Noam Chomsky: Prospects for Democracy (1994)

Noam Chomsky: Prospects for Democracy (March 10, 1994)

[Conception of a good society: enriching popular participation]
If we look at the present scene, we find an apparent clash between doctrines that are widely and, in fact, proudly proclaimed and social and political realities that appear to conflict with them very sharply. The leading doctrine is that the wave of the future is democracy and markets, a future for which America is “the gatekeeper and the model.” I happen to be quoting from the New York Times, but if you sample almost at random, you’ll hear the same thing in more or less the same words.

That’s the doctrine. The reality is that the world, including our own society, is moving toward a more autocratic and absolutist structure. The scope of the public arena is narrowing. The opportunities for popular participation in it are also declining. In short, the realities are that democracy is under attack.

There are also parallel attacks on free markets, and there are expanding forms of market distortion. It’s an interesting topic, but I’ll put it aside and keep to the question of democracy, the other half of the story.

I’ve said that the doctrine and the reality are apparently in conflict, that is, the doctrine that the wave of the future is democracy and we’re the gatekeeper and the model, and the reality, which I think is rather the opposite. So there’s at least an apparent conflict. But in fact the conflict can be resolved, namely, by attenuating the concept of democracy and reducing it to pretty much an empty shell, to various forms with little meaning. And I think that that’s exactly what is happening. Of course in that case the doctrine will be true, and I think if we look that’s pretty much what we see. The same is true of the talk about markets, but again I’ll put that aside.

The currently prevailing concepts of democracy, which have been narrowing and becoming more restricted and impoverished over the years—
democracy and liberty as well—these concepts would, I think, have utterly appalled someone like, say, Thomas Jefferson and other great figures of classical liberalism, for whom, incidentally, democracy and even liberty were part of something broader. They were part of the conception of a good society, which would be measured and evaluated by how well it freed individuals and their creative powers. It’s to that end that democracy was considered an appropriate means.

If we turn to a more modern period, I think that the currently prevailing and increasingly narrowing concepts of democracy would also have appalled contemporary, twentieth-century thinkers. A crucial example is John Dewey, who was the greatest American social philosopher and whose thoughts focused primarily on the problem of enriching democracy, which he understood pretty much in the classical sense. He, incidentally, was appalled by the narrowing of the scope of meaningful democracy both in practice and in the rising democratic theories of his era, mainly the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, the progressive intellectuals of the Wilsonian period who laid pretty much the basis for the modern form of the impoverishment and the attenuation of democratic theory, helped out by the then-rising fields of the academic political sciences. There’s little doubt in my mind that Dewey, like Thomas Jefferson, would find today’s scene, a half century later, even more ominous and depressing.

These are pretty important issues in contemporary intellectual history.

They have very broad implications. There’s a reality beneath them that is even more portentous. These are very large topics, actually topics for an ongoing seminar and not for a talk. I’ll try to say a few words about them, but they’re going to be inadequate, I’m afraid.

To begin with, notice that just about every contemporary society calls – itself “democratic.” Actually, every contemporary society also calls itself “egalitarian.” The question is: Equality of what?, as is discussed in an interesting book by Harvard economist Amartya Sen that came out recently. So in our doctrinal system you’re supposed to insist upon equality of opportunity. It’s one particular form of equality. Others call for other forms of equality. I stress ideology, where the reality is something else, as usual.

Take, say, the old Soviet Union. It consisted of countries that were called “people’s democracies” and in fact described themselves as the highest form of democracy. We laugh at that, for good reasons. It’s useful to have a look at the reasons. It’s not that they didn’t have elections. In fact, they did have elections. They could have even made the elections free in the sense that anybody who wanted to could say, I’m a candidate, and could even be listed on the ballot. Nothing significant would have changed.

The reasons were several. The primary reason was that the basic decisions, the most important decisions about how the society worked, were not in the public arena at all. So it didn’t matter much who voted and who ran.

The basic decisions were made by a military, bureaucratic elite, including crucial decisions over the economy, decisions over what was invested, what was produced, commercial interactions, and so on. In fact, the basic decisions that are at the core of any modern society were out of the public arena entirely.

That had a lot of consequences. One consequence was that information was quite narrowly controlled by the very same hands, namely, by those who had the resources and the power to impose decisions on how they were used.

A side comment: The population of the Soviet Union apparently had very wide access to information and used that access. There were interesting U.S. government-funded studies done by American Russian research centers and others in the 1970s who concluded that it appeared that over three-quarters of the population were listening regularly to foreign broadcasts (about 95 percent of the most educated sectors of the population). Samizdat (underground newspapers, technically illegal but all over the place) were read by about half of the relatively educated part of the population and by about 15 percent of blue-collar workers, according to these studies. Those are phenomenal figures for dissident literature, incomparably beyond anything that we can imagine.

Returning to the reasons why we laugh at “Soviet people’s democracies,” another was that there was very little in the way of popular organizations that were able to function in the political sphere. Public participation in proposing, crafting, and formulating public policy was extremely slight, and there weren’t any organizational structures around that enabled people to take part in it. Finally, most people were so busy just trying to survive that they were unable to participate in any meaningful way in the public arena and wouldn’t have been able to even if opportunities had existed. Under such conditions, democracy is at best a very thin reed.

[The autocratic structures of twentieth-century absolutism]
You’ll have noticed, I’m sure, that I’m describing our society. The basic point, the crucial point about the concentration of resources and decision-making power, is not quite the same as in the Soviet Union. Basic decision making here too is out of the public arena—in fact, entirely out of it, almost. But it’s not in the hands of a military, bureaucratic elite. It’s in the hands of private power, like corporations, financial institutions, and the like, which operate in secret without any public scrutiny, virtually no public input. They are almost completely unaccountable. In fact, they determine the basic things that happen in life. They are now increasingly transnational.

It’s been the case over a long period that governing structures—things that become government—tend to coalesce around concentrations of power. In the last couple of centuries that means primarily economic power, so national economies led to and were integrated with national governments: the increase in and rapid escalation of transnational corporations, banking institutions, financial institutions, and so on. Around them there is also coalescing a network of structures of governance, what the world’s leading business newspaper, the London Financial Times, describes as a “de facto world government,” with its own institutions: the IMF, the World Bank, the new World Trade Organization (WTO), the GATT, the G-7 executive, the executive branches of the seven rich countries. That’s a kind of framework of world government that also operates very remotely, in secret, without scrutiny, without accountability. Its primary constituents are in fact precisely the transnational corporations and the financial institutions. It reflects their interests.

