I think this is because in other countries, there is either a diversity of political opinion (represented by European parliamentary government systems) and/or there is strong enough social oppression that people really have to decide which side they're on -- they have to stake out their political beliefs and live or die by them.
In America, however, we find neither in evidence. Americans live in the freest society in the world, and at the same time, are the most propagandized people in the world, too. That may seem contradictory, but it's true. Noam Chomsky and others have written extensively about this -- namely, it is in free societies where you need so much thought control to occur, because in a free society, people have the means to actually effect change. So, the challenge for those in power is to keep people unaware of the need for change, and part of that involves the control of language and thought. I've alluded to that in my Buzzwords section, but it goes further and deeper than this.
Politics makes mainstream Americans uncomfortable. They like to bitch about Congress, or the President, and they think that makes them politically aware. But Americans are truly an apolitical people. It's the result of decades of propaganda by the corporate/government elites that run our society. Most Americans are unable to have an intelligent political discussion, because of this process.
For example, if I say "socialist", odds are you "know" what that means. It should conjure up some images, even if you've never even met a socialist. What images come to mind?
Odds are you envision the former Soviet Union, or China, or Cuba. Communism. Police states. Oppression. Poverty. Perhaps you think of a Utopian ideal, but not practical in real terms. Generally, it's a negative image conjured up by that word.
Where have these images and ideas come from? The propaganda system, of course. Propaganda, by definition, is designed to engender a response without thought. Sort of like somebody pushing your buttons, prompting a knee-jerk reaction. Americans have been hammered with this drek for over a century -- moreso recently, as the corporate media have gotten new tools.
I'm reminded of a discussion with a coworker, years ago (I was a teenager), and she dismissed an argument I'd made by saying, "but, that's socialism." She repeated that a few times, and to her, it clinched the argument -- socialism was presumptively bad. Had she ever read anything about socialism? No, she hadn't. Was she aware that this negative opinion wasn't her own? No.
This political ignorance occurs across the spectrum in America. It's not that Americans are idiots, because we're not. It's that billions of corporate dollars are spent annually to stupefy us. The net result of the propagandization of America is that political thought evaporates -- it becomes reduced to one or two banal, simplified abstractions. Socialism's bad. Anarchism won't work. Capitalism is good. America is the land of the free. Government is a necessary evil. People are basically bad. I'm sure you can insert your own examples of this, once you become aware of it.
What's more, so many of these propaganda ideas are actually unconscious -- they've become internalized in the individual, who grafts them onto their own meager political opinions. These ready-made answers spring forth when needed, and create the illusion that a person is informed.
That's the most insidious part of it all -- these same people don't realize that they're utterly ignorant of the topic at hand. Have they actually researched it or done any reading on it? No. Why should they? They know it's bad. They know all about it. So they dismiss it out of hand, without a moment's further thought.
If somebody was talking about computer programming, or flying an airplane, or brain surgery, would you spout off on that without any knowledge whatsoever? Perhaps you would, but you'd be an idiot if you did -- you would be ignorant of the topic. The one exception to this is the area of politics. Only here to people think they know what's what without actually bothering to read, ponder, and understand the ideas behind it.
And they don't even think about this paradox. Political ignorance is somehow an American virtue, and the result is that we live in an extraordinarily depoliticized society. I should add that not everybody is this way. Some people genuinely bother to explore the ideas the run our society, and think about them. But these people are definitely in the minority. I think it's safe to say that the majority of Americans are clueless about the nature of our society.
Now, that may sound snide or arrogant, but I don't leave it at that. I encourage people to take some time to actually learn about the various forms of government, to come to an understanding what politics is all about. Too often I hear Americans mutter the words "oh, that's politics" as if that has any meaning.
If the majority of Americans remain apolitical and disengaged and ignorant, then the elites that run our society have that much freer of a hand. They'll be happy to point out all sorts of boogeymen to keep you in line with their agenda, which usually revolves around securing more power and privilege for themselves.
The sad thing is that if you're reading this essay right now, you're one of the people who actually is trying to get a clue. The people I'm really addressing don't even know anarchism exists, or if they do, they have some vague images of bomb-throwing lunatics. Again, courtesy of decades-old media mythmaking.
These people -- these "mainstream" Americans -- just stumble along with a vague sense that something's wrong, but they still look to the corporate media to lead them out of the desert of the American political landscape. In broadcast lingo, they talk about signal-to-noise ratios. Noise is static, while signal is clear broadcasting -- in America, we are awash in noise, with precious little signal.
And it's getting worse as the corporate media continues to conglomerate. In a few more years, we'll only have a few capitalist media companies with global reach. Much noise, scant signal.
