Episode Transcript
It is Nineteen Seventy-Five, fifty years ago today, and an austere white man, tall, angular, with the sense of authority that only an Ivy League academic of his ethnic background is able to have, is going to put forward a premise that is a paradox but should also be an anomaly in a nation that claims all its foundations rest on the notion of democracy.
This should bring opprobrium on him but because of the fact that he is not only white but part of the American elite, whose interests this thesis will promote, he is going to be lauded and what he says will become central to creating the highly dystopian, dysfunctional, authoritarian, elite controlled America, and Europe, we are in today.
His name is Samuel Huntington (a Harvard political scientist) and through the cold of winter and the heat of summer, he has been putting the final touches to the report of The Trilateral Commission entitled, Crisis of Democracy.
This so-called Crisis of Democracy is not the result of democracy failing but counter-intuitively he will argue that the 1960s and early 1970s has seen an overload of democratic participation, leading to governmental inefficiency and instability.
He will suggest that the surge in social movements, civil rights activism, anti-war protests, and demands for greater equality have created too much pressure on democratic institutions, making governance difficult.
In the process he will coin a phrase that will be seized upon by those whom it suits to encapsulate this. He will call it "an excess of democracy,” but cleverly without answering the accompanying question that must be central to all democratic governance – what is the role of government if it is not to look after its people and be answerable to them?
A paradox of capitalism, especially how it works both in practice and rewards, is that it is the antithesis of democracy.
Therefore, in America, where capitalism parades in its most naked form, it has always had a strained relationship with democracy both in terms of what it actually means and how it is practiced in reality.
Understandably, one of the fundamental fears the elite in America have always had, as revealed by the Founding Fathers and those who were against FDR, is loss of control of the system that gives them power and wealth.
The shills of the wealthy like Citibank, but not only it, reveal this.
They have at various times defined this danger as 'Excess Democracy' or 'The Crisis of Democracy' meaning too many people in a democracy being able to agitate the system for their own well-being rather than allow them to do so, which is as Kafkaesque as you can get.
No time in the last hundred years was democracy seen as a greater, concerted threat by the elite than from the Nineteen-Fifties to Nineteen-Eighty because it was coming from the people.
It was generational.
Reasons were simple.
Corporate America needed a well-paid American workforce in the late-Forties and Fifties to create a strong internal consumer market when the economies of Europe were still rising from the ashes of the Second World War.
Henry Ford had recognised the importance of this much earlier so that his workers could buy the cars they were making.
The political elite also needed to ensure the population stayed onside because it saw the American system was working for them in the face of the challenge of the Soviet Union.
This combined with the war bonus of cheap mortgages GIs received on return as part of the GI Bill in 1944 which also provided funds for college education, housing, and unemployment insurance was enough for people to buy into it.
Black GIs - effectively excluded - paid more for their loans and mortgages for worse housing.
However, the rise in living standards amongst the populace had unforeseen political and social consequences the elite had not anticipated.
They had expected a more docile, more grateful population would come into being.
However, because they only think in terms of material gains and do not understand, or care, about peoples’ deeper needs, they were mistaken.
A people, then their children, with a good job, a home to call their own, material comforts, security and freed to think beyond daily survival naturally become stakeholders in a society, its active citizens, and want a greater say in how it works.
Terrified, corporate America, the finance sector that powers it, and the political elite who act on their behalf, realised that on top of FDR's actions, the changes the Second World War had brought meant they had lost the national narrative they had previously completely controlled, of what the country was and how it should work, since the country's inception generally, and after the Civil War specifically.
As is the American cycle, they begin a co-ordinated campaign to reverse the emerging one, cut down opportunities for thinking independently, and go back to the one they had controlled previously where their interests were paramount and unquestioned.
The impact is all around us today where we live in a world of creaking but rigid systems, rules in all aspects of public life that narrow our interactions to preestablished frameworks, limit our human empathy, innovation, and are in place to ensure the same outcomes every time.
Thus, people were first reduced from citizens to consumers, and have now been diminished to algorithms.
Those with power, defined conveniently as the Right and Left although power knows no boundaries, love the limits they can place on us, and find support in, which argues that it's a human mindset that we all lean towards in search for security.
In turn, this allows the power elites to utilise it for their own benefit regardless of their socially defined political perspective.
How did they do this?
First, the American elite had to re-present and re-establish their narrative.
They found the 'predictive programming' they wanted by promoting the elite propaganda of pseudo-philosophers with half-baked theories like Ayn Rand, and economists like Milton Friedman, who propounded warped, anti-human thinking which placed selfish, self-interest at centre because they understood the easy appeal of their ideas to the always greedy, but not what it takes to make a good citizen, a civic society and the importance of shared, common good on a finite planet.