The new trade agreements—which is a rather misleading term, in my opinion—are accelerating this transfer of effective power to these absolutist, unaccountable institutions on a vast scale. Corporations themselves are absolutist institutions. Power lies in the hands of owners and managers. The only debate is about how you divvy out the shares. Big literature about that.

There’s a fairly strict authority structure in a corporation. An individual can sometimes enter into the hierarchy, which means you essentially take orders from above and transfer orders down below. It’s a fairly strict hierarchy, as much as any we know of in any institution. If you’re an outsider, you’re not part of it. You have basically nothing to say. You’re allowed to rent yourself to it. That’s called “getting a job.” You can buy what they sell, if you like. You can watch—you can’t see very much because they operate mostly in secret.

Now that they’re remote enough to be transnational and have their governing institutions in Brussels and Geneva and so on, they are even more operating in secret.

This is all well-known and old stuff. About ten years ago I was at a conference in Switzerland on international affairs. One of the participants was a Swiss diplomatic historian. In fact, he told me he was the Swiss diplomatic historian from the University of Geneva. We got kind of friendly. We were out having a beer one night. He told me that the worst job in the world is to be a Swiss diplomatic historian. The reason for that is quite simple: Diplomatic historians are people who look at archival materials primarily.

They try to figure out what’s going on by looking at the archives.

In most countries there’s a sort of buffer between private power, which basically rules, and policy. The buffer is called the government. Governments do leave a kind of paper trail. We’re pretty good in that respect by comparative standards. If you wait thirty or thirty-five years, sometimes even earlier, you get some kind of a record, in fact, often quite an interesting and complete record, of what the government was up to. But in Switzerland they don’t bother with the buffer. The corporations just rule straight. They make the decisions (the banks and transnationals and so on). Corporations don’t leave any paper trail at all. They are secret societies. They are secret, absolutist organizations. If you learn anything about them, it’s because the Multinational Operations Committee in Congress in the mid-1970s, under the pressure of the popular movements of the 1960s, in fact, got subpoena power and released some information about them. Occasionally you find something out in other ways. But basically you learn nothing. So being a Swiss diplomatic historian, without this kind of intervening level, leaves you with not a lot to do, he was complaining. Well, we have something to do because there is this transmission belt. But the picture is not all that different, if you think about it—if you think about where power actually is, how decisions are made and how much you can find out about the centers of power.

This has its consequences, naturally—for example, the other aspects of deficiencies of democracy (I can’t even use the word), the absurdity of using the term democracy to refer to the Soviet system of tyranny. In various respects we also have the same features. Information is very narrowly concentrated in pretty much the same hands as other decision making. The major media are just huge corporations, selling people like you, selling audiences, to other businesses, to advertisers. That sets the framework within which most of the rest operates. Actually, it’s a different information system and all sorts of different properties. One of the properties is that people here have much less access (they have access; they don’t seek access to other sources of information). So the proportion of the population here that listens to foreign broadcasts is minuscule. Publications that are outside the very narrow and rigid ideological framework reach a statistically insignificant part of the population. Nothing like, say, the Soviet samizdat. There are reasons for that, and they are interesting ones, but again, that’s another topic.

With regard to popular organizations that permit the people to function in the political sphere, they’re very limited. We don’t have functioning political parties. We don’t have political clubs. There’s very little. And furthermore, most people are indeed so busy trying to survive that even if such organizations existed, and even if information were readily available, there would be a limited amount that they could do with it. Under such conditions, again, democracy is a fairly thin reed. I don’t want to suggest that here it’s like under Soviet tyranny, but some of the structural properties are quite similar and worth thinking about.

[Liberty as a bridge to equality]
These are the kinds of reasons why classical democrats and libertarians were so hostile to corporate power. They didn’t really see it. They were in the classical period (people like Thomas Jefferson). They were only witnessing the very early, incipient moments of what was going on, but enough to see it and not to like it. So Thomas Jefferson in 1816 expressed his fear that “the country was moving toward a single and splendid government of an aristocracy founded on banking institutions and monied incorporations.” If that tendency, which was just beginning, continued, he said, “it would be the end of democracy and freedom. The few would be riding and ruling over the plundered plowmen and the beggared yeomanry.”

That was 1816. A decade later, during the Jacksonian democracy, Jefferson was a little more optimistic. But right before his death, in fact I think hours before his death, he spoke at the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. In speaking there, he made a crucial distinction which is worth paying careful attention to. He distinguished between “those who fear and distrust the people and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes,” that’s one category, and the others are those who “identify with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe depository of the public interest, even though not the most wise.” That’s the second category of people. He was hoping that the second category would be in the ascendancy.

Looking now—that was 1826—it’s clear, it should be clear to any observer, that Thomas Jefferson’s worst fears have been realized. Effective power is indeed in the hands of the higher classes. The early institutions, banking institutions and monied incorporations, that he was concerned about are now vast in power and control and dominate the decision-making system, essentially in secret. Modern democratic theory, interestingly, has veered very sharply from Jeffersonian ideas and in fact is precisely based on fear and distrust of the people, who must not be allowed to determine public policy or enter into the public arena because, as contemporary thinkers put it, they are too “stupid and ignorant.” They agree with Jefferson only on one point: that the people are perhaps not the “most wise.” But they disagree with him on everything else. That’s rather important. I’ll return to that.

If we go back, say, a half century earlier, to Adam Smith, he was describing a world that is very different from ours, so much so that the descriptions and the explanations really don’t carry over very well, but the ideas do. He lived too early to see the autocratic structures of modern industrial capitalism. He didn’t anticipate their development. But he was already, at that period, very much opposed to joint stock companies, what we nowadays call corporations. He was particularly opposed to them if, as he feared might happen, they would become personified and made permanent, that is, they would gain the status of “immortal persons,” in effect, with all the right of persons, except immortal.

