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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
From the breweries of Colorado and the faculties of Harvard to the Nobel Prize ceremonies in Stockholm, Marco D’Eramo guides us through the places where a new war has been thought out, planned and financed. It’s a real war, though it has been fought silently, without us realizing it. Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in the world, said it best: ‘There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning’.
The revolt from above has affected all fields – not only the economy, but also justice and education. It has twisted our ideas of society, family and ourselves. It has taken advantage of every crisis, whether natural disasters, terrorist attacks, recessions or pandemics. It has used every weapon, from the information revolution to the technology of debt. It has changed the nature of power, from discipline to control. It has learnt from the workers’ struggle, using Gramsci and Lenin against them.
Maybe the time has come for us to do the same and to learn from our opponents.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
1. Counterintelligentsia
The Marines Study Ideology
That Fatal Memorandum of 1971
The Midwest Enters the Fray
The Three Stages of the Reconquest
Assault Think Tanks
2. Ideas Are Weapons
State phobia
The Campus as a Battleground
3. The Justice Market
Optimum Pollution
Free Baby Market
4. Trigger-Happy Parents
5. The Tyranny of Benevolence
6. Capitale sive Natura
Business Ontology
7. The Politics Pricelist
The Privatization of the Brain
8. Arsenic and Witchcraft I: The Remote-Control Society
9. Arsenic and Witchcraft II: Do Not Forgive Us Our Debts as We Do Not Forgive Those Indebted to Us
Financial Corollary
10. And They All Lived Antily Ever After
The Debt with the Planet, or the Optimal Catastrophe
The Festival of Unintended Consequences
11. Social Pornography
12. The Circular Thought of the Economic Circuit
The Rotten Kid Theorem and Other Tautologies
The Ideological Entrepreneur and Other Anachronisms
13. The Game is Rigged. However
14. Time to Learn from Your Enemies
Postscript: In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Bank Account
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Table
Chapter 6
Table 1
Healthcare spending per capita in dollars and in % of GDP (2020)
Guide
Cover
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
Begin Reading
Postscript: In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Bank Account
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
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Masters
The Invisible War of the Powerful Against their Subjects
MARCO D’ERAMO
Translated by Alice Kilgarriff
polity
Originally published in Italian as Dominio: La guerra invisibile dei potenti contro i sudditi © Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore Milano, October 2020
This English edition © Polity Press, 2024
This work has been translated with the contribution of the Centre for Books and Reading of the Italian Ministry of Culture.
The translation of this work has been funded by SEPS Segretariato Europeo per le Pubblicazioni Scientifiche
Via Val d’Aposa 7 – 40123 Bologna – [email protected] – www.seps.it
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5745-5
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023936984
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Prologue
When we hear the word revolution, we invariably think of the oppressed rising up against their oppressors, of subjects overthrowing the powerful, the dominated rebelling against those dominating them. We imagine the Levellers who decapitated King Charles I in London in 1649; the sans-culottes of Paris who stormed the Bastille in 1789 and condemned King Louis XVI to the guillotine in 1793; the black slaves in Haiti who in 1791 set fire to their masters’ plantations and declared independence for the nation in 1801; the Bolsheviks who took the Winter Palace in St Petersburg in 1917 and shot Tzar Nicholas II in Ekaterinburg in 1918; the Cuban barbudos who attacked the Moncada barracks in 1953 and chased out dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959.
But in reality, there is not just one kind of revolution; there are two and they are opposites, as Aristotle observed some 2,400 years ago in a splendid (and inexplicably ignored) passage of Politics: ‘The universal and chief cause of this revolutionary feeling has been already mentioned; viz. the desire of equality, when men think that they are equal to others who have more than themselves; or, again, the desire of inequality and superiority, when conceiving themselves to be superior they think that they have not more but the same or less than their inferiors; pretensions which may and may not be just. Inferiors revolt in order that they may be equal, and equals that they may be superior.’1 Those who are dominated rebel because they are not equal enough; those who dominate revolt because they are too equal. ‘For the weaker are always asking for equality and justice, but the stronger care for none of these things.’2
Seeing this is both shocking and enlightening. It opens up the horizon of a revolution from those above against those below. Aristotle makes a further point: ‘Now, in oligarchies the masses make revolution under the idea that they are unjustly treated, because, as I said before, they are equals, and have not an equal share, and in democracies the notables revolt, because they are not equals, and yet have only an equal share.’3 This suggests that when confronted with what they perceive as too strong a push for democracy, the dominant react and revolt against the dominated.
My thesis here is that the last fifty years have seen the enactment of a colossal revolution of the rich against the poor, masters against servants, the dominant against the dominated. This revolution has been invisible, a ‘stealth’ revolution, as US philosopher Wendy Brown calls it,4 using language borrowed from military aviation. Stealth bombers do not show up on radar. The military metaphor is appropriate because it has been a real war, even if it has been fought without us noticing. However, none other than Warren Buffett, one of the wealthiest men in the world, acknowledged it fourteen years ago, candidly telling a New York Times reporter that: ‘There’s class warfare all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.’5 Five years later, in 2011, Buffett doubled down and stated that the rich were no longer just winning the war: ‘Actually, there’s been class warfare going on for the last 20 years, and my class has won. […] If there’s class warfare, the rich class has won.’ The Washington Post columnist goes on to comment: ‘if there’s been any class warfare in this country, it has been waged from the top down for decades, and the rich have won’.6 This is not some fanatic talking about class warfare from the top down, but a protagonist of that very war: their victory is so total that they can talk about it openly. We, on the other hand, are too ashamed to mention it, not least because we risk being suspected immediately of extremism.