Friedman was given the Nobel Prize in 1976 for his economic theories which promoted 'maximisation of profit' and the total neglect of 'public interests,' that is, the workers, local communities, broader society, the country, or the planet, which highlights how elite prizes are used to reinforce and support the existing, elite political and economic mindset, and have nothing to do with the betterment of humanity as a whole which they claim to stand for.
Yes, you're right, Chile under the murderous rule of General Pinochet, would be his intellectually deficient, economic baby.
The American elite do not need or want a true freethinker philosopher.
They always want a mouthpiece, a role Rand played admiringly well.
Rand's most famous book, Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, depicts a dystopian United States in which private businesses suffer under increasingly burdensome laws and regulations. In addition, railroad executive Dagny Taggart and her lover, steel magnate Hank Rearden, battle against the ordinary people who want to steal the fruits of their work.
Ayn Rand's Atlas analogy, specifically referenced in the book, is that the industrialists and geniuses of the material world, a singular group which her readers and followers generally assume themselves to be part of, essentially carry the entire planet on their backs by their brilliance and efforts.
The political message is that they, the movers and shakers, are hemmed in, imprisoned, both legally by an unsupportive government and physically by the 'little people.'
They need to break free from all that is holding them back.
Atlas, a Titan in Greek mythology, is a curious choice as an example to be admired both as an individual and a representative of his species.
Titans were a race of giants, feasted on human flesh and wanted to destroy the world which makes Atlas horribly humorous, or unintentionally appropriate, poster-boy of this economic and social outlook.
However, Atlas is also the ultimate loser who after being defeated was punished by Zeus to bear the entire world on his shoulders, meaning he would forever maintain the very order that he had tried to overthrow.
Never mind that the analogy used by Rand is based on a misunderstanding of the Atlas myth, the fact that both the Atlas myth and Rand's book is fiction says everything.
Human history argues the reverse of what she is writing is true.
Guess how many people have read this trash and compare it to The Lord of the Rings where self-sacrifice and unity is held up as the greatest virtues for a better world, to get a better understanding of how people want the world they live in to be.
Their support of her false narrative also argues that the American elite narrative of America, the country and their actions, is the exact opposite of the reality.
More pertinently, what America is today is even more revealing.
American history, as that is what we are discussing here, has more real examples of great wealth being made on the broken backs of the masses, left alone to carry the cost of this success like a billion damaged, human Atlases if you want to use the analogy: native indigenous people, slaves, indentured servants, chain gang labourers, prison slaves, ordinary workers forced back to work at gun point, young women dying, unable to breathe, after having their lungs destroyed in the cotton factories of Nineteenth Century New England, same with the Appalachia miners in the Twentieth Century, all the too many millions today whose wages are not enough to put a roof over their heads while the corporations that employ them, and their owners, are valued at billions of dollars.
Rand, who was Russian by birth, and therefore, a very useful tool in the propaganda war of systems against the Soviet-Union, appeals to the American elite because she reinforces the notion of 'American Exceptionalism' and is an apologist for giving the wealthy a free pass, both foundational pillars.
She is also valuable for reiterating the ancient myth of the great man/woman, one of the elite, moving the world forward almost single-handedly that plays into the American mindset of unrestrained individualism.
Even that most mythologised of Western icons, Alexander the Great, realised that he was nothing without the foot soldiers who made his dreams possible.
Their refusal to go on after reaching Northern India meant he could not either. It was their collective, shared vision that brought the success and rewards.
The loss of this unity combined with his death meant the collapse of what had been achieved as everyone scrambled for their own individual self-interest.
Yet the point being missed by both perspectives is perhaps the most relevant.
While it is inarguable that Alexander was a military genius, it is also true that his ambitions were ended by his own soldiers.
He was their leader but as free men they felt they had an equal voice in the enterprise.
Exercising this free voice changed its destiny.
This is the hidden lesson that all elites, of all persuasions, including the Founding Fathers who knew their classic history; they admired Greece for its culture but adored Rome for its military might and extractive empire building, learned.
Too much freedom and equality is dangerous for them.
While you must pay lip service to the concept of free speech and equality to make people feel they have a voice in what happens, you must do everything to ensure that it does not equate to an ability to fundamentally affect the existing structures, and the levers of dominance that you control.
Those on which your power and wealth rests.
It is equally applicable in big business as in politics.
Say the right things in public, drown the voices of truth and dissent, and regardless keep doing what is making you rich, best illustrated by tobacco, pharmaceutical, fossil fuel and tech companies, but it is true for all major businesses.
Two sides of the same human coin.
However, they miss the main point about true leadership.