That in fact is exactly what happened in the nineteenth century. One of the major parts of American nineteenth-century history is the creation of corporate power by government decision and the turning of corporations, which used to be sort of public interest groups (to build a bridge, etc.) into immortal persons with the rights of persons, which, if you have corporate power, means vast rights, well beyond any real person. That didn’t happen through the democratic process. It happened primarily through judicial decision, decision by lawyers and judges and so on, as part of the effort to create a developmental state, a powerful interventionist state that would introduce a high level of protectionism and direct public resources to private power and in that way enable development to take place.

Incidentally, that’s the only way in history that development has ever taken place, from England up to South Korea and Taiwan. There are some lessons there, too. The prescriptions that contemporary economic ideologues offer to underdeveloped societies have the interesting property that they are refuted 100 percent of the time. If you can find one case in history of a society that’s developed by those rules, or even marginally using them, it would be interesting to hear about it. There are cases of societies that have followed those rules, and they’re mostly basket cases. Again, something worth looking at when you read primers on free trade and so on on the front pages of the New York Times. Again, that’s another topic I’m not talking about. The judiciary in the nineteenth century did create the immortal persons that Adam Smith was so concerned about. Again, his worst fears were realized, though again it’s a very different world that he was describing and the arguments that were true for his world don’t hold for ours, nevertheless the ideas are interesting and the beliefs are worth paying attention to. This is part of the system of classical liberal thought, the basis for modern libertarian theories of freedom and democracy. He held that markets could function properly only under conditions of relative equality. He also thought and gave a long argument to try to show that liberty would lead to equality, either absolute perfect liberty would lead to either absolute equality or to continual tendencies toward equality. Insofar as we don’t attain that state of equality, or near equality, insofar as that’s not realized, that simply indicates that we have not attained the state of liberty, of perfect liberty.

Of course, the discrepancies are vast and growing. That gives you a measure of how far we are from liberty in any sense that someone like Adam Smith would have recognized. He held, in fact, that only under conditions of relative equality and tendencies toward equality would market competition be efficient or fair and thus able to contribute to its further ends. The market was no end in itself for people like Adam Smith. The further ends were realization of human capacities and potentialities. A market could contribute to those ends insofar as the outcomes were relatively equal. That, he thought, would happen under conditions of liberty. Otherwise you don’t have liberty.

The very foundation of liberty, in Adam Smith’s view, and this is standard Enlightenment thinking, is the right of every workman to the fruits of his own labor. That, he said, is sacred and inviolable. It’s a crucial element in fulfillment, as another major classical liberal thinker, Wilhelm von Humboldt (who very much inspired John Stuart Mill) put it: if a craftsman creates something beautiful but does it on external command, by the orders of someone else and under coercion, we may admire what he does but we will despise what he is, because he’s not human; he’s a machine. Adam Smith held the same view.

Coming to the present, John Dewey, who again was one of the increasingly lone voices speaking for democracy and freedom in twentieth-century America—although he was very much in the mainstream intellectual and political culture of his day, the first half of the twentieth century, increasingly marginalized, by now is viewed as almost unrecognizable—he held (and I’m reading it because I think it’s basically correct, incidentally), he held that “politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, and as long as that is so, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.” In other words, reforms are basically pointless. The reason is that democracy requires that the shadow of big business simply be removed so that the political system can function. The very institutions of private power, he stressed, undermine freedom and democracy.

He was very explicit about the anti-democratic power that he was talking about. To quote Dewey, “it resides in control of the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation, and communication.” Whoever owns them rules the life of the country; even if under democratic forms, we act under the shadow that big business casts. “Big business for private profit, through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced through command of the press, press agents, and other means of propaganda,” he said, is the system of actual power, the source of coercion. Unless it’s unraveled, we cannot seriously talk about democracy and freedom. In a free and democratic society, workers have to “be masters of their own industrial fate.” That’s a classical liberal doctrine. You find it right through classical liberalism, Adam Smith, Humboldt, Thomas Jefferson, of course, and the rest.

It’s “illiberal and immoral” to train children to work “for the sake of the wage earned,” not “freely and intelligently” under their own control. Hence industry must be changed if democracy is to exist. It must be changed “from a feudalistic to a democratic social order.” All of these are, or at least should be, truisms. Indeed, they were very common coin. They were common ideas among uneducated working people not all that long ago, during the century, for example, when working people called for an end to what was standardly called “wage slavery,” which they regarded as not very different from chattel slavery.

I stress that all of this is as American as apple pie. It has nothing to do with Marxism, Leninism, or any of the other scare words that are concocted by the contemporary commissars. And it’s all completely down the tubes as the system has become more feudalistic in Dewey’s sense, more fundamentally illiberal, and more closed to the ideals of human freedom that were held, and indeed rightly held, by classical libertarians, those who we profess to honor but in fact constantly kick in the face and whose ideas are simply disappearing from sight.

As the system has itself become more feudalistic, absolutist, unaccountable, narrow, remote, secret in essentially the classical liberal sense, running right up to Dewey and others of the time, as it has become narrower, the doctrinal system has also correspondingly become narrower. That’s what universities are about, in fact, to narrow it and exclude the thinking that in fact inspired classical liberalism and democratic action and thought. The fundamental libertarian principles—which, as I say, were even common coin among the general population, let alone libertarian thinkers—now sound very exotic and extreme. I just gave you a sample of them. In fact, they’re often called “anti-American,” an interesting term that can be used only in cultures where there are really deep totalitarian strains. For example, in the Soviet Union the worst crime was to be “anti-Soviet.” In the U.S., people like professors at the University of Massachusetts published books called The anti-Amertans, which people don’t laugh about. They’re highly regarded. You get several reviews in the New York Times and so on. You might ask yourself, as a sort of thought experiment, what would happen if somebody, say, in Italy were to publish a book called The anti-Italians, or anti-Italianism, or antiNorwegianism, and ask what the reaction would be on the streets of Milan or Oslo, or in fact any political culture that had not succumbed to totalitarian doctrine and still had a memory of what freedom and democracy were about. The very fact that we’re able to use terms like that is quite striking, particularly if you consider our own history, of which I’ve just barely given a sample, but it’s a real sample, of major figures.

