Elitism

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 6 of a 10-part Series:

The Double-edged Sword of Populism

There has always been in our national experience a type of mind which elevates hatred to a kind of creed…For this mind, group hatreds take a place in politics similar to the class struggle in some other modern societies. “

Richard Hofstadter, 1963,  Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

Populism is a political movement that purports to champion the “common person” against a real or perceived elite that exerts an inordinate amount of power over the life of everyday people. The paradox of populism is that it can come from either the right (anti-government) or the left (anti-corporate), and its effects can be either progressive or regressive.

Populism often arises in response to real injustice, but then may morph into something darker as it gains power. A good example of this is the Jacobin Club of the French Revolution. It was formed by mostly middle and upper-middle class persons, and its goal was to preserve the gains of the revolution by preventing a reactionary backlash from the aristocratic elites. The Jacobins increased their membership by recruiting lower-middle-class shopkeepers and artisans, and they became increasingly radicalized. During the trial of King Louis XIV, moderates who opposed violence were excluded from the club. What followed was the Reign of Terror, where many people were publicly executed. The Jacobins were blamed, and they were eventually abolished.

Here in America, perhaps the earliest example of populism was Shay’s Rebellion in 1786-1787. A group of farmers who were subject to bank foreclosure violently stormed courthouses in Massachusetts. The governing authorities in some states (who were comprised of elites) were concerned whether they would be able to suppress future such rebellions themselves. Shay’s rebellion was the event that motivated the American Constitutional convention (May-September 1787). A national government would allow the states to combine defenses against future challenges to “property.”

Later populism in America was associated with the Progressive era (1877-1917). This was the period characterized by the ascendance of industrialism, the growth of monopolies, and rampant inequality. For most of the “regular folks,” there was a major shift from livelihoods on small family farms or independent shops to wage labor. It was the period where businesses combined to form huge “trusts,” which allowed regionally dominant businesses to merge across state lines. The enlargement of trusts created the American Gilded Age and prompted passage of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890.  This was more than a matter of money and raging inequality, but presented a threat to democracy itself, as the voices of regular people were increasingly unable to be heard in the halls of Congress that had been captured by big money.

The Progressive Populist movement pushed forward trust busting (the Sherman Act), reform of government corruption and cronyism (the Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883), and the labor union movement. Although the Progressives themselves were not directly responsible for violence, violence and unrest frequently appeared around labor strikes. Like today, while the mainstream press often blamed the striking workers, later investigations found that it was often created by Pinkertons (a vigilante law enforcement group hired by the industrialists) or federal and state national guard troops responding to requests to defend factories.

More recent examples of American populism are represented by the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. Although these movements are frequently portrayed as opposites, in their early days they sometimes were described as two sides of a very angry coin. Both were motivated to some degree by the government bailout of Wall Street and big banks during the Great Recession of 2007-2009, while the pain of Main Street and working people was ignored. Although both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street started as grass roots response to injustices against “the people,” the Occupy movement faded out due to lack of organization and resources. Conversely, the Tea Party movement morphed into something much more organized and better funded—including the support of right-wing billionaires.

Throughout American history, various groups have been demonized: Abolitionists, Mormons, Jews, Catholics, Muslims, African-Americans and other peoples of color, immigrants, bankers and intellectuals. We can intuit that the demonization of the latter (bankers and intellectuals) came from the ground up, whereas other forms of demonization were likely more generalized. Anti-intellectualism is a common element of populism in America.

Some of us remember former Vice-President Spiro Agnew’s calling students protesting the Vietnam War “effete snobs.” The intellectual is portrayed as someone who is content to live a life of the mind, safely ensconced within the Ivory Tower and immune from the hard work and exempt from fighting wars that all the rest of “us” must do. The intellectual is stereotypically described as enjoying an unearned social superiority while contributing nothing of real value to the rest of society. Intellectuals are the ones who live in an abstract world of spreadsheets and data, who jet off for meetings in fancy places like Davos, where they make decisions resulting in lost jobs and shuttered factories.

In modern times, the buzzwords are “meritocracy” and “professionalism,” along with their messages that only those with requisite (usually expensive) training and degrees are qualified to make certain decisions. We can sympathize with populist arguments that “elites” were behind policies (e.g., globalized trade and rapid technological change) that made a few very wealthy while destroying jobs and impoverishing the communities that were left out of the decisions.

In real life, however, the targets of anti-intellectualism are not always so easy to identify.  Typical non-Wall Street targets are higher-level public administrators and university professors. Although public administrators can be co-opted by the managerial ethos (get more work out of everyone for less), they are also public servants—most who genuinely want to see their work make a difference and improve communities. Likewise, many university professors genuinely want to improve the future through their students, and they often share the angst of their working-class neighbors—managing larger classes with fewer resources and constantly under threats from “the Administration.” Or state legislatures. Indeed, professional-level workers are increasingly subject to many of the same forms of inferiorization typically experienced by blue-collar workers. 

While “bottom-up” driven populist anti-intellectualism is usually based on legitimate grievances (and may sometime serve to advance democratic ideals), todays anti-intellectualism is a top-down driven version with entirely different roots and purposes: Oil and gas companies deny climate change, the corporatocracy and the wealthy promote “trickle down” economics, notwithstanding all the evidence that it doesn’t work as they claim. This form of anti-intellectualism allows them to whip up the working class against “intellectual elites.” Which, remarkably, never includes the well-paid white-paper “researchers” at their own posh think tanks.

 

At some point, rabid anti-intellectualism morphs into anti-science, anti-evidence, and denial of reality. The propaganda machine has been pushing policies (anti-regulation, anti-wealth-tax, anti-union, anti-education) that either harms regular working people directly or disempowers them in some way.  Relentless propaganda, combined with the defunding of public education, has resulted in loss of critical thinking skills among working and middle-class populations. Most people are already working too many hours to have time to educate themselves on all the issues—if they are even inclined to do so in a culture that disparages learning. Add on top of this the constant media barrage of glamorous and exciting lifestyles of the “rich and famous” juxtaposed against one’s own drab and shabby life, and you have a recipe for mass cognitive dissonance.

In a world where everyone is exhorted to view everyone else as competition for increasingly fewer resources (good jobs, housing, opportunity, recognition), anti-intellectualism creates another form of “us versus them.” Universities and research groups are working to make education more accessible as well as to bridge the divide between academia and the “real world.” At the same time, both oligarch-funded and organic social media hate propaganda machines have made intellectuals defensive. Feeling themselves under attack, some academics and intellectuals respond by expressing disdain for the ignorant masses, perpetuating the cycle of hate and distrust. 

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.