“There’s a cycle where (1) concentrated wealth buys political power, (2) political power yields legislation that concentrates wealth even more, and (3) the cycle repeats again and again—the cycle goes around and around until you have a situation where all of the economic gains are going to extremely few households.”
“There are many factors that have contributed to lubricating this cycle.”
“But one important factor has been the society-wide implementation of corporate propaganda, which is a neglected and crucial aspect of American history—this is one of the biggest topics out there.”
Elite domination has reached an absolutely obscene level in America. Over 53% of all gains in American household income between 2001 and 2006 went to the richest 1% of households—more “than 50 cents of every dollar in additional income pocketed by Americans over this half decade accrued to the richest 1 in 100 households”, which is utterly insane to think about.
How did this level of elite domination come about? There’s a cycle where (1) concentrated wealth buys political power, (2) political power yields legislation that concentrates wealth even more, and (3) the cycle repeats again and again—the cycle goes around and around until you have a situation where all of the economic gains are going to extremely few households.
There are many factors that have contributed to lubricating this cycle. But one important factor has been the society-wide implementation of corporate propaganda, which is a neglected and crucial aspect of American history—this is one of the biggest topics out there.
The Threat
America was very progressive coming out of WW2—take a look at the following excerpt from Elizabeth Fones-Wolf’s 1992 Selling Free Enterprise:
In 1946, the contentious atmosphere of industrial relations culminated in a strike wave unparalleled in American history. Especially frightening to the business community was Walter Reuther’s demand that GM open its books to union contract negotiators in order to link wages, prices, and profits. His demand exemplified the growing threat to management rights both on and off the shop floor. Equally troubling to many companies was the seemingly widespread community support for labor during these struggles. In the aftermath of the strikes, labor appeared so powerful that labor-relations scholar Sumner H. Slichter could easily foresee the United States “gradually shifting from a capitalistic community to a laboristic one—that is to a community in which employees rather than businessmen are the strongest single influence.”
There was a “growing threat to management rights both on and off the shop floor”. And companies were worried about “the seemingly widespread community support for labor”.
And take a look at the following excerpt from a 1949 Fortune editorial:
Sixteen turbulent years have rolled by since the New Deal began to rescue the People from the Capitalists, and no one can say that business has retrieved the authority and respect it ought to have if the drift to socialism is to be arrested. Every U.S. businessman, consciously or unconsciously, is on the defensive.…A majority of the people…[according to public opinion polls] believe that very few businessmen have the good of the nation in mind when they make their important decisions. They think business is too greedy and that it has played a large part in keeping prices too high. They think, therefore, that government should keep a sharp eye on business. And they have been thinking just about that way for fifteen years.
You can see the concern about business being “on the defensive” and about business lacking “the authority and respect it ought to have”.
To get a sense of the threat, consider that John Dewey was as American as apple pie decades ago—just look at Dewey’s following comment:
Power today resides in control of the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and communication. Whoever owns them rules the life of the country, not necessarily by intention, not necessarily by deliberate corruption of the nominal government, but by necessity. Power is power and must act, and it must act according to the nature of the machinery through which it operates. In this case, the machinery is business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda. In order to restore democracy, one thing and one thing only is essential. The people will rule when they have power, and they will have power in the degree they own and control the land, the banks, the producing and distributing agencies of the nation. Ravings about Bolshevism, Communism, Socialism are irrelevant to the axiomatic truth of this statement. They come either from complaisant ignorance or from the deliberate desire of those in possession, power and rule to perpetuate their privilege.
There was more at stake than just profits—people were questioning whether top-down business control was even legitimate.
The Corporate Sector’s Response to the Threat
Business was petrified about how threateningly progressive American attitudes were—business therefore decided to pursue an urgent and aggressive and ambitious strategy of indoctrination in order to check the threat.