[Brainwashing under freedom: an American invention]
These are very important features of the deterioration of democracy in the current period, not only at the institutional level but also in the doctrinal support for power that accompanies it. I want to stress that this fear of democracy is a very old story and very deep-seated. The first modern democratic revolution was in England in the seventeenth century. The popular democratic forces were bitterly condemned for seeking, as the leading intellectuals of the day put it, to “raise the rascal multitude … against the men of best quality” and for making the people “so curious and so arrogant that they will not submit to a civil rule.” There was a civil war going on, as you learned in high school, between king and Parliament. But what often isn’t taught is that the rabble, the “rascal multitude,” were opposed to both sides in the civil war.

Their pamphlets said that they did not want to be ruled by king or Parliament, rather, as they put it, “by countrymen like ourselves that know our wants” and “know the people’s sores.”
Incidentally, that same call was reiterated by rebellious farmers right here after the American Revolution, when they learned that they would continue to be ruled by the “men of best quality” and not by “countrymen like themselves,” as the revolutionary pamphlets had claimed. We’re back to the distinction that Thomas Jefferson drew in 1826 that I quoted earlier. Actually, that’s true of every social upheaval and revolution, at least to my knowledge.

The official story is that there are two sides fighting. The reality, quite typically, is that there are three sides: the two sides that are officially fighting one another for a share of the power, or all of it, and then the general population, which wants to be free of both of them and quite often gets crushed. That, I think, if you look, is the rea/ history of social upheaval and revolution, including the American Revolution, if you look closely.

Over time the rabble has won rights. They have won rights through struggle. They’re not gifts from above. The rights include, for example, the franchise, the right to vote, which has expanded. So in the USS. half the population was disenfranchised until the 1920s, for example, but it finally won the vote. In the 1960s the vote extended effectively to the black population, which hadn’t really had it before. So these are all victories for democracy, it extends the franchise, extends something.

These victories brought with them renewed fears of the rascal multitude and new and more sophisticated devices to control and marginalize them. As the power of the state to coerce gradually declined over the years, these modes of coercion and control and marginalization shifted more and more to propaganda. Propaganda is naturally in the hands of the powerful, not for surprising reasons. In our own business-run autocracies, that means primarily business propaganda. That includes media propaganda, the media just being big businesses. That’s a huge phenomenon, some of it direct, like what comes out of the public relations industry (an American creation, not surprising in a uniquely business-run society with a highly class-conscious business community that is always fighting a bitter class war and knows it). And then there are its outlets, including a good part of the media and the academic profession and so on.

The leading student of twentieth-century business propaganda, an Australian, Alex Carey, who has written very interesting things about the U.S. and is unknown here, opens some of his work with the following comment, which I think is quite accurate: “The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance. The first is the growth of democracy. The second is the growth of corporate power. The third is the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.” That’s quite right, and that’s in fact the new version of the methods of the fear of the rascal multitude and the methods of controlling. And we see that if we look at recent American history.

Start with, say, the First World War, which was important. The First World War taught quite important lessons in this regard. Woodrow Wilson created the first official government propaganda agency, the Creel Commission, designed to try to drive what was in fact a very pacifist country into war. He was particularly aided by the people who modestly called themselves the “most intelligent members of the society,” the liberal intellectuals, who took pride in the fact that for the first time in history a population had been driven into war not by generals and rotten people, but by the smart guys, who perceived that it was the right thing to do. In fact, what they were doing was disseminating fabrications concocted by the British Ministry of Information about Belgian babies with their arms ripped off and various other propaganda that was designed by the British, as they put it, to “try to control the thought of the world.” The ones who they were most easily able to control were the most intelligent members of the society here, self-designated, namely, the serious intellectuals, who propounded all of this stuff with great sobriety and later took great credit for what they had achieved.

This was quite successful, this business propaganda. It impressed people.

Woodrow Wilson himself was called the “Great Generalissimo of the Propaganda” on the propaganda front, a phrase that was used by Harold Lasswell, one of the leading figures in contemporary political science, the founder of the modern field of communications, who began a very influential career by studying wartime propaganda. The success of the Generalissimo was substantial and it impressed several audiences. One first audience that it impressed was the most important one, the American business community.

It gave a big shot in the arm to the public relations industry, which had existed, but it really took off, very much influenced by the successes of the Generalissimo. In fact, the Generalissimo of corporate propaganda, Edward Bernays, who lived here, was in the Wilson propaganda agency and learned a lot from it. He developed the ideas which he later propounded, which were that the essence of democracy is propaganda, what he sometimes called the “engineering of consent.” It’s quite obvious who’s going to do the engineering, obvious but unsaid, because that’s not one of the things you’re supposed to say.

Another person who was quite impressed by the successes of AngloAmerican propaganda was Adolf Hitler. If you read Mein Kampf, you’ll notice that he thinks Germany’s defeat in the First World War was in large part due to the inability of autocratic, authoritarian Germany to compete on the propaganda front with the democratic societies, which carried out thought control much more efficiently and effectively. He’s actually quite right about that. In Mein Kampf he promised next time around they’d have their own propaganda agencies. Whether they succeeded equally to ours or not is another question, but again we’ll put that one aside.

A third group, an audience that was deeply impressed, were American intellectuals, people like Harold Lasswell, for example. They were not particularly cognizant of the fact that they were the main victims of the propaganda, which was true, but you don’t want to think that about yourself.

Lasswell was the author in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences in 1933 or 1934 of an article called “Propaganda.” In those days people were a little more honest. We don’t use the term now. We use other terms, like journalism, or something like that. But in those days they were pretty straight and just called it propaganda. He recognized that propaganda is necessary in any society and more necessary in a society that’s more free.

The logic is sort of obvious. If you can control people with a whip, you don’t really care all that much what they think. That’s probably part of the reason why the Soviet Union wasn’t very repressive with regard to, say, samizdat and foreign broadcasts. They were to an extent, but nowhere near what they could have been. It really didn’t matter all that much. They had a bludgeon over people’s heads. Here it matters a lot more what people think, so propaganda has to be far more sophisticated and much more intensive, as Lasswell and others realized. “Propaganda,” he wrote back in the 1930s, “is a new technique of control” of the general public, who are a threat because of what he called “the ignorance and superstition [of] the masses. We must not succumb to democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests.” We are the best judges. That you’ll recognize from the two alternatives that Jefferson counterposed in 1826—notice that Jefferson’s worst fears became the credo of the modern liberal intellectuals, in fact, of the intellectual community rather generally.

