By Michael Hoexter, Ph.D.
While describing the machinations of the Democratic Party
Establishment creates an repellent vision of political scheming and ethical
compromise, today’s Republican Party is a few qualitative steps more repellent,
more reactionary, and at the same time simpler to describe. To compare and create a realistic vision of
the current American political landscape, one has to be able to conceive of
both “bad” and “worse”, i.e. degrees of moral compromise and turpitude in
political (and social-economic) life.
With the re-mobilization of the anti-New Deal, anti-civil
rights, anti-Communist Far Right following its crushing electoral defeat in the
1964 Republican Presidential Election (the aftermath of the Goldwater campaign)
and the emergence of the New Right in the 1970’s, the Republican Party has been
over a period of decades fully transformed into a party of open reactionaries
and racists, determined to defend a couple centuries of sometimes ill-gotten
gains and privilege of wealthy white European-origin people on the North
American continent, with a massive propaganda campaign and gun-enabled domestic
terrorism.
The initial impetus for the growth of the New Right was as a
reaction to the social and political changes that we associate with the social
and cultural movements, most importantly the civil rights movement, and
legislative changes of the 1960’s and early 1970’s. While the base of the current right-wing was
initial divided politically between Dixiecrat Democrats and business and
money-oriented Republicans, largely racist, reactionary forces shifted their
political allegiance in 1980’s and 1990’s almost completely over to the
Republican Party, eventually sidelining the more staid Republican
Establishment, including what were called “moderate” or even “liberal”
Republicans. Now, led by Trump, the
Republican Party is evolving into a somewhat disorganized neo-fascist white supremacist
party, tending in terms of tactics to rely on stochastic
terrorism to immobilize opposition, intent on grabbing all the political
power it can, often in violation of the Constitution. Despite its tendency towards sociopathic,
every-man-for-himself disorganization and stochastic methods of fighting for
political, quasi-military goals, it unfortunately has to date been far more
goal-oriented and well-organized than its Democratic opposition.
The GOP and its affiliated think-tanks, donor networks, and
supporting media sources via a range of long-term strategies are driving
towards a form of top-down hegemony over American society that may usurp much
of American democracy for the benefit of plutocrats and large corporations, ostensibly
in the name of a left-behind, older middle- and working-class suburban/rural,
land-locked and Sunbelt white minority. Funded
and sometimes led by deep-pocketed patrons, the right-wing has taken over large
parts of legal academia and the judiciary, with no counter-hegemonic left
forces of any description offering much resistance. The complete adoption of a neoliberal,
market-oriented, individualistic, and meritocratic vision on the side of the
Democrats and a refusal to embrace a solidaristic approach to politics and as a
fundamental worldview has led Democrats to meekly accept the Republicans’
viewpoint on many issues of law and of economics.
The Democratic Party, as described in the first portion of
this essay, has a diffuse, disorganized ideology and is, with its current
leadership, seemingly slated or slates itself as a subsidiary or perennial
loser Party to the Republicans, even as the Republicans seem to sink lower and
lower in both general moral terms and in what they could, in terms of policy,
offer the broad middle of American society.
The Democratic Party elite actively undermines the formation of
ideological coherence and unity in its own Party, smothering its electoral
chances and policy initiatives internally.
Both parties with a few exceptional policymakers mostly on the
Democratic side and perhaps one or two on the Republican side, are complicit in
the slide of American institutions towards oligarchy and fascism, though the
GOP has been leading the charge.
Core Right-Wing/Republican Ideologies
There are at least four main ideological streams that have formed the Republican Party’s current ideology, which to varying degrees are either the passionate core beliefs or, in some individuals, feigned Trojan-Horse beliefs of a sociopathic, Machiavellian leadership. Trump is clearly the (current) exemplar of the sociopathy in political leadership: a life-long grifter, extreme narcissist, and bully who manipulates existing Republican belief systems for his own and his patrons’ benefit without much in the way of fixed beliefs in the intellectual content of those ideologies. Showing both signs of current senile dementia and lifelong intellectual limitedness, Trump nevertheless currently leads the Party via acting out and sometimes pandering to these ideological streams:
- Christian Evangelical Fundamentalism/Dominionism/Social Conservativism – This is probably the main binding ideology of a core cadre of the Republican Party and one of the most frightening. A large group of US evangelicals have become a loose-knit millenarian cult with dangerous beliefs about spurring “end times” scenarios via a blundering, pro-Israeli-militarist US foreign policy in the Middle East. Some evangelicals believe in preparing for the Second Coming and the Rapture, thereby derealizing the world, while others are “dominionists” that believe that they must take over the US government and turn it into a theocratic regime (these are two contradictory theologies) contrary to the US Constitution and republican order, that mandates separation of church and state. The strongest and largest base of the current Republican Party are white evangelical voters, though some of the evangelical base may eventually defect from the fanatical leadership, due in part to the real domestic devastations of climate change. Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo, among others, appear to be ensconced in evangelical thinking. The Trump Administration also has a strong alliance with a number of “prosperity gospel” preachers, who operate their churches like scam self-enrichment operations for themselves, with almost no connection in content to the historical teachings associated with the ancient Israelite preacher, Jesus Christ.