The result of this noise is that we're unable to really think and talk about anything, because Americans are busy fighting political strawmen conjured up by the corporate and government elites.
In American circles, the only words that have any real meaning are "liberal", "moderate", and "conservative" -- I use "meaning" loosely here, because these words are twisted by the barren nature of American politics. Words like "radical" are used for both left- and right-wingers, and is roundly painted as a bad thing by the corporate media.
This is amusing, because every single thing we take for granted today was once a radical idea. All progress comes from the radical, which embodies the new, the different, the...revolutionary. I ran across something the other day about public libraries, which, in their day, caused a huge uproar, because it was such a "radical" idea. Like public schools. Or birth control. Or gender and racial equality. And so on.
Time and again, this is so. People freak out about these new-fangled ideas, and fight them out of ignorance and sometimes outright wrongness, but eventually, they come to be seen as sane and sensible, if we're lucky. Which brings me to another word.
"Reactionary" is a word that just doesn't appear in American political language, although you can see it in European circles, and among politically aware Americans. Reactionaries thrive in America, but, like radicals, they don't get attention (although they are more visible than radicals, because there are quite a few wealthy reactionaries out there, and so they have their foundations and support groups, media, and even colleges). Unlike radicals, they have money backing them, so they've got more of a presence in the US than radicals.
While radicals try to push society into the future, reactionaries seek to force things back into the past. They are political throwbacks, and I think you can take some guesses about who fits in this category (Religous Right being one example, but by no means exclusive. Neo-nazis and hate groups are also notorious reactionaries). Reactionaries wax nostalgic about the "good old days" (which, at the time, weren't so good -- I mean, do we really want to go back to the 50s?)
Modern political opinion really crystallized around the French Revolution, where the radical (!) idea of popular self-rule and abolition of monarchy met serious resistance from the reactionary monarchies of Europe. Since then, society has fought between opposing poles -- one, the radicals, seek the just society. One writer termed it as the "unfinished business of the French Revolution" -- libery, equality, fraternity (aka, solidarity). They seek a society without privilege and social oppression.
The other side, the reactionaries, seeks a return to the old order. They've basically been pissed ever since monarchy went out of the vogue (although keep in mind there are still monarchies out there). They like a stratified society, where the "better" people rule over the lower orders. This adaptive ideology continues in our supposedly democratic society, in the clear form of social wealth. The media mythmakers like to say that because we lack noble titles, America is somehow a classless society, but that's bogus, when all that really matters is social wealth. Take a wealthy American and an impoverished European noble, and you tell me who's got the edge, there?
A modern adaptation of the old feudal "ideal" embraced by reactionaries is fascism. Fascism is the ultimate expression of reactionary ideas, just as anarchism is the ultimate expression of radicalism, and it makes sense -- the former seeks an incredibly powerful central government and unfettered capitalist control of property; the latter seeks no government at all, and no propertarian elites. The anarchist and the fascist have always been the bitterest of enemies, because we seek opposite social ends. I could elaborate on that more, but I have more to talk about below.
But it gets even more perverse. While people are referred to as "liberals" in government, I say, without hyperbole, that there are no liberals in the American government. Perhaps Bernie Sanders of Vermont, but that's it.
See, the American political elite has continued a rightward shift for many decades, so when somebody is called "left-of-center" or a "liberal", it's a relative term, based on a new political center.
Imagine the above list, but shift it to the right. Where the original "moderate" was, I put "centrist" -- that's the political center. By shifting everything to the right, the new "moderate" becomes de facto right-wing, while "conservatives" are outright reactionaries. I put "n/a" where liberals and radicals should be. The names marked by parentheses are what these actually, are although they aren't called that.
This may seem confusing, but it gives you an idea of how twisted the American political system is. The above words (not the parenthetical words) are the only permissable ones in the corporate media. They are unable to imagine anybody else even existing, and anybody else must be bad.
But what's so deceiving is that if you go by the words and rhetoric alone, you think you're getting one thing, and you actually get another. That's why it's so amusing to listen to the media talk about various would-be candidates. Like Bill Bradley was termed "liberal" or "left-of-center" and yet it's without substance -- look at his track record and the policies he advocated, and you find he's not even remotely liberal. Or John McCain was considered appealing to moderates, but again his politics are strongly right-wing. Not centrist, certainly.
Al Gore and George W. Bush are both right-wingers. Yes. Al Gore may be slightly left of Bush, but that doesn't make him a left-winger, or a liberal. What's spooky is that the press will work hard to create the illusion that there's a choice between either of these clowns, when there isn't. By redefining where the center is (in this case, "conservative") a new political spectrum is created, one manifestly sympathetic to corporate wealth, because the opinions represented are so limited.