Bolshevism is a subcase of this (not very different, if you think it through), a fact which was long noted by libertarian, by anarchist thinkers, and in fact predicted by Bakunin long before the Bolshevik Revolution. He predicted that there would be two forms of modern intellectuals, what he called the “Red bureaucracy,” who would use popular struggles to try to take control of state power and institute the most vicious and ruthless dictatorships in history, and the other group, who would see that there isn’t going to be an access to power that way and would therefore become the servants of private power and state capitalist democracy, where they would, as Bakunin put it, “beat the people with the people’s stick,” talk about democracy but beat the people with it. That’s actually one of the few predictions in the social sciences that’s come true, to my knowledge, and a pretty perceptive one. That’s the credo of twentieth-century intellectual life to quite a remarkable extent. It shows how much we have declined since Jefferson’s day. Jefferson was hoping that the alternative would turn out to be true; this is what did turn out to be true, his worst fears. This should be part of intellec- tual history in a free society, the kind of thing that you ought to learn in elementary school. Jefferson’s distinction applies with precision to the modern
age, except everything has been reversed and forgotten. This is also pretty standard in the academic culture. So, for example, the president of the American Political Science Association in 1934, Harold Lasswell, in his presidential address, right in the period of the big ferment in the Depression, workers’ struggles, everybody uprising, said, “We must exclude the ignorant, the uninformed and antisocial elements from the political arena.” That’s almost everybody, if you look at what he’s talking about. “What we need is an aristocracy of intellect and character. The men of brains must seize the torch”
(the action intellectuals of the Kennedy period, for example). There’s an unspoken assumption in all of this, unspoken and possibly unnoticed, since it’s not nice to see yourself in a mirror. The unspoken assumption is that these guys can seize the torch insofar as they keep well within the shadow that’s cast by big business that we call “politics.” If they move a little bit beyond that shadow or even to its margins, they forfeit their place within the aristocracy of intellect and character. As I say, that’s not much discussed, though an obvious truth.

The leading thinker, the leading exponent of these doctrines and one of the most influential ones, was Walter Lippmann, who was the leading figure in American journalism for half a century, a major commentator on foreign affairs, and also a highly regarded progressive political theorist. He made a distinction between what he called the “responsible men,” a small number—
he was of course one of them; everyone who presents the views is always within the group of the men of best quality, the aristocracy of intellect and character and so on—so there are the “responsible men” on the one side, and then there are the “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders,” who are the population. It’s a democracy, so the ignorant and meddlesome outsiders have a role or a function, as he put it. Their function in a democracy is to be spectators, not participants, but they are allowed to, as he put it, “lend their weight” periodically to one or another member of the responsible men, the men of best quality. That’s called an “election.” Then they’re supposed to go home and watch the Super Bowl, or whatever the equivalent was in the 1920s.

[A recurrent pattern through American history]
I’m talking about the center. This is the liberal, pragmatic mainstream. The spectrum extends in both directions. Toward the more libertarian end, it extends in his day, for example, to John Dewey, with his roots in classical liberalism. Toward the more reactionary end, it includes the mainstream business community (which has enormous fear of the rascal multitude) and its explicit political representatives, for example, say, the Wilson political system and, in the ideological sphere, the Reaganites, the people who are funding those journals that were mentioned before. Their view is that the population shouldn’t even be spectators. That’s too much. They should be completely outside.

That’s one reason why the Reaganites were so committed to protecting an increasingly powerful state, because they were statist reactionaries and believe in an extremely powerful and interventionist state intervening in the economy and overseas. But it should also be protected. So they instituted an unprecedented censorship, the first government propaganda agency since Wilson, this time illegal, because the laws had changed. They went for clandestine operations; big, huge clandestine operations reached new peaks.

Clandestine operations are operations undertaken targeting the domestic population. Everybody else knows about them. It’s just the domestic population that doesn’t. That’s the respect in which they’re clandestine. There are very interesting counterparts to this in corporate propaganda. I’ll read you a couple of examples if you’re interested. They’re kind of interesting to look at, rather well crafted. But I’ll put it aside, time being tight.

That’s basically the spectrum. At the libertarian end you have the extremists like Thomas Jefferson, Adam Smith, and John Dewey. That end has been pretty much sawed off. The rest of the spectrum lies between the Generalissimo of propaganda and his administration (that’s kind of like the center), Lippman, Bernays, Lasswell, the concept of engineered consent and elite control. Then you go all the way off to the right like, for example, the Reaganites, who think even a spectator role is too much. They’re basically Stalinists adapted to our political system.

At the end of World War I the Generalissimo had some work to do.

There was a lot of ferment, labor organizing, strikes, political thought, and so on. That had to be squashed. So the liberal Wilson administration conducted a very violent and repressive Red scare, with the support of the liberal press. That worked quite well. It led to a decade of quiescence and subordination to business control. That’s when these mainstream views of the Lippmann, Lasswell, and Bernays type flourished.

In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the quiescence broke. People became active again and fought to enter the political arena, began to organize. They actually won some victories in 1935. Labor finally won the rights that European labor had won half a century before, namely, the Wagner Act, the right to organize. That victory for working people and democracy sent a real chill through the business community. The National Association of Manufacturers, the major business association, in its publications described the “hazard facing industrialists in the newly realized political power of the masses.” This must be reversed and their thinking directed to more proper channels, or we are definitely headed for adversity [the industrialists thought]. They indeed began a huge corporate propaganda offensive to block this incipient threat of democracy and human rights. The world war came along and put it on hold for a while. But right after the war it took off: huge corporate propaganda offensives. That’s one of the reasons why the U.S. is essentially off the spectrum of industrial societies on things like health, social contract, labor rights, and so on. The right to organize was essentially destroyed by 1948, and by then the game was pretty much over. This is, incidentally, all pre-McCarthy. McCarthy was kind of a latecomer. This was led by a spectrum of liberal Democrats attacking independent thought and people further over to the right undermining unions and social policy. McCarthy picked it up and turned it into something obscene, but it was bad enough before. Essentially it was all over by the late 1940s.