- Libertarianism/Market Fundamentalism/Small Government “Conservatism” – Attracting the more secular, business-oriented Republicans and right-wingers, libertarian/market-fetishizing beliefs have been promoted and sustained by wide circles of mainstream, sometimes politically liberal, academics and pundits, many of whom are funded by centimillionaire and billionaire donors. The dominant neoliberal ideology, shared by the current center-left and right wing, is of a piece with this strain of Republican ideology and is the bridgehead by which the secular center right and nominal neoliberal “left” do the bidding of the donor class. The high-flown abstract ideas propounded by some of the supposedly clever or deep-thinking intellectuals in this stream of discourse can be often boiled down to propertarianism, or defense of private property, and individual and corporate acquisitiveness to the point of hoarding the property and monetary gains of historical positions of privilege or lucky windfalls. The primary policy focus of this stream are tax cuts for the rich and corporations and pro-corporate anti-regulatory actions, reframed more recently, in the words of Steve Bannon as “Deconstruction of the Administrative State”.
- White Supremacism/Neo-Confederate Ideology/Racism/Xenophobia – The Republican Party now represents a core group of resentful white people from either the post-Confederate South or other parts of the country that want to re-establish or reinforce racial hierarchies and expel, continue to lord it over, segregate or commit genocide upon different “Others” including new immigrants. Some of the more extreme and passionate among these groups are now essentially neo-Nazis and some of these neo-Nazis in the form of deranged fanatics have turned to terrorism with the sanction of pro-gun elites and firearm manufacturers.
- Authoritarianism/Sadism/”Law of the Jungle”/Gun-Fetishism/Militarism – Not distinct from the above tendencies, Republicans have a belief in “law and order” where this means not consistent adherence to legal codes and due process but the imposition of “law of the jungle” by brute force or intimidation in which Republicans and their already privileged constitutency maintain privileges and privileged access to valuable property. There is a belief in the military as a “disciplining” instance upon new recruits, via exertion of brute force or threat of force against foreign enemies or against domestic unrest in situations of civil breakdown. Deep in this ideological stream is the (sadistic/masochistic) idea that inflicted and inflicting pain always have a salutary effect and furthermore can be enjoyed as a spectacle. Bullies, as has been the case with Trump, and other public sadists thus become heroes to authoritarians. An underlying belief system to authoritarianism is as follows:
- Nietzchean Belief In Übermenschen (super-people) – Underlying the authoritarian mind is an unconscious or semi-conscious belief in super-people, the idea that there is a class of people that are saviors or redeemers by reason of having enormous powers beyond typical human beings. Authoritarian followers endow the often-sociopathic leaders of their cults with these powers, explaining in part the multiple blindnesses of the followers for Trump’s legion of personal flaws and lack of values that contradict the values of some of his base.
- Gun-Enabled “Superpowers” – Trump (and before Trump other figures) is, in fantasy, also endowed by the authoritarian followers with these superpowers, sometimes shown in Photoshopped iconography as having an extraordinarily muscular physique or carrying weapons. In the United States, this fantasy is sometimes enacted in reality with often deadly consequences as being heavily armed with semi-automatic or automatic weapons, which, in this death-focused cosmology, is a more “democratic” way to become a “super-person”. This form of belief structure is not exclusive to the far right wing but it is more widespread there. The belief in Übermenschen “justifies” in the mind of authoritarians the human and environmental destruction and wastage that are encouraged by the right-wing; the imagined or real destruction (via running amok with guns) might be viewed as, in adult infantile thinking, “evidence” of the power and superiority of the super-people and those who worship them/follow them.
Passionate belief in any one of or a combination of these four sets of right-wing ideologies becomes the motivational core for activists and political leaders on the Right. Alternatively, and this is an important distinction, sociopathic individuals aspiring to leadership use others’ passionate beliefs in these to advance their own interests in wealth and power. In the latter category, the social psychologist Robert Altemeyer, has found that right-wing leaders tend towards sociopathy, so therefore do not often believe in the ideals of the movement but manipulate others who believe in them while they themselves simulate personal belief in their appearances and staged events. The internal tendencies towards corruption and perversions of their professed morality by right-wing leaders continue to support Altemeyer’s thesis that they are generally sociopaths or near-sociopaths, intent on grifting as well as seeking political power. Machiavellianism and sociopathy are related to each other, in that the former can be a controlled and coldly manipulative subgroup of the latter. The odd attachment of right-wing followers to their sociopathic and often-duplicitous leaders may lie in the followers’ needs to construct out of social reality and misperceive their leaders as Übermenschen a need apparently driven by perhaps their propensity to use their leaders as anxiety-relieving fetish objects in their internal psychologies. The lying, law-breaking leaders assert to their (timid, conventional) followers that they are “larger than life” by breaking laws and disregarding annoying social rules about truth-telling.
Dyed-in-the-Wool Machiavellians
The word “Machiavellian” might as well have been formulated
to describe both the operatives of the New Right that emerged in the 1970’s and
increasingly for the entire leadership of the current Republican Party. Machiavellianism
is a term from social, clinical and political psychology that describes a
cold, calculating mindset that pursues narrow individual self-interest, often
in violation of moral precepts. What
unites the current somewhat diverse group of individual Machiavellians is an
overwhelming sense of entitlement to power without regard for legal and
institutional structures, seeing those structures as merely tools to, on
occasion, use to accumulate more power for the already wealthy and
powerful. A preponderance of
Machiavellian people and political actions is antithetical to the continued functioning
of democratic republicanism, as all important decisions are made and actions
are taken outside the realm of public scrutiny and possible public control and
moves are made in public view that push more and more important decisions into
private control, usually of the wealthy and private corporations. These Machiavellians see themselves, as Corey
Robin describes
reactionary political thinkers since the French Revolution, as protectors
of and advocates for a “better sort of people” who are entitled to regain past
privileges lost, often via bloody conflict and suppression of the ‘lower orders’.
