Part of the answer to the enduring quality of such a destructive politics can be found in the lethal combination of money, power and education that the right wing has had a stranglehold on since the early 1970's and how it has used its influence to develop an institutional infrastructure and ideological apparatus to produce its own intellectuals, disseminate ideas, and eventually control most of the commanding heights and institutions in which knowledge is produced, circulated and legitimated. This is not simply a story about the rise of mean-spirited buffoons such as Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Michael Savage.
He writes,
...one starting point for understanding this problem is what has been called the Powell Memo, released on August 23, 1971, and written by Lewis F. Powell, who would later be appointed as a member of the Supreme Court of the United States. Powell sent the memo to the US Chamber of Commerce with the title "Attack on the American Free Enterprise System."
Giroux continues,
For Powell, the war against liberalism and a substantive democracy was primarily a pedagogical and political struggle designed both to win the hearts and minds of the general public and to build a power base capable of eliminating those public spaces, spheres and institutions that nourish and sustain what Samuel Huntington would later call (in a 1975 study on the "governability of democracies" by the Trilateral Commission) an "excess of democracy."[5]
...
Any attempt to understand and engage the current right-wing assault on all vestiges of the social contract, the social state and democracy itself will have to begin with challenging this massive infrastructure, which functions as one of the most powerful teaching machines we have seen in the United States, a teaching machine that produces a culture that is increasingly poisonous and detrimental not just to liberalism, but to the formative culture that makes an aspiring democracy possible. This presence of this ideological infrastructure extending from the media to other sites of popular education suggests the need for a new kind of debate, one that is not limited to isolated issues such as health care, but is more broad-based and fundamental, a debate about how power, inequality and money constrict the educational, economic and political conditions that make democracy possible.
Vast right-wing conspiracy, anyone?
I thnk I was part of that '60's right wing. I came out of an area that was 34-2 supporting Nixon over Kennedy--if my fourth grade class was any representation. Nervous and scared generally as a kid, I was especially nervous and scared about the communists who were perhaps going to drop a nuclear bomb on us and definitely gonna try to subvert us. My own mom suspected that some prof had attempted to recruit her as a communist...just another piece of evidence that they were out there and they were clever.
ReplyDeleteThe door--like a lotta other doors--cracked open in high school. I began to suspect that the communist conspiracy might not be the primary truth of existence here in the US, and that much in the discourse around me was questionable if not totally off base. I think living and working in Europe accidently pushed open that door almost entirely. There I found a whole civilization living under a whole different set of assumptions. And they weren't bad people. In fact, in at least some ways they were better.
Cat