The labor victories were reversed and there was a major attack on independent thought. That led to the 1950s, which were very quiescent, rather similar to the 1920s. Incidentally, this has been a recurrent pattern through American history: democratizing tendencies, repression, quiescence, and then things blow up again.

At that time there was a lot of new technology that helped, and that has a lot of bearing on the present day. So in the 1920s and 1930s radio was coming into existence. Radio, everybody recognized, is a public resource. It’s not like shoes. There’s a fixed band that’s got to be regulated. Everyone knew that. The question was, where will it go? Will radio be assigned to the public interests, meaning public radio, hence democratic to the extent that the society is democratic? That’s one option. The other option is just to hand it over to private absolute power and turn it into a device for propaganda and profit making by the private sector. Just about every country in the world, maybe every one, I don’t offhand know of an exception, went the first way, toward making it a public resource. The U.S. went the second way. It became a virtual private monopoly. A college could have a little radio station that you could hear for three blocks away, but this issue was struggled about. Labor groups, church groups, other public interest groups sought to put the U.S. within the mainstream of Western society, and they lost. They lost flat out.

That’s a reflection of a lot of other things, the extent to which we are indeed an unusual society with a highly class-conscious business community always fighting a vicious class war and very well aware of it. These quotes that I read from the National Association of Manufacturers are quite typical.

That was radio. By the time television came along it wasn’t even an issue.

The world went one way, the U.S. went the other way. That’s coming along right today. We’re right in the middle of it with the question of this information highway business. Again, there is a question: Is it going to be a public interest resource, serving a democratic, democratizing function, as the technology certainly allows, or is it simply going to become another instrument of corporate power and corporate propaganda and thought control and concocting artificial wants and so on? The answer to that depends on the balance of forces. The way things now stand, you can predict it’s just going to be another instrument of thought control and corporate power, but it doesn’t have to be.

These are questions of how people react. Other countries not very different from us, in fact very much like us, went the other way with radio and television, and we could have, too. It’s a question of organizing and activism and awareness. One of the reasons for the intensive propaganda is to keep people from thinking about these things. To some extent it has succeeded.

The 1950s were quiescent, very much like the 1920s. In the 1960s it broke again, rather like the 1930s. There was a lot of ferment, and it aroused the usual fear. Ever since then, from the early 1970s, there has been a major attempt to carry out another Red scare, essentially, to beat back the population to conformity and quiescence. It’s kind of interesting that this time it hasn’t worked. That’s really the first time in American history where the cycle hasn’t really worked out. It’s a rather interesting phenomenon with a lot of consequences. There’s not much time to talk about it. That’s what we’re right in the middle of.

[The attack on democracy: a key to understanding policy]
The new slogan in the early 1970s is what was called by the liberals the “crisis of democracy.” As the chairman of the political science department at Harvard put it, the Eaton professor of the science of government—I love that title—speaking for the science of government, he deplored the “crisis of democracy” and the fact that societies were becoming “ungovernable,” essentially because the rabble was trying to enter the public arena. That made it ungovernable. Unspoken in all of these discussions is that somebody is allowed into the public arena. Who? You’re not allowed to say that bad word.

But the public is not allowed. Samuel Huntington almost gave it away. He referred nostalgically to the Truman period, when Truman, as he put it, “had been able to govern the country with the help of a few Wall Street lawyers and financiers.” (That’s a little on the vulgar Marxist side—it wasn’t quite that—but you get the idea.) He had the general idea correct. In those days there was no “crisis of democracy”: that’s exactly the way things were supposed to be.

But now there was a crisis: women, blacks, young people, old people, farmers, all these bad types were trying to enter the public arena and press their demands, and that just made the society “ungovernable.” It had been fine when you had a couple of Wall Street lawyers and financiers doing it.

That’s the struggle we’re right in the middle of. The efforts to restore passivity have been a mixed success, not completely by any means. We’re right in the middle of it now, and the lines that are drawn are the usual ones, quite currently, in fact.

Take, say, the NAFTA debate. It’s very revealing in this respect. NAFTA was a major issue for the corporate world, such a major issue that the media, which usually pretend to be above the struggle, abandoned the pretense, and their class commitments became very explicit. In fact, the New York Times actually used the phrase “class lines” at one point. That’s like a no-no: you’re not allowed to refer to that. But it was just too obvious to conceal, as were the commitments of the media. There was a real frenzy about NAFTA. Unusual, in fact. That tells you something really important was at stake, because it was.

A lot of what was important was the attack on democracy, which is accelerated by these so-called trade agreements. Right at the end, it looked like not such a clear thing. The frenzy mounted to a fever pitch and focused on one thing primarily: the fact that labor, working people, were attempting to lobby their representatives. That was considered an absolute scandal. Clinton made all kinds of speeches, which were headlined all over the place, in which he denounced what he called the “naked pressure” and the “raw muscle of labor” which even descended to “pleading based on friendship, threatening based on money and work in campaigns”: total outrage to approach your representatives and say, look, we’d like you to do something. This went all the way over to what’s considered the left in the media, say, Anthony Lewis (about as far out as you can imagine and still be in respectable society), who denounced the “backward, unenlightened labor movement with its crude, threatening tactics and its fear of change.”
The whole thing was real hysteria. It was quite interesting. The New York Times the last day had an editorial which had a box in which they listed people in the New York area who were planning to vote against NAFTA. They listed their contributions from labor. They said it was ominous, that it raises serious questions about whether they were being honest and so on. The Washington Post did the same thing.

That was interesting. As everybody knew but didn’t say until afterward, when they came clean on it—in fact, they came clean the day after the vote—corporate lobbying was hugely greater than labor lobbying, by an overwhelming factor, as always. Nobody worried about that. They weren’t having “crude, threatening tactics” and all this bad stuff. There’s a good reason for that: corporate lobbying is not a problem. They are the men of best quality.