The modern Republican pursuit of political power by all and
often innovative means available can be traced at least back to Richard Viguerie’s use of
direct mail in the 1960’s and 1970’s to mobilize and fundraise off as a
starting kernel the group of reactionaries that donated to Barry Goldwater’s
1964 Presidential campaign. Charles Koch
has been a key mastermind in engineering the evolution of the Republican Party
into a ruthless far-right anti-regulatory, climate-denying party. Newt Gingrich
is another key Machiavellian in the evolution of the Republican Party,
contributing almost single-handedly to the destruction of bipartisan comity and
consensus building.
What marks Viguerie, Koch, Gingrich and other activists is a
commitment to an extreme anti-Communism and right-wing ideology, including to
Christian evangelical ideas while at the same time being open to experiment
with new technologies of communication, more open than their Democratic
opponents, to further mobilize donors and voters as well as to demobilize by
any means necessary perceived enemies or obstacles to their path to power.
Before Viguerie, born-multimillionaire, now fossil-fuel-multi-billionaire
Charles Koch had already
started a longer-term campaign to transform American political economy and
educational system in order to make it a weapon to fight liberal reformers of
the New Deal and the Great Society eras and thereafter. Koch drew inspiration from older
reactionaries from a melange of pro-fascist, anti-New Deal operatives that
gravitated to the Republican Party and rightward during the 1930’s. Koch’s father, Fred Koch, a virulent anti-Communist
(after profiting handsomely off Stalin’s oil industry) and an early key backer
of the paranoid anti-Communist John Birch Society, was also a strong political influence
on the younger Koch. Charles
Koch was also an early Birch Society member. Charles Koch founded among other institutions,
the Cato Institute, a key libertarian thinktank that is still viewed by some as
non-partisan.
Charles Koch was and is both a patron and canny mastermind
of meta-political strategy, understanding as did the Italian Marxist, Antonio
Gramsci, a fighter and intellectual for a very-much-opposed cause, that durable
political power can be best achieved by achieving what Gramsci
called “hegemony”, the creation of a widely-diffused cultural-political
“common sense” within which political actors will more easily slide into
positions of influence and power, and therefore more easily defeat opponents. Gramsci also made the critical distinction
between a “war of position” and a “war of movement”, the former being more of
what Koch has specialized in. Rather
than baldly state his political program and ideology and organize around it,
Koch used his eventual multi-billionaire fossil fuel wealth to create
frameworks of academic and political discourse (a “war of position”) where
politicians could refer to his extreme and unrealistic “libertarian” ideology
as fact rather than as a contentious philosophical, political and ethical
proposition. Koch’s hegemony-seeking
approach was reinforced by his now recently-deceased brother David’s decisive
defeat as a Libertarian Party Presidential candidate in 1980. Koch was thus confirmed in his belief (and
his already existing patronage of intellectual work of right-wing economists
like Friedrich Hayek and James
Buchanan) that his ideology would need to be introduced in stages to the
public through a longer-term strategy of patronage and positioning. Framed in this essay in Gramscian terms, Koch
had formed a hegemonic (though anti-scientific) framework of belief, from which
to infect a diversity of younger or unknowing minds.
Through the next three decades, Koch quietly built an intellectual and political machine
that until the arrival of Trumpists, had developed an almost complete hegemony
over the agenda of the Republican Party as regards fiscal and regulatory policy,
with further reach outside the Republican Party into the now-bipartisan
neoliberal ideology.
Koch, a fossil fuel multi-billionaire, one of the world’s
richest men, has also been a major funder of climate denial/confusion, seeing
his own pecuniary interests as somehow a firm basis for rejecting climate
science, as supported by the fanciful neoliberal/libertarian economic
pseudo-science he has helped engineer.
Like most climate deniers, Koch perceives his own non-scientific
economic philosophical views to be more important and fundamental than natural
science data indicating a warming and destabilized climate due to carbon
emissions. Koch has recently made sounds
that he is reconsidering his climate denial but only after having done massive
damage to the world’s ability to respond effectively to the climate
challenge. Via a wide network of funding
sources and political action groups, Koch has been able to exert massive
influence over who gets elected in Republican-controlled areas of the country
as well as exerting influence over “purple” areas and donating
to (center-right, corruptible) Democrats as well .
While Koch is (or has been, if he in old age is experiencing
some second thoughts) a malignant, highly destructive mastermind and works
mostly behind the scenes, he and others have recruited an army of Machiavellian
Republican politicians who have few scruples in pursuing power by biasing the
political game in their favor.
Gerrymandering and voter suppression are considered to be
“commonsensical” and “legitimate” tools by these GOP operatives in pursuit of
the twin goals of winning power and weakening their opposition, the Democratic
Party.
The public sphere and media are so compromised by a
neoliberal morality (that the pursuit of individual self-interest has priority
over group, national or universal human self-interest) and advertiser dollars, that
these efforts to bias the political game in favor of one party tend to be
treated as “natural” and even laudable, rather than criminal vote-stealing and
undermining of American democracy. The
bias in media treatments is to not “rock the boat” or even stand back in awe, as
the Republican Party steamrolls common morality and democratic norms. Neoliberalism
has been until very recently completely hegemonic, a bedrock of the “common
sense” of our age. Those few reporters or opposition politicians standing up
for common morality, or trying to expose scandals based on violation of laws
and rule breaking, go against the hidden
Nietzschean current in the background assumptions of neoliberalism and, as
mentioned above, in the authoritarian mind, that the wealthy and powerful are Übermenschen
and are above the law.