Corporate propaganda is a neglected and crucial aspect of American history that you can read about in Elizabeth Fones-Wolf’s 1992 book Selling Free Enterprise—which I quoted from above—and in Alex Carey’s 1997 book Taking the Risk Out of Democracy:
Everyone should read these books’ introductions—you might find the introductions intriguing and therefore want to read further.
Fones-Wolf’s Book
Nelson Lichtenstein has an interesting 1995 review of Fones-Wolf’s 1992 book—he says that the book is “of enormous import” and that the book “offers a wealth of evidence to demonstrate the extent to which the American business community sought to discredit New Deal liberalism and undermine the power and legitimacy of organized labor”. The book documents how “business leaders waged a strategic, ideological campaign at the workplace and within the community to recapture the hegemonic authority they thought the New Deal and the new unionism had so catastrophically disrupted”—this campaign was responding to a situation where attitudes were so anti-business that “one postwar survey” showed that “nearly half of all workers thought they would do as well or better if American manufacturing firms were run entirely by the government”.
Lichtenstein does offer a couple criticisms. First, the book doesn’t tell us “the extent to which the corporate campaign succeeded, either among American workers themselves or within the ranks of the larger public”—one can observe that “the business campaign had little immediate payoff” and that business’s triumph might instead owe itself to (A) “the growing racial divide within the workforce” and (B) “competitive deindustrialization” that undermined “union bargaining clout”.
Second, Fones-Wolf’s book “might well have captured a deeper and more profound understanding of the battle” if the book had “devoted more attention to the contested character” of terms like “‘security’” and “‘individualism’” and “‘free enterprise’”—the book doesn’t go into this and therefore “often has a shallow and repetitious quality that does little justice to the importance of her subject”.
Carey’s Book
Carey’s 1997 book provides the deep analysis that Fones-Wolf’s important book doesn’t provide—take a look at the following praise for Carey’s book:
Andrew Lohrey writes—in the 1997 book’s introduction—that Carey’s work “provides us with a historical context to much of the string-pulling behind our thinking”.
In the 20th century, “many academics” and “many members of the ‘free’ press” tacitly “assumed the need” to assist “in the management of public opinion”—this management takes “the risk out of democracy” and shapes opinion “in the interests of business”. It reflects poorly on “the intellectual character of political and academic leaders in the United States” that “this management of democracy should seem necessary and go unchallenged for so long in what is often hailed as the leading democracy in the world”.
The essays in the book “represent a major challenge to the continuing effects” of a “covert and widely orchestrated series” of propaganda campaigns.
Corporate propaganda “has been stunningly successful over a long period” in identifying “business interests with national interests”. The “simplest of covert messages” is the “identification of patriotism with the ‘freedom’ of business interests”—“persistent, repetitive orchestration” has allowed “this simple regime of thought-control” to triumph “with so little public resistance”.
Threats to elite interests have been constructed as “the ‘risk’ to democracy”—these threats to elite interests include organized labor, “such government initiatives as welfare and environmental policies”, and “any government intervention in the economy directed at redistributing wealth” downward.
Corporate propaganda has sought to attack “community policies and activities” that threaten to bring about progressive redistribution, but corporate propaganda hasn’t attacked these things straightforwardly on the basis that progressive redistribution is bad—corporate propaganda has instead attacked these things on the grounds that they “reduce the ‘freedom’ of the individual, restrict ‘initiative’, or hamper ‘free’ enterprise”.
Carey’s “careful and sometimes exhaustive work” details “the processes, rituals, celebrations, symbols and propagation methods of these crusades”. The book’s impact on readers “will come not from its polemics but from the enormous amount of empirical evidence Carey presents”—readers will find that “the sheer amount of detail” slowly overwhelms them.
The book “undermines our commonsense opinions about freedom, liberty and civil rights”. The book presents “the story of how a minority set of business interests sold their values and perspective to the rest of society”—the “selling of these values has been so successful that most of us have taken them on board without any sense of having been brainwashed”.
Fabulous piece! And providing two great books...
I tweeted this out and wrote that Join Andrew was as it as it gets but takes a lot of stamina to keep up. GB