They are the ones who are supposed to rule. And the responsible intellectuals are their good and loyal servants. Therefore there’s nothing to say about corporate lobbying. They won’t object to it. It’s when the rascal multitude tries to get in the act that everyone starts foaming at the mouth. They are supposed to submit in silence to the rule of the aristocracy of wealth and, of course, the aristocracy of intellect and character, the smart guys who do the work for them.

Actually very little has changed since the seventeenth century. If you look at the hysteria in the seventeenth century, among seventeenth-century intellectuals, which I just gave a couple of quotes from (I have a lot more elsewhere if you like), it’s very similar to the hysteria today, say, if working people dare to lobby their representatives. The reason it’s the same is the issues are the same. You can call it a new world order, if you like, but it’s the same class war: the intellectuals playing the same service role, the ones who are within the shadow cast by big business, that is, and therefore granted respectability.

Departures from this do exist, but they’re very slight.

All of this helps to explain the enthusiasm for NAFTA and GATT. The primary thing about them is that they vest far more power in private, absolutist institutions which are completely unaccountable to the public and operate in secret, spawning the de facto world government that the business press openly talks about. All of that moves us back to that spectrum on democracy. This moves us toward the reactionary end, the Reaganite end, in which the population are not even spectators. Insofar as power is shifted to the transnational arena with its own de facto world government, youre not even a spectator, because only the real experts and specialists have any idea what’s going on in the IMF. That’s a great achievement in the destruction of democracy, and that helps explain the tremendous enthusiasm for NAFTA, GATT, and other such profoundly anti-democratic developments—also anti-market developments, but as I say, that’s another story. Finally, just a couple of words on how this stuff works out in our dependencies. Sometimes it’s described with considerable candor. One of the clear- est voices these days is a former Reaganite insider, a guy named Thomas Carothers, who was part of the “democracy enhancement” programs, as they were called, within the State Department in the 1980s. These were hailed with great pride that makes us the beacon of the future. He has written a
book and a couple of articles about this, and they’re informative and honest, rather rueful. He says that the policies were sincere, but he thinks they failed.

On the contrary, in my opinion they succeeded quite brilliantly. But putting aside that judgment, what he describes is entirely accurate. It’s just interesting to have it said from the inside. He points out that there was a correlation between democracy in the hemisphere and U.S. influence, namely, a negative correlation. Where U.S. influence was least, the steps toward democracy were greatest, primarily in the Southern Cone of Latin America, where, as he points out, speaking from the inside, the Reagan administration strongly opposed the moves toward democracy, tried to back the autocratic governments, which are in fact a residue of the Kennedy liberals, I should say, who were very close to the Reaganites in their picture of the world, remarkably close.

The Reagan Administration sought to preserve these neo-Nazi states in the Southern Cone, but they failed and there was democracy. Then of course they took credit for what happened afterward. That in fact happened all over the place: where U.S. influence was the greatest, in Central America and the Caribbean, the effects were worst. He recognizes that but doesn’t draw any conclusions from it. But in fact it’s something that generalizes on human rights as well (it’s another one of those lessons you’re not supposed to learn).

He then points out what happened. Here is his description (from the inside), which he opposes as a bad thing. He says, Washington sought only limited, top-down forms of democratic change that did not risk upsetting the traditional structures of power with which the U.S. has long been allied. It sought to maintain the basic order of quite undemocratic societies because of the deep fear of populace-based change with all its implications for upsetting established economic and political orders and heading off in a leftist direction.

What’s a “leftist direction”? That’s a direction of some “leftist extremist” that holds that “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few, booted and spurred, ready to ride them.” It is the view that we should oppose “a single and splendid government founded on banking institutions and monied incorporations.” I’m quoting that “leftist extremist” Thomas Jefferson in the early days of the corporate state-capitalist absolutism that he despised and feared and that has come into existence.

Carothers is quite correct. His picture of what happened is accurate, generalizes very broadly. It applies at home as well. It is the key to understanding policy.

[Lessons still not taught in elementary school]
Again, these are truths that would be taught in elementary school in a free society. Major efforts have to be made in the educational system, way up to the elite universities, to prevent people from seeing that 2 + 2 = 4. But that’s the answer: it does. It’s not very hard to figure out. If you look not even very profoundly, you see it all over the place. It’s quite systematic. The policy is that the traditional structures of power must remain. They have to be protected from the “populace-based changes.” That’s true abroad and that’s true at home. Democracy is a fine thing, but only if it has the right outcome.

Democracy is defined not by process but by outcome. The right guys have to win, otherwise it’s not democracy. The “right guys” means Thomas Jefferson’s “banking institutions and monied incorporations” and their modern inheritors and the aristocracy of intellect and character that serves them and labors to conceal the reality of the world from the rascal multitude. People like you, if you get properly trained. You have to be willing to accept the training, of course. And if you do, a lot of privilege and power comes with that submission to power, a lot of advantages.

We can see the Thomas Carothers thesis of the 1980s, which is just a chapter of history right before our eyes today. In fact, it’s playing itself out with really brilliant clarity right in front of us in Haiti. There couldn’t be a clearer example. In Haiti, the U.S. made a mistake. We had been supporting dictators and murderers and everything was all great. But there was a mistake: they allowed a free election. It was assumed that the U.S.-backed candidate, a World Bank official, would win easily. He had all the resources. But unknown to the “men of best quality” there and here, there had been a lot of ferment in Haiti. There was a lot of popular organizing. Many popular organizations had developed, with nobody paying attention to them. They had been very effective, and in fact the wrong guy won with an overwhelming majority in the first free election in the history of the country, namely President Aristide, with two-thirds of the vote.

The trouble is, it was the wrong two-thirds of the population. As it was described by Americas Watch, the leading human rights group, he was swept into power by a remarkably advanced array of popular organizations that gave the vast majority of the population a share in local and national politics. Totally the wrong thing. Completely wrong from every point of view. He was quickly overthrown by violence, and that was the end to Haiti’s democracy. As the New York Times put it in a headline right afterward, “Haiti’s Democracy, Such as It Was.” That contemptuous comment means “not much.” That just symbolically means the rabble that voted for him. We read regularly that President Aristide has meager democratic credentials. He is opposed by what the New York Times calls “civil society,” which fears that he supports class-based violence. He even blamed the rich for the poverty of the masses. That’s an absolute outrage, to tell elementary truths in public. Maybe in secret somewhere, but not in public.