Largely independent of Koch, another highly influential
Machiavellian in the GOP is Newt Gingrich, who pioneered
many of the hardball tactics that Republican legislators now use to stall
the Democrats, pre-emptively attack, and counter-attack against a Democratic
opposition that has little taste or apparently interest in aggressive
tactics. Gingrich helped create a GOP
that wasn’t afraid to be nasty, while the Democrats have continued to pine for
the old days of comity among political elites and bipartisan courtesies. In tune with the neoliberal era that was
founded on individual self-interest, Gingrich instilled narrow self-interest as
a norm within Republican politics, driving out eventually the moderate wing of
the Republican Party.
Gingrich’s tenure in the House and influence over younger
generations of right-wing legislators has been one of the primary influences,
along with masses of donor money over the current political configuration in
the US Capitol building and in other political arenas: Republicans ruthlessly
pursue their self-interests while Democrats style themselves, to a largely
indifferent public, as the defenders of political comity between parties and of
now bygone legislative norms. The
Democrats nine times out of ten end up bowing to the Republicans, filled with
“passionate intensity” in pursuit of their and their donors’s money-greed and
power-greed.
Mitch McConnell openly parades a Machiavellian approach to
politics,
stymying Barack Obama’s efforts to appoint a Supreme Court judge and advertising
to the public his categorical opposition to doing anything to help pass
legislation that does not meet his own and the right-wing GOP’s narrow interests. While McConnell is prone to hide his
manipulativeness behind a few pieties, his obvious glee in exerting power for
very narrow and short-sighted self-interest and donor-class-interests speak to
his motivations and lack of compunction in abandoning duty to broad national
interests in favor of the interests of the rich and donors.
A more recently-emerged set of Machiavellians are the
“alt-right” leaders and activists who are in essence neo-fascists for a
media-soaked age. Figures before them
like Gingrich have so normalized narrow self-interest and defiance of
conventional morality (for instance, reciprocity) that the alt-right has made
almost no effort to hide their self-interested manipulation of information and
of others to gain political power. Steve
Bannon is probably the most famous and still an influential alt-right figure,
who talks openly of a neo-fascist world order that fights the encroachment of
Islamic and other non-white European cultural-political groups. Bannon seems to be both convinced of his own
beliefs and mission while at the same time willing to engage in almost any
tactics to achieve power and political ends.
Bannon’s political fall from grace, at least as regards the Trump
Administration, seems to have come from him taking his ideology too seriously
in an Administration that is mostly empty of deep commitment to any one set of
beliefs, other than using varying admixtures of the four streams of Republican
ideology as tools to gain power and money.
Rampant Sociopathy and a Gangster Society
As Altemeyer found, right-wing leaders tend to have strong
sociopathic tendencies. Sociopathy or as
it is called in the psychiatric profession’s diagnostic manual, Antisocial
Personality Disorder, is a severe character disorder where a person has
little or no empathy with others, lies without compunction, and often acts
aggressively towards others in pursuit of their own narrow self-interest. Typical sociopaths are somewhat impulsive but
there is a subset that is cool and manipulative, characteristics that are
captured by the concept of Machiavellianism.
These sociopaths who are also cool and manipulative are sometimes called
psychopaths, a subset of sociopaths that have no conscience or remorse
(non-psychopathic sociopaths have a weak conscience that doesn’t stop their
often-impulsive law-breaking behavior).
Some psychologists attempt to describe evil in people via
the “dark tetrad” which is the intersection of sociopathy, sadism,
Machiavellianism, and pathological narcissism, sometimes called together
shorthand as “malignant narcissism”. A disordered
narcissism is at the core of all of these phenomena, in that to pursue any of the
four legs of the tetrad assumes an overvaluation of the self, a lack of empathy
with others, a low or purely instrumental value placed on the idea of a common
humanity and no internalized conception of a common public interest.
Some sociopaths are street criminals, while some are con-men
and -women from wide variety of social backgrounds who manipulate others via
verbal and other tactics to get what they want.
It can be argued that capitalism, especially loosely regulated
capitalism, tends to reward sociopaths, especially from privileged or elite
backgrounds, who can be found in many boardrooms and trading floors of stock
exchanges, succeeding often by “making out for themselves,” bullying weaker or
less fortunate others, and incidentally benefiting the gang-like corporations that
are sometimes built around their self-seeking and victimization of the
vulnerable. There are sociopaths at all
levels of society but working class and poor sociopaths are often the ones who
make up a substantial portion of prisoners in jails around the country. Privileged and wealthy sociopaths most often avoid
punishment if they have committed punishable crimes.
While sociopathy is a diagnosis for individuals and
describes an individual difference that
is thought to exist in all societies, an emergent
property of groups of sociopaths together is gangsterism, most recently
historically dramatized by Mafia culture or the culture of street gangs. Gangsters, of course, are organized groups of
human predators that prey on the society at large; they form criminal
syndicates of varying sizes and complexities.
Elaborate internal bonding rituals may be formed which emphasize a
hierarchy of gangsters and loyalty to the criminal group above all else, defining
themselves against “straight” society as a whole, as well as against established
morality and law. The gangster group
forms its own morality that is obeyed internally until broken by sometimes
bloody or cruel acts vis-à-vis other members of the gang; the “bonds” formed
between sociopaths are always fragile as self-interest and impulse can easily
take over. Gangsters’ and sociopaths’ tendency
towards authoritarian leadership structures is enacted, often on a symbolic but
sometimes on a real level, in terms of bloody example-making of those who have
dared to challenge leaders b . Coating that display of force and power are
professions of “love”, sometimes felt as profoundly as these gangmembers can
muster, tinged of course with fear.