This all-out ideological warfare is the story I want to relate here. Like any war, it has required planning, strategies, choices of battlefield and the careful use of crises. As Barack Obama’s former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said: ‘You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.’7 Never waste a shortage, an insolvency, an attack; definitely don’t waste a financial crisis or pandemic.
The story of this war begins with the United States, because it is the empire of our age and all other countries are its variously docile or unruly subjects. What’s more, one of the effects the victory of the dominant has delivered is that it renders us oblivious to our own subjugation and clouds our perception of power relations. Thank goodness Donald Trump arrived to remind us of the tyranny, arrogance and callousness of every imperial domination. Still, not even his breath-taking vulgarity could rouse us from our intellectual torpor. If we want proof, we need merely observe the Western left: what remains of it is now entirely Thatcherite, having adopted the slogan T.I.N.A. – there is no alternative – made famous by the Iron Lady and internalized by global financial capitalism as the only possible future for the planet. As Mark Fisher, who is sadly missed, put it in Capitalism Realism, ‘It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.’8 There is an abyss separating us from the 1960s, when the economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote that ‘With regard to the designation “liberal”, almost everyone now so describes himself’ (1964).9 Fifty years later, the word liberal has become an insult.
How did this reversal happen? We tend to attribute it to megatrends, from globalization and the new digital revolution to long-term objective and statistical phenomena, not least because this interpretation consoles the Marxist who still lives within us. In fact, it happened because one side waged a war that the other side didn’t notice. And why didn’t we notice? Because of the tendency that prevails in so-called progressive opinion: we underestimate adversaries, dismissing the right’s victories as ‘belly aching’, ‘exasperation’, ‘resentment’ or ‘ignorance’ without recognizing the long-term trends. We have been unable to see the wood for the trees.
1.
Aristotle,
Politics
, Book V (trans. Benjamin Jowett). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885. Available at:
https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/125519/5013_Aristotle_Politics.pdf
, p. 137
2.
Ibid., Book V, p. 157.
3.
Ibid., Book V, p. 139.
4.
Wendy Brown,
Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution
. New York: Zone Books, 2015.
5.
Ben Stein, ‘In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning’,
The New York Times
, 26 November 2006,
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yourmoney/26every.html
.
6.
Greg Sargent, ‘There’s been class warfare for the last 20 years, and my class has won’,
The Washington Post
, 30 September 2011,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/theres-been-class-warfare-for-the-last-20-years-and-my-class-has-won/2011/03/03/gIQApaFbAL_blog.html
.
7.
He said this in 2008 during the most acute stage of the financial crisis, inspiring Philip Mirowski’s book,
Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown
. London: Verso, 2013.
8.
Mark Fisher,
Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
Winchester: Zero Books, 2009, p. 1.
9.
Cited by Lewis H. Lapham in his wonderful essay ‘Tentacles of Rage: The Republican Propaganda Mill, A Brief History’,
Harper’s Magazine
, September 2004, pp. 31–41, p. 31.
The terms of the social compact between these two estates of men may be summed up in a few words. ‘You have need of me, because I am rich and you are poor. We will therefore come to an agreement. I will permit you to have the honour of serving me, on condition that you bestow on me the little you have left, in return for the pains I shall take to command you.’
Jean-Jacques Rousseau,Discourse on Political Economy (1755)*
*
Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Discourse on Political Economy
, available at:
https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/125495/5020_Rousseau_A_Discourse_on_Political_Economy.pdf
(my italics), p. 19.
1Counterintelligentsia
The ideological defeat is so absolute that the left has arrived at the point where it is ashamed of its own ideology. We have been so thoroughly convinced that ‘ideology’ is a dirty word that we no longer dare use it, when instead ideology’s critical importance is recognized even by the Pentagon.
The Marines Study Ideology
This is a direct quote from the official US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, written by Generals David H. Petraeus and James Ames (2007):
Ideas are a motivating factor […]. Insurgencies gather recruits and amass popular support through ideological appeal. […] The movement’s ideology explains its followers’ tribulations and provides a course of action to remedy those ills. The most powerful ideologies tap latent, emotive concerns of the populace, such as the desire for justice, religious beliefs, or liberation from foreign occupation. Ideology provides a prism, including a vocabulary and analytical categories, through which the situation is assessed. As such, ideology can shape the movement’s organization and operational methods […] The central mechanism through which ideologies are expressed and absorbed is the narrative. A narrative is an organizational scheme expressed in story form. Narratives are central to the representation of identity […] (1-65–1-66).
