``What social psychologists who study social movements say is that a social movement definitely needs a clear and visible opponent that embodies the values that are opposed, and which can be vilified and railed against. But in opposition to the conspiracists, these opponents are readily identifiable and working through visible and legitimate institutions.
So, I would say that the opponents are the corporate conservatives and the Republican Party, not the Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderbergers, and Bohemians. It is the same people more or less, but it puts them in their most important roles, as capitalists and political leaders, which are visible and legitimate...If thought of this way, then the role of a CFR as a place to try to hear new ideas and reach consensus is more readily understood, as is the function of a social club as a place that creates social cohesion. Moreover, those understandings of the CFR and the clubs fit with the perceptions of the members of the elite...'' Domhoff
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The above is from an brief interview done by Chip Berlet, from Public Eye with William Domhoff.
This reminds me to try and write something on the change in the power elite that I think has been a concrete transformation of their sensibility. (It relies on what I've read of Strauss, so be forewarned. This is also long and rambling, and it indulges list tolerance to the max.)
I always got the sense that the divisions between Democrat and Republican wings of the power elite shared a common political philosophy that crudely mirrored US history, the sort of pragmatic political ideas that we all read in our intro to political science classes: how the executive branch is supposed to work, what the legislative branch does, important supreme court decisions, and the socio-economic history of the various regions of the country and how they compete and vie with each other for wealth, power, and influence on the course of the US in the world. That sort of stuff.
>From a philosophical point of view that is pretty thin gruel. Except
for the anti-communist themes of the cold war, which really just
amounted to a capitalist protection and propaganda scheme, there
hasn't been much intellectual examination of what the US was supposed
to be. What we were supposed to be was a liberal democracy with a big,
wealthy and powerful business sector, that had to be kept in check
from its own excesses now and again. From at least FDR on through
Nixon, there was a general consensus on what kind of political
establishment we had and it was no secrete really who was running
things no matter which side was elected. Who was usually running
things in the executive branch were the usual groups of the power
elite that both Mills and Domhoff outlined. They were rich, well
connected, mostly east coast types in law and from business or from
rich families who established their wealth and power from businesses
in the past. They were recycled from one administration to the next
and provided a kind of political mediocrity of stability---where
business likes to flourish.
The power elites in those eras didn't have much of a political philosophy as such, except to keep themselves and their corporate interests well served. As close as they got to ideology was anti-communism, which of course served the capitalist class quite well.
The extreme fracture of the Vietnam war, the wave after wave of demonstrations and discourses coming from students and progressives and most important, the politically aware communities and their respective masses, not only opened a chasm of disbelief, what the media so quaintly called a credibility gap, but these movements also shook the power elite consensus makers to the core. The legitimacy of the elite's right to power, based mostly on how smoothly or professionally they could make institutions of government and business manage the country was shattered, and shattered in public. I am thinking of guys like McNamara, Rusk, Acheson, on global policies, and liberal senators like then VP Humphrey and other go-slow types on the domestic fronts. The whole elite class was symbolically hauled to the docket, castigated without mercy, and promptly marched to the square for summary execution. It was not just a matter of political disasters and failures of the war, but the whole kind of US practical minded, business oriented, sort of US political philosophy of vague liberalism that was de-capitated. There was no there there. And what was there, was mostly a lie. Each establishment ideal, patriotism say, vague hand-waving at human rights, or the great American spirit that melted engineering and business together, Edison for example---all that was gone. What was exposed was nothing but a corrupt military-industrial-complex and an equally corrupt elite establishment that would go right on killing and making money doing it no matter what---and worst of all, the great freedom cant against the evil communist world was just turned into mush---almost overnight. From Tet in January, through the assassinations of King and Kennedy, right on through to Chicago---it all evaporated into thin air.
In a sense the cold war anticommunist consensus was the ideological glue that held the two wings of the power elite together---they agreed on the privalaged position of business interests---they just disagreed on how best to manage that interest. It really came down to a question of whether or not to keep the system of checks and balances, regulation and privilage that had formed the New Deal era, or whether to abandon all that and go back to a period of free wheeling capitalism. By the Carter administration, the choice had been made to abandon the New Deal reforms that had been put in place to stave off pressure from below in unions and more radical minded progressives in the 30s. Those sorts of reforms, had only precipitated pressure for more and deeper reforms by the next generation and the next. Carter was a new Democrat, from the New South and while he talked a good game on civil rights, he began the federal level dismantling of the New Deal and Great Society that Nixon had only had a chance to hobble with tight budgets.
At the end of the 60s, the fall from legitimacy the power elite suffered and the exposure of their failures, also followed a collapse of the whole liberal pragmatic ideology they espoused. It had no direction, no national purpose, no vision of the future and could not answer the reform and progressive ideological assaults that were battering them to pieces. Civil rights fine, now what else can you show me, boys? How about some equality? How about some social justice around here? There were no policy answers, except to unleash the FBI, and hope that local police would shut-up the noise makers.