There is much fascination in the “straight” world with
gangster culture, which has become a staple of film and television drama, due
in part to the pyrotechnics and action-orientation of their form of
relationships with each other, as well as a general interest that
culture-consumers have in cathartic release of their own aggressive impulses by
vicarious viewing of aggressive acts in film/on video. Despite the dramatic attractions of depicting
gangster culture in the arts, it is no laughing or entertaining matter when
gangsterism is widespread as a reality in society or, even worse, gangsters
take over parts of or the entire state apparatus.
While not caused by the ascension of Trump, who is both a
symptom and now a malignant cause, the Trump-led Republican Party is becoming an
openly gangster party and is in the process of transforming the U.S. federal
government of which it runs two-and-a-half of the three branches, a deformed,
ultra-corrupt gangster-led institution. Trump
has made rhetorical and policy-oriented calls upon the gangster-like elements
within the law-enforcement and military Establishments to reinforce their
penchant for brutality and lawlessness, that were once mostly confined to
imperialist war-making and subversion abroad.
The emergent fascistic gangster-state, unfortunately, also holds the
power of life and death over billions of people via its nuclear weapons
stockpile and its encouragement of the mining of fossil fuels and other
resources and the emitting more of the already massive amounts of heat-trapping
greenhouse gases our society emits.
Differing Political Views of Sociopathy, Social Evil
Politics between the gangster right-wing and the weak
Democratic opposition can also be couched in terms of their differing theories
about where sociopathy and social “badness” comes from and what can be done
about it. The right-wing selectively perceives
and projects the idea of sociopathy and social ills onto the working class and
poor, onto their political opponents (perceived liberals, socialists,
Communists) as well as onto different-looking or culturally distinct “others”,
i.e. supposed “outsiders” or Untermenschen (“under-people”) to their
cultural worldview. They entertain dark
fantasies about insidious inside/outside forces “infections” in the biologized
body politic, often represented by groups like the Jews, gay people, Muslims or
Sinti-Roma (“gypsies”). The right-wing
tends towards a biologistic view of society, falling easily into a language of
“blood” and biological pests and microbes as metaphors. There are deep paranoid
tendencies on the right-wing, which lead to obsessions with “pollution” of
society by different others, as well as hidden powerful forces and
conspiracies, often of these inside/outside groups. Their political opponents are also the
subject of paranoid projections of fears about infection and internal
subversion, with the right-wing very quick to project onto their political
opponents exactly their own criminal and corrupt activity, including subversion
of the institutions of the republican or democratic state for their own
pecuniary and power-oriented wishes. The
metaphor of infection reinforces their sense of pure victimhood and partly
self-chosen loss of personal agency, that includes an exoneration for any
misdeeds and violent impulses they themselves harbor: they are simply “victims”
of an “infection”, they are being “forced” to do evil.
One focus of right-wing-leaning news and politicians like
Donald Trump is upon stories of poor people victimizing each other or
victimizing or discomfiting wealthier or more comfortable people; the only
solution that is suggested by this focus is stricter policing or
expulsion/imprisonment of some of the “lower orders”.
The (real) Left on the other hand sees sociopathic behavior
as emanating from socially-constructed systems run by privileged elites who may
also be individual evil doers in their own rights. The emphasis on the Left is mostly on
socially systemic ills as the cause of individual wrong-doing, though key
powerful and wealthy actors may also be seen as villains, but villains mostly because
of the systems of exploitation and oppression that they run.
The right-wing in its populist-fascist versions, also can
focus on wealthy/powerful villains that may collude with the lower orders and are
given often weird extraordinary powers or become the objects of wild
projections of a perverse nature. The
Clintons and Obama have been subjected to these often perverse projections by
right-wing media sources, politicians, and political operatives. Sometimes those wealthy people who are
supposedly behind the liberal-left are identified as Jewish or occasionally
from another “outsider” group, leading to the tendency of right-wing populism
towards anti-Semitism, even though the current Republican far right uses its
support for the apartheid state of Israel and the minority of Jewish
Republicans as a fig leaf to hide its tendency towards anti-Semitism. The difference between the fascist
right-wing’s view of malignant elites and the left-wing’s is that the latter
attribute the evil of elites to their running of evil systems that exploit
others and ensnare society in a vicious cycle, not to inherent biologistic or
personal characteristics, as does the fascist right wing.
The centrist pseudo-“left” represented now by the Democratic
Establishment and affiliated media organizations tends to claim that both the
Left’s view of systemic evil and the Right’s view of sociopathy are the same,
reserving for themselves the idea that they are neutral and reliable guardians
of the status quo and of political liberalism (i.e. the tradition of John
Locke).
Lying, Propaganda and a Gaslit Nation
One of the features of sociopathy, of both con artists and
those who tend towards street criminality, is pathological lying, i.e. the use
of language as simply another tool to “get what I want now” without regard for
the veracity of statements made. The
personal capacity and propensity to lie effortlessly and endlessly plays into
the the proto-fascist and fully-fascist right wing’s affinity for propaganda as
a political tool, as the habitual use of propaganda can easily become an
organized “group” form of lying to achieve political power.
A national and now global public sphere dominated by
propaganda and counter-propaganda undermines the project of the Enlightenment
and of political democracy which is one of the most praised but most endangered
products of the now approximately five- or six-century-old Enlightenment. The construction of a public discourse based
on lies goes even deeper and threatens the core of having a human society at
all , that is itself based on the use of language and the trust that speakers
generally mean what they say. Without
reliable public information, peoples and leaders of government cannot make
informed decisions about their future.
As it turns out from a study of history and the various efforts to
undermine public understanding, reliable public information in the last couple
centuries has been a combined product of private collection of news and public
information gathering by governments constrained by laws and by forms of
democratic popular sovereignty. With the
emergence of new information media, such as social media on the global Internet
and mobile phone networks, propaganda purveyors that seek to concentrate
political and economic power in new ways have gotten a head-start over more
democratic forces in utilizing the new media of communication, as well as
“gaming” the interaction of new and old media sources.
