Audacity of the Great Unwashed: Study of Elitism in "Democracy Inc"
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(First published on July 2008 on old Montanamaven.com site which disappeared into the night).
Stanley Kubrick’s last movie “Eyes Wide Shut” was about a young doctor who succeeds in getting invited to the ultimate party; a meeting of a secretive society of elites. Masks, feathers, naked women, and sadism. Creepy stuff. Could there be such a secret society?
We saw the secret but slightly less creepy version of a secret society in De Niro’s “The Good Shepherd” with the frivolity of a Skull and Bones party where the men retreated to back rooms to discuss how to keep America’s new Super power status going after World War II.
I’ve written a lot about Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. An equally scary book that I’ve been writing about lately is Sheldon J. Wolin’s “Democracy Inc: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. I alternate reading it with Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland”. You can imagine that I have a lot more grey hair now that I found out about what’s been going on in our so-called “land of liberty” for the last 60 years.
So as I sit on my deck overlooking the idyllic pasture where my Hereford cows are grazing with the deer and antelope playing, I plunge deeper into Wolin’s book and the hair on my arms rise as I read Chapter Nine: “Intellectual Elites Against Democracy.”
When I got to the part about the secretive followers of Leo Strauss with their secret language, I wondered...
Previously I’ve written about Wolin’s idea that the United States has embraced the system called “Superpower”. It is imperial and not national. It is militaristic and continues our manifest destiny to conquer the earth in the name of God and our goodness.
It is our new identity. It is the antithesis of democracy that is
“first and foremost about equality; equality of power and equality of sharing in the benefits and values made possible by social cooperation. Democracy is no more compatible with world domination than is 'the political,’ which is first and foremost about preserving commonality while legitimating and reconciling differences.”
Political scientists have been studying elitism for 2000 years. At first you were an elite because of your birth. Jefferson then came up with the concept of a “natural aristocracy". It was an ideal of the person who rose on merit beholden to no one.
Elitism is about how The Few are “entitled to power and reward” if they are in politics and if they are in business, they are entitled to power and wealth. Once upon a time, the two were viewed as being “at odds with each other” because political elites were supposed to be “virtuous., that is disinterested, principled, and above all, dedicated to the true interests of the society.”
At the end of the chapter a group of Sand hill Cranes appear in the distance and with their strange garbling pass directly over my head. A few minutes later, a Gulfstream jet appears from the same place that the cranes came from and loudly swoops over my head as well carrying its cargo of corporatists to a safe landing in Big Sky Country. The Few have come to play a bit in one of their many homes while the Many go about their daily chores.
I’m now joining my friend Elizabeth in being referred to as Dr. Doom. But I’m Dr. Happiness compared to Dr. Wolin. Yikes! Now he’s got me checking my phone lines and stocking up on supplies.
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I wrote 2 essays before this one that were more
fleshed out. But because I lost my website and all contents, I'm sifting through my back up files for the others. I found the 2nd one though and I'll publish that. You gotta read this chapter about secret language and other weirdness.
Dr. Doom
Yes, I've often been accused of being negative and cynical. But that's a different subject. Any time I read people who pretty much nail it, I get depressed. People like Joe Bageant (deceased, sadly), Morris Berman, Charles Derber, and Bruce Levine. There are many others pointing in the right direction, but not many people want to look. I'm looking forward to reading Wolin's book, though.
Jeremiahs, Cassandras and Debbie Downers
have a purpose in life to point out the other way, but it's often not fun. So it's good to have a site where the Debbie and Dan Doomers can party. And at last, the Occupy movement has made us look less negative and more like the satraps of sanity.
I had the privilege of interviewing Charles Derber once. And if my radio show hadn't been cancelled, he would have been a regular along with my favorite, Glen Ford, of blackagendareport. Sam Smith over at prorev.com is wonderful too.
Ha!
I never did understand why cynicism and negativity came to be synonymous. I have a book, The Making of Modern Cynicism, by David Mazella, that I start from time to time, but never finish, that allegedly tracks this change over time. It is indeed nice to be validated by the OWS movement.
I subscribe to Sam Smith's newsletter - he's great!!
DownSouth was a commentor
DownSouth was a commentor over at Naked Capitalism who used to like to quote Reinhold Niebuhr among others. I one time pointed out that elites spend a lot of their time propagandizing us, the 99%, about how necessary they are and how in fact all their privileges and positions are merited. In response, DownSouth quoted this passage from Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society:
A point I have been making more recently is one that Niebuhr does at the beginning of this quote, that is how elites justify to themselves what they are doing and that is by replacing our good with their good. Empire is an elite construction and an elite good. It is not ours and diminishes us, but wars, a bloated military, bailouts for the rich, their tax cuts work for them just fine. And if it is fine for them, they consider it fine, by definition, for the rest of us.
Obama and Niebuhr
Isn't Niebuhr Obama's favorite philosopher? Too bad someone couldn't engrave this quote on a permanent plaque that could be posted near the front door of Obama's retreat on Martha's Vineyard.
Well, Obama likes to think of
Well, Obama likes to think of himself as a Constitutional scholar too. The invocation of Niebuhr is just to establish some more intellectual cred and is to be taken about as seriously. I think Niebuhr is dead on here but the criticism of him is that he came to be co-opted by the powers that be and pulled his punches in areas like just war.
Seems to me that Obama filled out a form
From his advisors I.e. favorite book, movie, philosopher, . And even david brooks likes Niebuhr, doesn't he? For the reasons you mention. Also Obama is not a constitutional scholar. He got a gig as an instructor teaching a class because he had "Harvard Law Review" on his resume. A " scholar " publishes original ideas. I have never heard anything original from him, have you? Honestly. I'm not being snarky.
Constitutional Scholar?
I did a little bit of research on the question of whether Obama was a Constitutional scholar but was unable to find much. He taught classes at the University of Chicago that apparently required students to debate points and use the Constitution as a justification for their arguments, but I could find no evidence that he was a Constitutional scholar. I've never seen any peer-reviewed articles in academic journals by him, have you? Isn't that pretty much the definition of a scholar - one who publishes in peer-reviewed journals? No, Obama was at the University of Chicago, home to Milton Friedman and devotees of Leo Strauss. Maybe that Constitutional scholar meme got started because people were so impressed with his silver tongued rhetoric. If he spoke so well and was obviously so well educated, then he must be a scholar, no?
If he's any kind of a scholar, he is a not-so-secret follower of Justice (?) Roberts' school of thought on Constitutional issues.
Jeez were we ever duped!!
"Frontier" is the nicer word for "empire"
says Wolin. I address this in the next essay.
I also think that the political elite are mostly a certain psychological type. What in the Myers/Briggs Jungian world are STJs. They are managers and guardians of the status quo. They are the majority in psychological type. They are not architects or engineers. Those are the NTs, intuitive thinkers, who are a tiny fraction of the population. But that's another essay.