I think a new term -- "gliberal" -- should be used when describing anybody from the Democratic Party who pays lip service to being somehow left-wing. I want to make it abundantly clear: there are no liberals, and certainly no radicals in the American government today. Noam Chomsky has said several times that the last true liberal American president was Richard Nixon.
That may seem bizarre, but in American politics, it's on the mark. When you look at the actual policies of American political leaders, you see the substance behind the rhetoric, and you find the complete absence of left-wing ideas in American politics.
Meantime, the American political leadership races ever rightward, producing a perilously lopsided political landscape. Moreover, the American public also leads the media, which is also overwhelmingly right-wing (this might fly in the face of the myth of the liberal media, but the coverage and editorial stances -- aka, the evidence -- backs this up.)
Thus, we find ourselves in a potentially revolutionary situation. The leadership represents the interests of corporate wealth and power, at the expense of the rest of society. The range of acceptable political opinion is wafer-thin, representing right-of-center, to conservative, to reactionary (mislabelled liberal, moderate, and conservative). Again, I'm not making this up -- if you actually look behind the lip service and rhetoric, to the actual policies, you find a continuous rightward shift, politically.
We find an American populace saturated with rightist propaganda, starved for political alternatives in a system that actively prevents any alternatives from coming about. It makes the continuing political disconnect actually a logical reaction -- when you know a system isn't representing your interests, why play the game at all? It's a sucker's bet.
When this political absenteeism occurs without other political activity, it's a bad thing, because it abandons the field to the reactionaries and other would-be oppressors. Instead of disengagement, apathy, and apolitical grumbling, Americans need to discover just who they are.
The media is quick to conjure up phantom issues to distract people, and help them define themselves without really understanding what they believe, politically. You can spot political distraction issues because the media gives them lots of attention. Remember Monicagate? There's a political distraction "issue" at work.
Are you in favor or opposed to capitalism? That's a real defining issue, but it's so awash in propaganda as to be difficult for Americans to understand. What the hell is capitalism, anyway? Can you honestly say? I can, because I've read about it. If you can't articulate why you support or oppose something, then you're arguing from ignorance.
How about socialism? What is that, anyway? Again, this requires research on your part. Americans value socialist ideas without knowing it. Like public libraries? Socialism. Like public schools? Socialism. Like national health care? Wait, we don't have that in the US, cuz that's socialism. But they have it in every other industrialized nation. When you get past the word, Americans are actually more socialist than their leaders, who are pure capitalist drones.
Which brings me back to the beginning -- Americans need to educate themselves politically, if there's going to be any change in this society. That means reading things from all different sides of the spectrum, and taking time to think about what it means to you.
There is a pervasive American aversion to understanding politics. It makes people uncomfortable. And that discomfort is important, if it translates into education and activity. It's bad if it leads to alienation and apathy. Those in power want Americans to be a powerless mass of alienated inactivity. That's the ideal state for them, because it frees their hands to serve their corporate bosses more effectively.
The important thing for your political understanding to be derived from your own thought and study, not from the propaganda of others. My page is obviously anarchist political propaganda -- duhh -- I see the world with an anarchist's eyes. But that's because of my own study and thought. I came to the conclusions I did because of my own work and experience. It made sense to me. I openly proclaim my bias -- I support anarchism; I oppose capitalism, fascism, and authoritarian socialism.
That's what you need to do. Know where you stand, and why -- based on your own intellectual legwork -- and you'll be better armed in our propaganda-swamped American society and able to bring about the social change you desire. You do that and you'll be ahead of the majority of Americans, who simply regurgitate the opinions they've been force-fed by corporations, the government, and/or the media.
Make no mistake: no ideology is a substitute for critical thinking. It's just not. But it does help you form a worldview and have opinions with substance behind them, instead of either "I dunno" or whatever the media is spitting out that moment. In a society as propagandized as ours, you have the choice of pretending it doesn't affect you, or you can get involved, and gain some understanding of the world. But if you rely on the opinion makers and media pundits for your opinions, you'll be parroting back what they're spoonfeeding you, which represents the "diverse" range of opinions I listed above -- neoliberal to reactionary. Instead, do something radical -- think for yourself.
3/29/00
a4a
There are anthologies of political ideas out there. If you want some book recommendations, drop me a line. Just let me know the topic you're curious about. I don't recommend any American History textbooks, by the way, with the exception of Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" and, to a much lesser extent, "Lies My Teacher Told Me" by James Loewen.
Return to Anarchy for Anybody