The concept of propaganda has its origins, after the
invention of the printing press in the
Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, both of which
used propaganda to proselytize their forms of Christian faith and fight each
other both ideologically and on the
battlefield, with lethal consequences.
Its modern usage, however, has tended to focused on its uses by
political movements and governments and in particular by totalitarian
governments of the Right or the Left. While
the US government has made extensive use of propaganda, especially in war-time,
in the US there is a tendency to think of Communist Russia as a place where
propaganda was the norm of communication by the government to the people and
the world. Certainly under Communism, no
private or community-based networks of information gathering and sharing were
allowed, leading to vast distortions in how governments represented themselves
to the people and to themselves. Fascist
governments and military juntas have similarly used censorship to police
journalism. Attributing propaganda
mostly to the Left, to Communism as a system of government, or to post-Soviet
Russia, is a way of “othering” propaganda that shields both the right wing and
the United States government and private news oligopolies from fair and equal
scrutiny.
In the 1920’s and 30’s, The proto-fascist and fascist right
wing adopted propaganda and, in many ways, perfected it for use as a means to
achieve political power for reactionary and militaristic ends, and as a
supposed bulwark for the capitalist class and its allies against Communists
also using propaganda and some rather minor insurrectionary means to achieve
what they hoped would be a socialist or Communist revolution. Hitler, a frustrated artist, employed his imagination
to construct with his propaganda ministries a mythical (militaristic/terrifying)
world which he transmitted via painstakingly produced spectacle (such as the
Nuremberg rallies) and propaganda efforts. In a capitalist society, fascist
movements sometimes attract the interest of wealthy backers who fund or devote
some of their resources to supporting fascist movements, especially when they
feel that liberal elites have failed to protect or advance their interests
sufficiently, in times of social breakup, economic crisis or transition. Hitler’s promise to the German aristocratic
and capitalist elites was that he was the one political leader who could
protect them from Communism, even as he was viewed as “vulgar” and mentally
unbalanced by many in the German aristocracy.
Beyond its use by fascists and Communists, propaganda is
used by governments and by political factions and, in the form of advertising
and PR, by private corporations and wealthy individuals, to shape public
opinion and public economic or political behavior in favor of wealthy or
powerful interests. Societies at all
levels of organization run on a constant flow of discourse, of signifiers
generated by institutions and disseminated via various public and private
media; propaganda is the instrumentalization of that (mostly one-way) flow of
signs (written, visual, aural) for very specific goals prioritized as primary by
the powerful or wealthy.
Propaganda means that the signifiers (the physical part of
signs) sent out have no reliable relationship to the signifieds (the real world
of things, events and abstract concepts);
a means to establish a firm relationship between signifier and signified
based on reality is intentionally severed or distracted from by the senders of
propaganda. Propaganda has a parasitic
relationship on what people already believe signifiers to mean (based on past
experience) and uses it to persuade or trick them to believe in something (a
signified) that is newly invented for some targeted political or commercial
purpose. Not all propaganda is
dishonest: one can self-consciously and transparently say that one is trying to
persuade others, but this opens one up to discussions of “why” one is acting to
persuade. Those with nefarious purposes
do not what to discuss why they are trying to persuade others. Those who are using it honestly will say
“yes, this is propaganda, an effort to persuade”. Clever usually more honest advertising, for
instance, sometimes self-consciously plays on the fact that the message itself
is an effort to persuade and is open about its propagandistic nature.
Hitler’s “Big Lie” strategy, used by Trump as well, builds
directly on this feature of (non-transparent) propaganda: it is a trial balloon
by a sociopathic leadership that the population and elite institutions like the
media are ready to be fooled by the fascist leadership and be molded into a
compliant followership. Propaganda is enabled by the ownership of means of
dissemination, the ability to rent mass means of dissemination (advertising),
the exploitation of privileged positions conferred by the owners of the means
of dissemination (think of the free publicity garnered by Trump from a compliant
media prior to his election), or, in the case of Internet/mobile phone-based
social media, a privileged position in the hierarchy of peer-to-peer senders of
signs.
Government regulations of both its own transmissions of
signs and that of private senders (such as the Fairness Doctrine),
when enforced, can limit the number of one-sided or largely fictional
persuasive messages, i.e. propaganda, that can flood public discourse. However, the loosening of regulations can
open the door, as it has with the pro-corporate 1987 elimination of the
Fairness Doctrine in the United States, to profligate and open use of means of
mass communication for the purposes of pro-corporate and government propaganda. When large sectors of the population get most
of their information from propaganda-laced sources, they can no longer make
informed decisions about either, on a relatively mundane level, product
purchases or, as serious as, life and death political or existential decisions.
The core of the current climate of propaganda-based public
communication has its origins mostly in unregulated large media corporations in
the private sector colluding with right-wing political factions as well as, in
turn, the media corporations co-shaping those factions to suit the wishes of billionaire
owners of media conglomerates. With the
loosening of regulations on media news content, media-Machiavellians like Roger
Ailes and Rupert Murdoch formed, for instance, Fox News, a propaganda channel
masquerading as a news source. Bringing
content and an orientation previously confined to right-wing talk radio to the
cable networks, Fox News was able to coat right-wing propaganda in a veil of
news content and infotainment that were edited and tailored to support the
right-wing ideology of Rupert Murdoch. More
than radio talk, television provides images of real events, edited and tailored
to fit narratives, which becomes more persuasive to the receiving public than
simply the transmission of language via radio.