Simultaneous with these more progressive and more public assaults, there was also the quiet rise of a generation of establishment types (young Republicans among others) who dreamed they were headed for power positions someday. They were also infected with the ideological spirit of the time, and were made aware of the complete lack of any coherent vision or direction coming from the establishment in power. The neconservative philosophy of state, its related concepts of neoliberal economy and all the nonsense we now hear daily from them, were all forged as their reactions to that same period---only on the right---and all forged roughly contemporary with my own slow devolution into a far more radical view of the state than I ever had before. The right just went in the opposite direction.
In my intellectual journey to understand what had happened, and to understand what kind of place and time I was living in, I started reading anything I thought might shed light on that pregnant but almost fortuitous collapse of legitimacy. I just assume, now looking back, the same impulse infected the right. What I sought was progress out of the mire, and I suppose so did they. But their answer was a re-entrenchment, a return to before the fracture, while mine was to accept the fracture, understand it, and make it the basis of a new form of governing relation--more open, more equal, more enlightened, etc.
By personal coincidence, during this lull in the 70s I got to go to DC and see first hand the interior functions of state power and bureaucracy in action through the war on poverty program I was working for. Who were the guys in power who over saw our program? Unbelievable. In this particular wing of government, they were mostly from the legal support teams, lawyers and other administrative professionals, who were attached to civil rights movements and court battles of the previous era! The Johnson era appointees had been very good at pulling these people into government positions to administer these community programs---and possibly co-opted them from continuing to push for more radical reforms. No wonder Nixon was paranoid. He was absolutely right. The government was just crawling with these lefty civil rights and community organizing lawyers, and they were quite adapt at frustrating executive branch top down purges---coded under the rubric of a New Federalism. State's rights by any other name should smell so bad.
The right impulse to return was just as ideologically driven as mine. But return to what? Well, return to straight business white guys like-us rule of course---only all fancied up with a new terminology about freedom, prosperity, and the American way, and backed up with a new cultural and historical awareness---of mostly the imaginary kind.
We've often written about identity politics here, but rarely on the clean cut white guy business identities---in other words the power elite politics of identity. That's another of power's masks that was shattered---principally by civil rights, black power, and third world movements---which also opened the huge maw of imperialism, a view of the US and Southeast Asia that nobody in power wanted to address.
Now to the Strauss part. If Arendt supplied me with the beginnings of a coherent liberal political philosophy through her writing and analysis, Strauss performed the same function in the lives of the idealogues of the right. What made both of these writers so compelling was hard to exactly pin point. The appeal was essentially their resonance with political alienation, dark times and some concrete experience with intense political struggles---in their case of course much darker times and much more deadly struggles. They also dealt with identity as a political and philosophical issue. They had lived their minority status, battled it themselves, and wrote about it. But most of all they gave to the US political tradition a philosophical overview, a European history connection, and brought all of that to bare on their views of what constituted a democratic and liberal state. In other words they addressed the historical and political issues at hand. Just exactly what kind of state do we want here and what are the ideas from history and previous political experience that can help us get there?
So how is that Arendt had so little impact and Strauss had so much? The simple answer is Srauss wrote his most influential books, like What is Political Philosophy, and Natural Right and History for a power elite. Strauss provided the historical and philosophical justifications for the legitimacy of a ruling class in a liberal democracy (which in my mind, is a complete contradiction.) And coincidentally he made these justifications into a moral authority that almost exactly dovetailed with the new right generation of neoconservatives who viewed themselves as moral rectifiers of all that was wrong with America. The return was not only viewed as a return to order and a hierarchical one at that, and a return to some far less radical cultural trappings, but also a return to a privileged moral authority of the state under the banner of a return to traditional American values.
Arendt on the other hand was profoundly critical of the very legitimacy of such elites, their values, their states of order, their hierarchies of power, and the sort of historical analysis of democratic government and human rights offered by these new wave Hobbesians. Arendt was among other things a re-constructed Marxist in her social analysis (Human Condition). That is to say, perhaps too crudely, that Arendt treats Marx as a sociologist and political philosopher.
As mentioned above both Strauss and Arendt deal directly with their identity as Jews, as a social and philosophical issue. However, in relation to an enlightenment inspired project, or in terms of understanding the foundations of a modern democratic society, they reach almost opposite conclusions. Again in a rather overly simplified point of view, Arendt was an assimilationist. While certainly never denying her identity as a Jew and a woman, that was not the primary point of view from which she wrote or thought. For Arendt, religion, religious practice, and religious identities belonged to what she called the private sphere. In this sense then she fit well within the US liberal tradition of considering religion to be a matter of private practice and belief and essentially not part of the public life of the political arena or polity. Strauss on the other took the opposite position, which could be seen as anti-assimilationist. He considered his identity as a Jew central to his political personae. In effect he was writing his political philosophy as a political philosophy of a modern Jew. Paradoxically, while quiet traditional in his private life as a Jew, he was an atheist. Rather than consider his statue as a Jew to be an identity that deserved its place under a system of equality and civil rights, he considered such systems to be too open to tolerance of discrimination. This is something of an odd doctrine, but in Strauss's view, liberal tolerance and its implicit relativity of values also implied tolerance for anti-Semiticism. He thought that to be governed under such a system and be treated fairly, he essentially had to become assimilated and more or less renounce his political identity as a Jew.
