Oligarchy

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

Published on by Brynne VanHettinga

Part 1 of a 10-part Series:

Introduction to the Powell Memo and Chaos Theory

“The national television networks should be monitored in the same way that textbooks should be kept under constant surveillance. This applies not merely to so-called educational programs (such as “Selling of the Pentagon”), but to the daily “news analysis” which so often includes the most insidious type of criticism of the enterprise system.”

From the 1971 Powell Memo

A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon rain forest, and three weeks later there is a hurricane on the other side of the world. This is the essence of chaos theory. That is, one small and seemingly insignificant event creates a chain reaction that can produce profound effects in the future. Each event creates a juncture of sometimes only several and sometimes nearly infinite possible pathways forward. This phenomenon provides a plethora of plots for science fiction writers looking for “alternate universe” story ideas. It is also what makes the future nearly impossible to predict.

In 1952, the science fiction author Ray Bradbury wrote a story he called A Sound of Thunder. In the fictional year 2055, time travel is possible. An enterprising company called Time Safari, Inc. takes wealthy hunters back to the past to hunt dinosaurs.  Specific animals are selected who are known by the tour company to have died soon afterward. However, hunters are instructed to never leave a levitating path which has been constructed to literally minimize their footprint, because they could potentially cause a disruption in the timeline and change the future. How this levitating pathway was constructed without doing the same is never explained.

In the beginning of the story, we meet a hunter who has paid $10,000 for the privilege of shooting a tyrannosaurus rex. The Time Safari guide is explaining the instructions about “not leaving the path” and potential for disruption to the timeline. The conversation turns to a recent election, where a fascist candidate has been narrowly defeated. Everyone expresses thankful relief and then the hunting party departs in the time machine. When they arrive in the late Cretaceous period and spot a T-Rex, the hunter gets scared. The main guide instructs him to return to the time machine. Meanwhile, the two guides shoot the dinosaur shortly before a tree falls on it (the event that would have killed it in the current time).

The hunter hears the shots and returns to the spot where the dinosaur has been killed.  The guides find out he has stumbled off the path in his haste, and threaten to kill him if anything is “changed” upon their return. They travel back to 2055 and at first, everything seems normal. However, some of the words on signs appear to be misspelled. The head guide inspects the hunter’s shoe and discovers a crushed butterfly. Someone asks who won the election, and they learn that the fascist is now in charge. The “sound of thunder” is the sound of the guide’s gun, as he carries out his threat.

January 6th did not happen in a vacuum, but—as chaos theory suggests—was pushed by something that started a chain of causation that led to its inevitability. Here I make the argument that the “butterfly moment” happened on August 23, 1971, with the publication of a memo written by Lewis Powell and published through the Chamber of Commerce. At that time, Powell was a corporate attorney practicing in Richmond Virginia, where he also represented the Tobacco Institute. As most of us know, Powell was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Nixon less than a year later, where he served until 1987.

The Powell Memo is noted for its brilliant creation of a (mostly) false narrative that is nonetheless extremely compelling. The memo deftly targets the base emotion of fear—more specifically the fear of losing privilege and power—couched in tones of moral righteousness and victimhood. Within this infamous Powell memo is a call to arms that today might seem mild when frothing hate-filled white supremacist groups are roaming public spaces with assault weapons. Yet, the memo contains unambiguous war-themed language: “The American economic system is under broad attack;” The Greening of America, a book by Yale Professor Charles Reich constituted “a frontal assault…on our government.” Powell proclaimed that American business had a duty to “conduct guerilla warfare with those who propagandize against the system.”

Another effective device is the demonization of anyone who opposes you. Powell points a finger at Ralph Nader, labor unions, the ACLU, and anyone else who dared to call out corporate abuse of workers, consumers, or the environment as “shotgun attacks on the system…which undermine confidence and confuse the public.”  The charges incorporated tactics and strategies borrowed from the McCarthy era; e.g., branding one’s enemies as communists, “Leftists,” or Soviet sympathizers.  Indeed, the interests of business elites, Wall Street and the corporatocracy were made synonymous with America and all it stands for.

