisions that affect all of us are made. One way was through direct contributions to political candidates. Here in the United States, campaign finance reform (i.e., getting “big money” out of politics) has undergone a cycle of incremental improvements followed by regression. This is due to both the practical need for large amounts of money in order to run for office as well as limits imposed by Constitutional free speech jurisprudence.  Since the disastrous Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v FEC (2010), the amount of money already pouring into political campaigns has grown ever larger. Political committees may now accept unlimited contributions, so long as they do not “coordinate” with a candidate or a party. Although many of the fat cat donors have a political party preference, many of the special interest groups donate large sums to both parties—insuring access and influence regardless of what the people decide about who is elected.

 

Even prior to Citizens United, the Supreme Court eliminated the Millionaires Amendment in the 2008 Davis v FEC decision. The Millionaires amendment had allowed candidates running against an über-wealthy, self-funded opponent to bypass campaign contribution limits. Although the Millionaires Amendment imposed no limit on a wealthy candidate’s ability to spend funds on his own campaign, the Court’s rationale was that the Millionaires Amendment unconstitutionally “penalized” wealthy candidates; that such burden was not justified by any governmental interest in preventing corruption or the appearance of corruption; and that equalizing electoral opportunities for candidates of different personal wealth was not a permissible Congressional purpose. 

According to the FEC, the largest individual donors to Republicans in the 2020 election were Sheldon Adelson ($225 million), Richard Uhlein ($75 million), Kenneth Griffin ($70 million), Timothy Mellon ($60 million) and Dustin Moskovitz ($50 million). The two largest donors to Democrats—Michael Bloomberg ($150 million) and Thomas Steyer ($80 million)—were running for President themselves, so a large part of their donations was likely made to their own campaigns. The Adelson-backed super-PAC decided to support Trump late in the campaign, which likely contributed to Trump’s upset victory.  Thus illustrating yet more evidence of a “pay-to-play” political system.

Interest groups as well as wealthy individuals donate to political campaigns. One might think that these interest groups—who operate from individual donations and pooled funds—would likely be more representative of “the people.”  Yet, here again, we see that many of these groups either represent business interests (e.g., the Chamber of Commerce), or are “astroturf” organizations which appear to be supported by grass roots small donations, but are actually funded by wealthy (and often anonymous) donors:

  1. U.S. Chamber of Commerce   $130 million
  2. Crossroads GPS     $110 million
  3. Americans for  Prosperity    $59 million
  4. National Rifle Association    $58 million
  5. American Future Fund    $51 million

In 1971, only 175 firms had registered lobbyists in the nation’s capital. By 1982, some 2,500 firms had registered lobbyists. The number of Political Action Committees (PACs) increased from less than 300 to over 1,200 between 1976 and 1980, and their expenditures on congressional races increased nearly 500%.  In 1975, total revenue of Washington lobbyists was less than $100 million. By 2006, it was over $2.5 billion.  Although the number of lobbyists and the amount of money spent on lobbying proliferated during the 1980s and 1990s, the number of active lobbyists peaked at 14,837 in 2007.  In terms of both number of lobbyists and money, lobbying has been on the decrease following restrictions and reporting requirements passed by the Obama administration in 2008.

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) is itself a rather toothless organization. It is governed by six Commissioners, three from each of the major political parties. This (unsurprisingly) often results in deadlock. However, Commissioners must be confirmed by the Senate, and so the FEC frequently operates without a full Commission, which hinders its ability to issue rules, conduct investigations and approve enforcement actions. Shortly after the Citizens United decision, the FEC allowed the creation of independent expenditure-only committees, now known as super-PACS. Unlike political candidates, who must build their campaign coffers with legally limited smaller donations, super-PACs can collect six and seven figure donations. This “outside” (i.e., not under the control of a party or candidate) spending has amounted to $4.5 billion since 2010, outpacing “regular” candidate spending and contributing to record-breaking expensive campaigns. Billions of super-PAC dollars can flow instantly into ads and other communications—and they are often hard to distinguish from the ads produced by the candidates themselves.

Capturing the policy agenda with money may have been the primary agenda. But, in order to survive public scrutiny (and perhaps opposition), the oligarch agenda had to be supported with “scientific” sounding logic and argument. Money that wasn’t directly used to influence legislators and legislation was directed into academic-style “think tanks” that provided an intellectual foundation for oligarch ideology. This strategy is termed “preference-shaping,” a technique generally associated with advertising and marketing. When applied to the electorate, preference shaping is designed to insure that—during those few times when ordinary people (i.e., voters) are in a position to make a decision—that they are imbued with the world view, frameworks, and preferences of the plutocrats.

The Heritage Foundation was established in 1973 among a list of conservative notables. The Heritage Foundation receives an average annual revenue of $112.7 million. The Libertarian CATO institute was founded in 1974 and relocated to Washington in 1981. The older American Enterprise Institute—with an average annual revenue of $64 million—has been around since 1938. The AEI provided many of the personnel to staff the George W. Bush Administration. The Claremont Institute, founded in 1979, has become more recently infamous for its former senior fellow John Eastman, a figure (with another memo) who is nearly inextricable with January 6th. These are the sources of foundational ideologies that preach the gospel that allowing a few folks to become obscenely wealthy is good for all of us. This includes the “greed is good” ethos that emerged in the 1980s as well as “trickle-down” (aka supply side) economics—which has actually been disproven by real economists. But you would never know this from the continued promotion of it among economic and political elites.

Campaign finance ethics tends to focus on individual candidates—who is giving to whom in exchange for what favors. But the huge sums of money in our political system have a more insidious (and harder to discern) effect on both democracy and the welfare of the rest of us. It creates a system that is wealth-biased, or based on the presumption that everyone is equally free to accumulate as much as they are logistically able—and indeed are even expected to do so. Those whose only objective is the increase of their own wealth and power are easily able to create a unified and coherent value system.

All the rest of us, however, have a much wider universe of needs and interests: some folks struggle to keep a roof over their head or have enough to feed their families; others are worried about the quality of K-12 education for their children today and the cost of higher education for their children tomorrow. Others have more existential concerns about climate change, globalism, or war. If we can find time, energy, and resources which are not consumed with daily survival, we may be able to help toward one of these causes in some small way. But we will never have the unified clout of plutocrats and the corporatocracy. Indeed, a 2014 study by political science academics concluded that, “When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized  interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”