[WS:] Amen! What forces do you think produced this unified action? Decline of the "Soviet threat"? Shifts in public opinion in the direction favorable to neoliberalism? "Revolution from above" by technocrats and their business backers?
Jordan: Oh, a small question! To be glib, I guess the short answers is, "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely." Yes, I agree with many of the causes you listed. Unchecked corporate power, the main cause. It's not a fun new take on the course of events, but the way power works is usually not subtle. To me, our senate looks more and more like the roman senate everyday. They are so far removed from the plebs, they inhabit another world...
"Shifts in public opinion." Yes, and the mechanism for the shifts, how they are manipulated/created - and how profound that mechanism actually is.
The decline of the Soviet threat didn't seem to break the stride of the consolidation of power in the u.s. They just created/found/encouraged new enemies/threats to keep the military industrial complex going. In fact they used Iraq and Afghanistan to double down, with contractors from mercenaries to KFC, increasing corporate profits tied directly to war...Speaking of war, I think one of the "first causes" in the lead up to this unity - or simply, consolidation of power - is the winning of WWII. You can't have consolidation on this level without empire. Things like structuring global commerce with the Breton Woods institutions and GATT (which became the WTO in 1995) to benefit the relative few...It is a path that leads from global finance all the way up the capitol steps...Sixty-five years of handiwork, not too shabby...It's no surprise. The scale though...seems unprecedented to me. And that difference in degree may lead to a difference in kind.
But that is another discussion.
The long answer to your question would take a book or two. I took a step back about a year ago and realized writing a book (or film) describing the whys and wherefores of the multiple failures of the u.s. seems to have become a cottage industry. I'm not sure whether to be buoyed or depressed by that fact. If one believes all we need is more people to understand how they've been screwed, I guess I should feel something positive - of course that's assuming anyone is reading these books. I admit, after the theft of the 2000 election and the relative silence after the manufactured 2007-8 crisis, the NDAA - and a million other things, I'm not optimistic that more explanation/education is going to help much. If people are being smacked about the face with wealth consolidation and unchecked power that is directly impacting them - and still don't fight back...well...Though really, history is full of examples. Human beings will submit to horrific
conditions for ridiculously long periods before rebelling/revolting in the numbers required to make any change at all - though as we all know, even that may not make much difference in the end. My main position has always been organize, organize, organize - but I'm one of those demoralized "activists" that just spent the last twenty or so years having my ass handed to me. I put activist in quotes, because I'm not sure I even know what it means anymore in our current historical context. I want to say, it means what it has always meant, but I really don't know. Things fall apart..and come together again...and fall apart... This brings up stuff that has already been gone over with a fine-tooth comb, so I'll leave it alone.
Sorry, I digress...So, if we agree that the answer is unchecked corporate power. The question becomes, why is it unchecked... and in the case of the u.s - which is more to the point of the question - what happens when people are oppressed, but don't think they are oppressed? I think the only way to understand why americans have been so docile while the power/wealth consolidation has taken place is to acknowledge how the psyche of americans is shaped - if such reductionism is even possible - though in a sense it doesn't matter because it's a way to talk about what I think lies at the root of the question. I know I'm covering familiar ground for the most part and have no real defense, but here is a short list.
1) Mythos. The myths of The American Dream, rugged individualism, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, the , "can-do attitude" overcoming all, etc...have been powerful in shaping the psyche of americans. Turning what might be called a positive common sense attitude into a pathology based on an hypocrisy. This is partially a legacy of the puritans who have been like a plague on this country for the most part. Also, as Morris Berman points out, from the beginning of this "grand experiment," the vitiating force of this country has been the hustle - and I don't mean the dance. A nation of hustlers...The concept is a little weak because you can say capitalism makes hustlers of us all, but there is certainly something to it and it has something to do with molding our psyches and our myths...
2) Propaganda. What became holistically known as Madison ave. Edward Louis Bernays transformed propaganda and turned it to manipulating public opinion like no other in history. The coupling of film and newspapers with the PR, advertising and marketing "industry" was incredibly effective, but the invention of television transformed the propaganda machine again into something so powerful and pervasive I still think we struggle to conceive of its effect on our psyches. There is also a cumulative effect over generations now. It is so vast and so tied-up in the systemic consolidation of power it cannot be underestimated. One example: Much of the campaign money raised is to pay for television ads. No coincidence there. It is at the nexus of propaganda.
3) The multi-generational effect. This has to be its own category. I think it amplifies the myths and propaganda. Again, so powerful it's hard to quantify. The same messages through generations makes them our history, our memories, our psyches - or at the very least our weltanschauung - and the medium of the messages, if you will, helped enlarge the "memory hole," the short attention-span, the slackened ability to think things through - or dumbing down, etc...
4) Fear and greed. From the top down, from the beginning (genocide and slavery) to now (genocide and slavery). We can quibble about whether killing hundreds of thousands of brown people all over the world is technically genocide or whether factories in China and farms here are technically slavery, but I think people will get my point.
5) Fundamentalism in all its forms. Religious, economic, etc...
Well, I could go on, but everyone on this list already knows all of this. I guess I would just say political scientists and economists miss the importance of some of the things I mentioned and all of it is part and parcel of the continuing power consolidation we are suffering under. These ideas are also tied up with issues raised by Fanon's, "Les damnes de la terre" and I would also argue some variation on the Stockholm syndrome. Our minds have been colonized and we are sympathetic to and even empathize with our rulers. We are so steeped in this psychic sludge it is sometimes difficult to wipe it off and look at it.
Ah well, I'm sure I will be accused of stating the obvious, but there it is...
Aloha,
J