According to Powell, nothing less than the “survival of the free enterprise system” was at stake. He called for the Chamber of Commerce to make “significantly increased” investments on a broad front of (1) restoring “balance” on university campuses with instructors who would champion the free enterprise system rather than challenge it; (2) train a new generation of intellectuals who would bring the “right” ideology to news media, government, and regulatory agencies; (3) monitor the content of textbooks for “fair” comparisons of socialism, fascism and communism; and (4) maintain a system of “constant surveillance” of textbooks, television, radio and other media.

Notwithstanding the bellicose framing, we can also discern a subtle whine of victimhood in Powell’s memo. The most powerful, wealthy, and privileged members of society are under attack and must defend themselves to survive!!! We see a nascent form of too much and never enough. The rhetoric definitively connects corporate self-interest to national welfare—the “what’s good for GM is good for America” trope. We also see the beginnings of a style of demonization—anyone who is concerned about the environment, working people, consumer safety, voting rights, or anything else that involves the welfare of the “little people” against the corporatocracy is an enemy of America.

In order to accomplish this broad and multi-front war, Powell recommended that “American business” should earmark 10% (an amount that is analogous to religious tithing) of its total annual advertising budget to this purpose. American business also should get over its aversion to “confrontation politics…[and] consider assuming a broader and more vigorous role in the political arena.”  Although nothing changed immediately, we know today that business responded to Powell’s call.

 

Robert Reich explains how the Powell memo launched the “corporate takeover of American politics.”  

It’s Official! America is an Oligarchy

Published on by Brynne VanHettinga

OK, the findings in one study do not necessarily make anything official. But this is a joint study by political science professors from Princeton University and Northwestern University with numerous publications to their credit.  Moreover, it more or less corroborates what many of us have suspected for years—our government no longer represents “we the people.”  This is not just a problem with elected officials, but extends to broader social structures that operate to keep the voice and concerns of regular working people unheard on policy agendas.  More people are becoming aware of this, and frustration on both the left and the right has resulted in the anti-establishment movements known as the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street.

Political scientists describe the process of how policy is formulated, developed, and eventually adopted through three broad basic models. The first model is majoritarian pluralism. This is the “majority rules” model that most of us learn in school.  Indeed, the founding fathers were rightly concerned about the possibility of mob rule, political chaos and “tyranny of the majority,” and so they designed a system of government based on separation of power, checks and balances. This created a conservative bias, which means that all else being equal, it is harder to institute change than to maintain the status quo. The second model, interest-group pluralism, proposes that policy influence is brought about by competition between organized interest groups.  Because these groups have organization and resources, they are better able to develop expertise on a particular issue as well as create an infrastructure where their voices are heard by policymakers.  Both the majoritarian pluralism and the interest-group pluralism model predict that political candidates will tailor their policy platforms to accommodate as many of the competing viewpoints as they are able, thus policy results tend to represent some reasonable manifestation of the preferences of the “average” citizen.

Thomas Dye is a modern advocate of what has come to be known as elite theory. Dye is the author of The Irony of Democracy,  Top-Down Policymaking, Politics in America, and Who’s Running America among other publications on the same issue. In a nutshell, elite theory proposes that: (1) society is divided into the few who have power and the many who do not, (2) the few who govern are not typical of the masses who are governed, (3) elites share consensus on the basic values of the social system and the preservation thereof, (4) public policy is set by, and reflects the demands of, prevailing elites and is imposed downward on the masses and (5) the masses are relatively apathetic and exert little direct influence on elites and their policies.  A corollary of elite theory which combines it with interest group pluralism is biased pluralism. Biased pluralism predicts that it is elite groups—corporations, professional associations, think tanks, chambers of commerce—rather than elite individuals who have the greatest influence on policy.