Alexander's soldiers never lost their love for him because they saw him as one of them. Not cut away. Not separate. He was first in battle. He suffered the same hardships as they did. While making the disastrous crossing of the Gedrosia desert, in what is now the Baluchistan region of Pakistan, the story says he refused water until all his men could also drink.
There was no elevator reserved exclusively for him.
What set him apart was not his position, but his personality, which ironically, chimed with that of his army.
Not so, our ruling class in America, and Europe.
They think they are different from us, better than us for no other reason that they think so and control the narrative to ensure the loudest paid voices claim they are. Now you get the picture of how even the concept of 'Excess Democracy' can even exist.
Potentially the biggest and most existential danger to the ruling elite came in the Sixties and was not the result of one individual president seeking to do the right thing but was part of a wider, generational drive for more democracy,
African Americans were given the vote in 1965, social and economic change with the anti-Vietnam War and Civil Rights protests at their heart.
If it, dubbed 'Excess Democracy" by those who felt they owned the rights to democracy because they had bought it, had been implemented and given people what they were asking for, American neoliberalism would be a footnote in history and Americanism come to represent something different today.
It is no coincidence that all four charismatic figures who symbolised change and were seen as challenging the status quo, two white and two black, John F Kennedy (JFK, an outsider, the first Catholic president in American history so also a symbolic departure from the norm and no supporter of the CIA after the Bay of Pigs debacle), Robert Kennedy (JFK's brother and the potential president in race against Richard Nixon, the candidate of the regressive elite who had unexpectedly lost a close election to JFK in 1960), Martin Luther King Jr (the first, global voice for rights of black people) and Malcolm X (an uncompromising, political activist able to reach the young of all ages and ethnicities), were assassinated.
Their deaths fulfilled a dual function.
While they could continue to be presented as reflecting American free speech and ideals, the Kennedy 'Camelot' myth being a prime example, their untimely deaths removed the imminent threat that they represented.
More importantly, their deaths, combined with unrest on the streets created a heightened sense of societal breakdown that ensured the pendulum swung back to the past with a frightened white populace backing Nixon's election in 1968.
Symbolically, its cultural impact became clear with the racist murder of an African American man, Meredith Hunter, at The Rolling Stones concert in Altamont a year later.
Hunter happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, something that has been the African American experience in America; being African American in a vehemently white, lawless, controlled environment, with music that had come out of that singular experience providing the soundtrack.
The further irony that he was killed by Hells Angels, the contradiction is in their name, a group who claim to live outside the societal framework but whose attitudes are inherently regressive, in favour of the status quo and thus the existing power frameworks including White Supremacy, marshalling a music event that exemplified the thirst for a different world, could hardly have been greater, and of course, no one was ever found guilty of his murder.
The Rolling Stones who had never seen or acknowledged a colour bar in their work or personal lives had become unwitting hostages in the ongoing war for the future of America that was taking place, forever associated with an event infamous in American history.
The promise of popular music as a force for societal change that many had believed in had been ended at Altamont, a little over a decade after it had begun.
It would largely go back to regulated vaudeville as we can see and hear today.
The killing of four, white, unarmed students, Allison Krause, 19, Sandy Lee Scheuer, 20, Jeffrey G. Miller, 20, and William K. Schroeder, 19, at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guard the following year was the final ending of the youthful, intellectual challenge to the elite state.
Their silencing was in line with the course begun by Senator Joseph McCarthy to stifle alternative voices. While his ugly, open methods had been side lined a decade previously because they ran counter to the given national narrative, the process had continued and now reached its conclusion.
It was the final nail in the coffin of any prospect of meaningful change and ushered in a darker period in American history after a brief period of gradual, civic brightening.
Forty years later, a study by Professors Martin Gilens (Princeton University) and Benjamin I. Page (Northwestern University) looked at more than 20 years’ worth of data to answer a simple question: Does the government represent the people?
Their study took data from nearly 2000 public opinion surveys and compared it to the policies that ended up becoming law. In other words, they compared what the public wanted to what the government actually did. What they found was extremely unsettling: The opinions of 90% of Americans have essentially no impact at all, and over 95% of legislation does not reflect their concerns or wishes but rather that of corporations, economic interest groups or wealthy donors.
So, America, like Rome, is merely a rapacious empire with an oligarchy, and a huge majority of its people both economically and politically excluded, on the fringes.
With one instructive difference.
In Rome, they at least provided bread and circus for the masses. In America, there is distracting circus for the masses but the bread is for the elites alone.
By design.
Any kind of real representative democracy would not allow such an political and economic system to exist.
That is why they cannot allow anyone to challenge the current system. As its foundations are false and illusory, its continued existence rests of perpetuating myths of what it is, and gaslighting the people.