In an historical sense, Arendt wholeheartedly assumed the position of a citizen in the French and American revolutionary sense, which fundamentally denied any privilege of public position to religion. Strauss on the other hand rejected such a concept.
To recast these distinctions between Arendt and Strauss in a concrete and current context, for Arendt there should be no meaningful political contradiction between Jews and Muslim citizens living under a modern secular state, say in Israel with a revised constitution. For Strauss such a revised constitution would essentially mean the death of Israel as a Jewish state.
Or to cast it in yet another current context, for Arendt there should be no meaningful political contradiction between Shitte and Sunnis in an Iraq that has (by some miracle, impossible to imagine) a truly a secular democratic state. For Strauss such a state is impossible to imagine since Shittes and Sunnis are natural political parties.
If you follow the above, or if I have made any sense of it, you can see how intensely cogent these two political philosophers are to our immediate political climate. In terms of a politics of identity it is important to see the neoconservatives and their political power as indicative of a ruling elite. More specifically neoconservatism is in effect a privileged white man's identity movement that appeals to the predominately rich white male ruling elite.
Maybe its an overstatement, but I see the neoconservatives as a new wave, spruced up white supremacy movement. About the only accouterments they lack are the white sheet and a can of kerosene. Sure they drive BMWs and scorn their heritage: rusted out Chevy pick-ups covered in swamp mud. Of course few know which is the business end of a shotgun, and nobody drinks white lighting. And yet, once you strip off all that fancy German philosophy and those smooth talking big city ways, you get down to that good old boy stuff. Klan. We talking Mister Charlie shit here. And I for one, think old Mister Charlie is getting mighty (pronounced, myy-dee) nervous.
Whatever the fractures, reactions, and changes raught on the ruling elites of the past, at present any public pressure or progressive political group seeking change now meets a far more formidable opponent than their predecessors could have imagined. Everybody learns from historical struggles. Along with all the institutional shifts that Doug lists in his paragraph headings, there has also developed a global scaled ideological or propaganda apparatus that combines mass media, cadres of spokesmen and women in and out of government, and thousands of lobbyist well paid and ready to meet any reform head on, assault it and pretty much destroy it before the basic political drive ever gets very far into public view.
For all its public relations power and persuasion apparatus, there is something, perhaps only a hint, that the whole machine is very fragile indeed. Its elites and opinion makers are extraordinarily fearful, often over reacting when they should in their own best interest simply let mild reform drives succeed or flounder on their own merits. Was the idea of paying for prescription drugs for old people really all that radical? Did it threatening to unravel the whole fabric of capital and its neoliberal economy in a single stroke? Come on. What's the hysteria about?
So I disagree a little with Doug's view of complacency among the business class who Doug identifies as more less identical with the ruling elite. That's certainly an identification I agree with. But complacent? I am not so sure. The rise of numerous domestic anti-globalization movements just prior to the war in Iraq I suspect did startle the preening little roosters who now rule the country. The chronic harassment of G8 summits, meetings of the WB and IMF and other high level conferences of the elite did manage to stir up anxiety.
And then there is 9/11. From a more secure power elite point of view, the US has faced plenty of terrorist attacks before---mostly on foreign soil of course. It was forgotten that the whole of 70s through much of the 80s were studded with international terrorist attacks, mostly from the Arab world, and mostly involving passenger aircraft. There were already plenty of state powers, police institutions and interlocking international networks between elites and their intelligence services in different parts of the world to have dealt with 9/11 very effectively. Instead the US elite went nuts by installing mostly useless security measures and summarily erased most of the legal protections and human rights that had built up for decades. All that read to me as a severe anxiety attack. Circle the wagons, tie up the natives, put the women and kids inside, and get ready... Almost a Hollywood western script.
While thousands of innocent office workers died, the real target was unmistakable---the US ruling elite and its global military-industrial and financial empire. After finishing My Pet Goat, Bush flew straight for the nearest executive nuclear bomb shelter somewhere in the Midwest while our noble leaders in Congress ran out the doors and down the steps of Capital. Dick Cheney was in the White House bunker eating cold sandwiches and manning the briefing room phone bank. For something like almost eight hours the mayor's office of NYC seemed to be running the country with a much more a confident and assured hand than anything coming out the federal government which had gone to ground for hours on end.
It seems our new power elite has trouble managing its natural right to an aristocratic warrior caste and its privilege to wage war on anyone and everyone. Of course almost none of this particular generation went through what was at one time a mandatory military service. I suspect guys like John Keary are rare. It's also interesting to remember that Hilary Clinton and other new elite voted for useless police state domestic measures and declared total war on the Muslim world.
That's hysteria. Oh, lordy, lordy, the sand n-words is running loose, let's get'm boys.
CG
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