This is not to say that supposedly centrist or center-left
media sources remained free of propaganda but have instead allowed their
reputation as reliable news sources be increasingly compromised by both
government bureaucracies and also political factions. Government sources and
the militarist, neoconservative propagandists of permanent war close to the
U.S. war machine have used the media for targeted propaganda efforts that have
had dire consequences for democracy and for global peace and stability. The run-up to the Iraq War was aided by
centrist media such as the New York Times endorsing, via for instance the
reporting of Judith Miller, the false Bush Administration case for war against
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. That the New York
Times accepts advertising from defense contractors, as well as wants to
maintain chummy “access” to government officials, probably has influenced their
editorial attitude towards war and peace, in favor of war-making.
Beyond the Miller falsification or uncritical broadcast of
government lying, centrist Establishment media exerts most often its
propagandistic functions however in more subtle ways by creating zones of high
status and zones of taboo in public discourse and reporting. The centrist Establishment media, led in the
United States currently by the New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN
attempts to massage public discourse into an image and a political attitude
that is comfortable for its wealthy owners and advertisers, while providing
enough truthful reporting to inform and entertain their generally comfortable,
educated middle- and upper-income readers/viewers.
However the structure of the mainstream media’s carefully
curated public sphere is starting to wheeze and groan under the signs that
systemic threats and systemic challenges are starting to create discomfort for
the comfortable owners, editors, advertisers, and readers/viewers of those
media. Ever vaster income inequality and
the threat of climate catastrophe are exposing severe deficits in reporting and
the opinion-shaping function of the media is switching into high gear to
neutralize the threats. As an example of
this there is now an escalating propagandistic campaign in the centrist media
to downgrade and sideline Bernie Sanders as a potential contender for the
Democratic Presidential nomination, using various subtle and not so subtle
means. An even more concerted effort was
executed in Great Britain to sideline Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party he led,
by a massive disinformation campaign in which the venerable Guardian and BBC were
also willing participants; Labour’s
recent major loss can in part be laid at the feet of elite editors, media
owners and journalists, who propagandized non-stop against Corbyn.
The centrist, Establishment media is most adept at “soft”
propaganda, or as described above, massaging the flow of information to more
subtly support an Establishment, pro-corporate-advertiser message and
side-lining/stigmatizing critical facts and views as “taboo” and not
“respectable”. On the other hand, the
Establishment media in the US has been in thrall to a “both sides” false
balance format that has hid the radicalization of the Republican Party and the
US far right wing from view. Thus what
might have been viewed as “beyond the pale” has been rehabilitated as “respectable”
by the centrist media Establishment, for instance giving Trump’s neofascism and
mental derangement a “pass” because of at first his celebrity and then undue
respect for the office of the Presidency.
So the current Establishment
media been been doing unpaid public relations for Trump and the GOP, despite
some critical reportage in some pieces. Heather Digby Parton has
recently traced this tendency back to the 1960’s when the media covered
protests against the Vietnam War while under-covering the support for the War
among those who were not engaged in colorful protests. Since then the Establishment, New York and
Washington-based media has been hypersensitive to the Right wing’s “working the
refs”, i.e. howls of protest, to claim that their voices represent the American
majority.
The fascist right-wing however is several degrees more
committed than the centrist Establishment media to propaganda and enshrouding
society in a fog of lies, lies that favor their ascension to power and, for
many of them, amassing wealth for them and the elites they protect and that
fund them. While Establishment media and
the centrist Dems use targeted propaganda efforts to reinforce zones of taboo
and of privileged discourse, they have not generally engaged, except for in a
few (very troubling) areas of foreign policy (such as in the Middle East and
Latin America), in promoting a generalized sense of total submission to arbitrary
authority. These observations don’t mean
they are good or praiseworthy for being “not-fascists”. Ignoring the rise of domestic US fascism, some
Left critics of US foreign policy have generally seemed to argue that “nothing
could be worse” than the neocon imperialist system and tendency to engage in
deadly and mostly pointless wars, fueled by a compliant or jingoistic media. In my view these critics of US foreign policy
are narrowly correct on many of these issues but lack perspective on what domestic
fascism is more and more looking like: a likely complete collapse of civil
society and room to criticize, let alone change, any government policy,
including foreign policy. US imperialism
has been very bad but there is also the potential for worse, which we may be
now approaching.
Trump, a lifelong sociopath, is also a pathological liar, having
uttered more than 15,000 lies or false statements during his almost three
years in office. While some of Trump’s
false statements are due to his lack of conventional intelligence and a lack of
studiousness about facts, they are mostly intentional lies to deceive the
public, with Trump’s lack of knowledge simply a byproduct of his intention to
gaslight others. “Gaslighting” is a slang
word derived from a 1938 play and 1944 movie, in which a man deceives a
woman to think she is going crazy by literally turning down the gaslights
(old-fashioned lighting) in their home and tries to convince her she is
imagining things. The male character in
the movie is a con man trying to rob the female protagonist and “gaslighting” has
come to be applied as a term for a technique in real-world scams. In the era of
Trump, the concept has been revived, as it appears that Trump and the media
sources upon which he relies create a flickering, uncertain view of reality, in
which it is easier to deceive the public and also political opponents.
Trump and the right-wing of the GOP have been enabled to
gaslight critical sectors of the nation using an array of right-wing media sources
that have no problem in putting out false reports that favor the right. Rather
than being the chief Machiavellian manipulator, Trump is apparently an
instrument of Fox News, for instance, making
up policy based on his Fox News-viewing habits, so it is not clear whether the
owners of the media conglomerate or politicians and the donors they obedient
to, are the central Machiavellian actors.