In the Princeton study, the professors developed an updated analytical model to test the predictive validity of these four political models. First, they identified 1,779 distinct “policy cases” that represented an identifiable policy change and a clearly defined dichotomous “pro/con” response.  They also collected surveys of policy preferences based on respondents’ income level (at the tenth, fiftieth, and ninetieth percentiles).  Prior studies had suggested that each of the aforementioned models had some degree of predictive validity. In this study, the professors used more complex analytics to better parse out some of the confounding variables in the prior studies.  For example, there are cases in which the preferences of average citizens and the preferences of elites are highly correlated.  In such cases, ordinary citizens might appear to “win” on a policy issue, when they have simply been coincidental beneficiaries of elite lobbying.  Alternatively, the general public tends to be more divided on particular “hot button” issues such as abortion and gun control, while elites tend to be more united.  Consequently, in this study, the authors paid particular attention to policy issues on which elites and ordinary citizens disagreed.  The findings are summarized below:

1. When the preferences of elites (wealthy individuals) and net interest-group alignments is held constant, the preferences of the general public have virtually no effect on policy. The authors conclude that “empirical support for Majoritarian Pluralism looks very shaky, indeed.” What this means is that the democratic principles upon which our country was founded no longer apply.

2. Organized interest groups as a whole have a “very substantial and independent impact” on policy. However, when the authors computed separate net-interest-group alignment for business-oriented and mass-based groups, the influence coefficients for the business groups was nearly twice as large as that for the mass groups.  This is due to both the numerical advantage of business interest groups as well as the fact that (unlike the general public) they are rarely on opposite sides of an issue, particularly economic issues.  In essence, the model generally supports interest group pluralism, with the caveat that in the U.S., interest groups are “heavily tilted toward corporations, businesses, and professional associations.”   Moreover, the alignments of these groups are negatively correlated with the preferences of average citizens.

3. The elite theory model also performed well, and the authors suggest that it probably understates the political influence of elites.  For one thing, their data captured preferences in the top 10 percent, but they could not state with specificity how much of this was due to the top 1%, the top one-tenth of 1%, or the more numerous individuals around the 90th percentile. Also, economic elites tend to occupy positions of influence (high social standing and high-level positions in institutions), from which they can work to shape and shift the preferences of others lower in the hierarchy.

4. Finally, the authors examined the effects of policy preferences on the status quo, with the assumption that it would be more difficult when the proposed policy requires the government to act or change something (the status quo bias). In these cases, even when an overwhelming majority (80%) of the public favors change, it is only successful about 43% of the time.  These results suggest a cumulative effect of policy that favors elites, as elite-favored policy tends to become more of the status quo with each passing year.  This phenomenon could also explain the compounding effects of income and wealth inequality, which has also been documented.

The authors conclude by stating, “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.”  To which I respond, “Why are we not surprised?”

So what does all this mean for most of the rest of us?  There is some suggestion that if “we the people” could form a sufficient number of groups (with a sufficient number of members and resources) we might have a better chance. In essence, organization and mobilization is the key to being heard and impacting policy. But this takes effort, energy and organization, which many of us may not have because we are too busy simply surviving. Another practical problem is how to coordinate the efforts of already existing social change groups who are working on a multiplicity of unrelated or only tangentially related issues. In the non-profit world, the emphasis is on capacity-building and resilience  because—just like working people—many non-profits have to spend time, effort and resources just to manage their funding sources and cash flow, which makes less of this available to the servicing of their mission.  Moreover, non-profits who are dependent on mainstream foundation money may find themselves cut off if they advocate policy positions that are not acceptable to their wealthy funders.

Thus there appears to be a sort of catch-22: it takes organization to affect policy and it requires resources (time, energy, money) to get organized. So if organization presents too many logistical problems for ordinary citizens to effect significant change in policy, what are the alternatives?  Chris Hedges in his 2015 The Wages of Rebellion depicts a downward spiral of more vigorous public protests followed by increasingly forceful counter-resistance efforts and corresponding growth of the police and surveillance state, which will eventually lead to totalitarianism. Hedges argues that when the people have no voice or power in such an oppressive state, there is tantamount to a moral imperative for revolution. The American Declaration of Independence itself proclaims both the right and the duty of the People to alter or abolish any government (including the very one being created) when it becomes destructive of the life, liberty and happiness of its citizens.

So, if “we the people” are not being heard, we might just have to make a lot more noise.