That happens to be the New York Times, but it’s standard, again. Pick at random, that’s the story. So therefore Aristide must “broaden his government.” That’s the current phrase. Unlike Clinton, whose government is broad enough—just take a look at the average income in his cabinet. So that’s broad enough, but Aristide must “broaden” his cabinet. That’s a code word which everyone understands. It means that he must broaden his cabinet to exclude the huge mass of the population, because they don’t belong there, and he must extend it to the “democratic” elements, which are called the “moderates”
in the military and the business community. Power has to be shifted into their hands.

Who are the “moderates”? The “moderates” are the ones who don’t think everyone should just be exterminated. That’s why they’re moderates.

Rather, they think that people should be allowed to work for $0.14 an hour in U.S.-owned assembly plants—which, incidentally, is a very useful weapon against poor people and working people at home: it’s a way to lower standards of living and wages throughout the world, in the rich societies, an extremely important thing. So that’s the “moderates.” Also, they’re allowed to produce food for export. Right now, under Clinton (although I haven’t seen any headlines about it), food exports from Haiti are increasing.

This is a starving country, remember. Food exports are increasing not by a small factor. They increased by a factor of thirty-six last year (a big number), under Clinton, thanks to the liberal Democrats. That’s fruits, nuts, melons—from a starving island. That’s for the benefit of U.S. agribusiness and yuppie markets.

In fact, all trade with Haiti is increasing rather substantially under what is laughably called an embargo. The reason is because the embargo has an exception. It has an exception for U.S.-owned assembly plants. When that’s mentioned, it’s always explained as a “humanitarian gesture.” You have to understand that Haitians suffer only when U.S.-owned plants don’t export and import. When others don’t export and import, they don’t suffer. Also, like children in Cuba, fortunately, they don’t suffer when they starve, so you don’t have to worry about embargoes there. But we have to have a very carefully crafted embargo in Haiti which excludes U.S.-owned assembly plants, whose trade is increasing (in fact, total trade is increasing), which allows export of food, which doesn’t happen to notice that the Dominican border is completely porous. The rich can get anything they feel like. The USS. is totally impotent to control the Dominican army, which it runs. The U.S. is known for having been able to exert influence in places, but not over a superpower like the Dominican Republic, so they can’t do anything about that.

The Haitian military, as everyone knows, lives primarily on narcotrafficking. Take a look. The U.S. Navy and Coast Guard have been able to pick up just about every fishing boat that escapes Haiti with some terrified refugees. That’s a totally illegal blockade, incidentally. It’s as if Libya, say, were to block all commercial air traffic out of the U.S. But we’re a terrorist state, so we do what we feel like. We’ve been able to pick up every refugee, just about, but not a single narcotrafficking boat. It’s amazing, isn’t it?

This was asked by the Black Caucus. They got an answer. They were told the problem in stopping narcotrafficking in Haiti is that the Haitian military, who we worked with and still work with, don’t have radar. So they can’t pick up the planes and boats. And of course the U.S. Navy and Air Force, because of these terrible Pentagon budget cuts, can’t figure out a way to remedy this deficiency. So therefore what can we do? We’d like to stop it but we can’t.

All this is going on. The end result is perfectly predictable and has been predictable from the beginning. For example, it was predictable when Warren Christopher, the secretary of state, had his confirmation hearings. The incoming liberal Democrats asked him (if you looked at the small print), What do you think about Haiti? He said, We think that President Aristide definitely has a place in the final settlement, but we haven’t quite determined yet what that place is. With that ringing endorsement of democracy, the Clinton administration took it over and has succeeded in harshening the policies of the Bush administration, which Christopher attacked, including what I’ve just described. The end result is, of course, that the government is to be “broadened” to include the “moderates” of the kind that I’ve described. Aristide either doesn’t get back at all, or maybe he gets back and has a kind of symbolic presence, which means that the population has a symbolic presence.

Meanwhile, the population is terrorized and intimidated. A year ago, when the Americas Watch report came out, they pointed out, already at the beginning of the Clinton term, that if this goes on, it won’t matter much whether Aristide gets back or not. The popular organizations will have been decimated. People will be intimidated and terrified. Then you can even run a vote, like the way we’re doing in El Salvador. And then you’ll be fine. If you intimidate and demoralize people enough, if you crush them, if you eliminate any hope, make it clear to them that if they get out of line they’re going to be slaughtered, then you can even run an election. Then you’ll get Anthony Lewis to talk about this “romantic era,” like Thomas Jefferson, as he did after we succeeded in doing precisely that in Nicaragua. That’s called “democracy,” and we’re now watching it play out before our eyes in the case of Haiti.

That formula that Carothers described is it. If after sufficient terror, intimidation, destruction of popular organizations, and so on, you can ensure that power stays in the hands of the right power groups, the ones linked up to U.S. corporations and banking institutions and the others who basically run this society, then that’s democracy and everybody’s happy and we praise ourselves for our glory. As I say, the same thing’s going on in El Salvador right now. We saw it in Nicaragua, and we’re going to see it again. It has nothing to do with the cold war, zero. That was just a pretext for things that happened before and continue without change since.

So what are the prospects for democracy? Again, that depends on what we mean by “democracy.” If we mean what Thomas Jefferson hoped for, then the prospects are gloomy and declining significantly. If we mean the official theory that’s been taken over, that has in fact taken over our increasingly impoverished and authoritarian intellectual culture, then the prospects are just as grand as we’re told every day by respectable authorities who sing odes to the new world order for which we (meaning ¢hey) are the gatekeepers and the model.

That, of course, is not the whole story. The real prospects for authentic democracy depend on something else. They depend on how the people in the rich and privileged societies learn some other lessons, for example, the lessons that are being taught right now by Mayans in Chiapas, Mexico, who are among the most impoverished, oppressed sectors on the continent, but unlike us they retain a vibrant tradition of liberty and democracy, a tradition that we have allowed to slip out of our hands or simply be stolen from us. Unless people here and in the other rich and privileged societies can recapture and revitalize that tradition, the prospects for democracy are indeed dim.