Trump’s extreme narcissism, which appears to be based on an
extreme sensitivity to personal slight, plays a role in the use of gaslighting
and deceiving others and apparently also sometimes himself. Trump’s
narcissistic sensitivity is so extreme that he creates an alternative reality
by talking and continually agitating as if the world is reflecting only his own
grandiose sense of himself and his vision of reality that reinforces that sense
of grandiose importance. Trump appears
to be a megalomaniac, the extreme of narcissism. Trump seems to feel entitled to only positive
media-reports about himself and his policies, criticizing even Fox News when
they report unflattering news about him or about his policies. The Establishment media has also been cowed
both by Trump and by the Republican Party, that, as mentioned above, knows how
to “work the refs” to get more favorable or less unfavorable coverage.
The supposedly centrist and “critical of Trump” mainstream
media has not responded well to Trump’s sense of entitlement to flattering
coverage. The New York Times, among
other media organizations, has since 2016 leaned right and hired columnists who
are, if not Trumpist loyalists, at least partly agree with Trump and GOP
policies. In general, the Times has
tended to amplify Trump’s message despite forays into investigative journalism
and critical stances that have angered Trump.
The mainstream media appears to be locked into a position in which they
feel obligated to do free public relations for people in power or in positions
of extreme wealth; Trump and Republican has benefited from the supposedly
“liberal” media’s gingerly treatment and lack of a stomach for a consistent
muckraking, investigative stance vis-à-vis those in positions of political or
economic power. The dependence on ad
revenue and risk-averse corporate funding probably plays a role in placating
rather than exposing the culture of falsehood on the Right.
The Trump Administration and GOP Congressional leadership
have also targeted the data- and truth-reporting functions of the US federal
government, seeking to distort or suppress reports on topics
such as climate change that threaten their and their donors financial
interests. Of course, the Environmental
Protection Agency, long a bugbear of right-wing anti-regulators, is
being decimated under the Trump Administration’s policies of hostile neglect
and budget cuts. The Administration is attempting to gut, in addition, the science and
analysis functions of the US Department of Agriculture by moving it to
Kansas City, thereby losing two-thirds of a specialized scientific staff to
attrition, unwillingness to uproot their families. Even such relatively neutral data-collection
and reporting agencies such as the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are being attacked by
Trump and his loyalists. Trump’s
hostility to science extends
to nuclear physics as well, critical for successful nuclear arms
negotiations.
The stabilizing functions of government
reporting of data and relatively unbiased analysis are being systematically cut
out of public discourse as well as simply being destroyed, as simultaneously
private media corporations are create a flickering, uncertain view of social
and political reality. While not exactly
the organized Nazi or Communist propaganda of the mid-20th Century,
the perception of the public of reality is being manipulated by powerful
political and corporate actors for private benefit, often serving the
ultra-wealthy donor class or the political ambitions of the Machiavellians of
the right-wing. The wavering view of
reality creates opportunities for attacks by predatory actors to manipulate the
public further and continue to outmaneuver an uncertain, intimidated opposition
in a context and medium that is their preference: discourse and discursive
rules (for determining truth or relevance) unmoored from fact and reality.
Goals of Right-wing Machiavellians Today
There is no single mastermind of the increasingly radical
right Republican Party. A few years ago,
it appeared that Charles Koch was largely in command but the lack of charisma
of Koch-vetted and Koch-educated right-wing operatives meant that their use of
propaganda via social media and conventional media was impaired. Trump brought a kind of brutal charismatic
appeal to the fearful, bigoted Republican base and was and is an intuitively
good user of various media to communicate with that base. Trump has a persona
of being “the man on the street” that is more appealing and entertaining to
crowds than the typically stiff fanatic right-wing politician from the South,
West or Midwest.
But Trump, though he has some strong intuitive
people-manipulating skills, lacks the intelligence and calculating ability to
be a political mastermind. Recognizing
semi-consciously that he is not capable of grand strategy, Trump is more than
happy, as long as he receives a constant stream of adulation and money, to be a
political front-man for an international class of billionaires and oligarchs with
whom Trump wishes to do business privately as well as, corruptly, politically. Some of these oligarchs are foreign,
including from Saudi Arabia and Russia, though many are domestic. Though he at times feigns having a moral
purpose and center, Trump is fundamentally an amoral man that by virtue of
having political power along with the GOP does fundamentally anti-moral
actions.
The overarching common goals then of the collection of
Machiavellians manipulating the Republican Party and public opinion then are to
continue to build a kleptocratic oligarchy with or without the semblance of
democracy and the democratic institutions that have, in part, governed the
United States for past almost quarter millennium. Some of these Machiavellians
are fairly short-sighted and are simply looking to accumulate still more money
and property in the shortest time possible, using the levers of the political
“game” to achieve these goals. Their
motivation is simple greed.
Right-wing Machiavellians, many from the donor class itself
and not politicians, are willing, as in the rise of Hitler in the 1930’s, to
countenance the strutting and threats of (more and continued) violence inspired
by a crude authoritarian leader, as a bulwark against radical reforms or even
revolution that would reduce their power and wealth. The neoliberal era has so spoiled these
activist members of the billionaire class, both US nationals and international,
that they are happy to dispense with the liberal democracies in which they and
their adult children have been educated and built their business empires or
portfolios. Most in the billionaire
class want to remain apolitical and are accepting of whatever
political-economic system that allows them to continue their business, investing
as well as looting as before, with democracy and liberal values viewed
currently as dispensable or assumed to be permanent in neglect, despite signs
they are in acute danger.