The manual returns repeatedly to the narrative, particularly in the chapter on Intelligence:
The most important cultural form for COIN [Counter Insurgency] forces to understand is the narrative. A cultural narrative is a story recounted in the form of a causally linked set of events that explains an event in a group’s history and expresses the values, character, or self-identity of the group. Narratives are the means through which ideologies are expressed and absorbed by individuals in a society. […] By listening to narratives, COIN forces can identify the basic core values of the society (3-51).1
What is most interesting (and disconcerting) is how, in their use of the language and jargon of the US human sciences, they draw on two fundamental theses expressed by French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser 50 years ago: (a) ‘Ideology is a “Representation” of the Imaginary Relationship of Individuals to their Real Conditions of Existence’; (b) ‘all ideology has the function (which defines it) of “constituting” concrete individuals as subjects’2 (referred to in the Manual as ‘subjects of insurgence’).
The upshot is that we always have an ideology, whether we want it or not, hence why no one can say ‘I am not ideological’. When you do not adhere voluntarily to an ideology (such as a religion), you adhere to one involuntarily. We ‘breathe’ ideology, and usually one ideology that denies itself as such. Indeed, it thrives precisely by denying itself to be one while labelling all other ‘representations’ as ideologisms. So, while even the marines have to learn how important ideology is, the Western left clutches its pearls, accusing its own cultural and political legacy of ideologism!
In some ways, we might view the ideological war unleashed against the left, fought and resoundingly won over the last 50 years, to have been precisely a form of counter-insurgency, a reaction to the movements in the 1960s. This war was fought and won first and foremost in the United States.
What follows is not the umpteenth history of the crushing advance of the reactionary right in the US, a story that has been told a million times over. These tales are often decentred, focusing more on the alliances rather than the battlefield, more on the armies than on the potential spoils of war. Instead, we will concentrate on the ideological side of the conflict and on everything that has happened in the United States, yes, but which is of planetary significance.
Notice of the conflict was first given by John Merrill Olin (1892–1982), owner of the corporation bearing his name that specialized in chemical and military industries (caustic soda, defoliants for the army and, most importantly, the Winchester weapons and munitions brand), founded in Illinois and eventually relocated to Missouri.
Created in 1953, Olin’s foundation remained pretty much inactive until 1969, the year when the magnate was appalled to see a photo of black militants carrying rifles with bandoliers of bullets strapped across their chests as they occupied the Dean’s office at Cornell University, where he had studied as a young man. Let’s remind ourselves of how America must have seemed to a capitalist at that time: universities in turmoil, black ghettos in revolt, the war in Vietnam hurtling towards a dishonourable defeat, and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King killed the year before. It is understandable, then, that the photo from Cornell shook John Olin and led him to provide his foundation with renewed means and a new objective: that of bringing order back to the universities.
Unlike other foundations, which were built to last, John Olin wanted his resources to be spent within a generation from his death, and so the foundation was officially dissolved in 2005, but not before distributing more than $370 million to promote causes favoured by the extreme right. To take up such political positions was new in the world of foundations, which until then had been devoted to charitable donations, such as buying new works of art, building hospitals, financing study grants or shoring up the actions of the American government (and its secret services) at home and abroad, but always maintaining a semblance of political neutrality, as in the case of the Rockefeller and Ford foundations.
That Fatal Memorandum of 1971
The actions of the Olin Foundation remained isolated, however, at least until 1971; or more precisely, 23 August 1971, the date cited by official history as the starting point for the great conservative counter-offensive. That day, Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote a confidential memorandum to the US Chamber of Commerce titled Attack on American Free Enterprise System.3
Powell (1907–1998) was a Virginia lawyer who specialized in defending the tobacco industries (he was a member of the board for Philip Morris between 1962 and 1971) and, as such, he had made an archenemy of Ralph Nader’s consumer defence movement. Two months after writing his Memorandum, Powell was named a Supreme Court judge by Richard Nixon, a position he held until 1987.
The novelty of this Memorandum is that Powell’s fury wasn’t directed so much at extremists, as moderates:
We are not dealing with sporadic or isolated attacks from a relatively few extremists or even from the minority socialist cadre […] The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism come from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians. […] Although New Leftist spokesmen are succeeding in radicalizing thousands of the young, the greater cause for concern is the hostility of respectable liberals and social reformers. It is the sum total of their views and influence which could indeed fatally weaken or destroy the system.
(He continues, ‘a chilling description of what is being taught on many of our campuses’.)
As happens to all those who prevaricate, from the Italian Lega who feel victimized by immigrants, to Israelis who feel victimized by the Palestinians, Powell also felt that American businessmen were victims, circled and in danger of extinction: ‘One does not exaggerate to say that, in terms of political influence with respect to the course of legislation and government action, the American business executive is truly the “forgotten man”.’
The businessmen must, therefore, equip themselves for something to which they are not accustomed: ‘[They] are not trained or equipped to conduct guerrilla warfare with those who propagandize against the system, seeking insidiously and constantly to sabotage it.’ As such, ‘it is essential that spokesmen for the enterprise system – at all levels and at every opportunity – be far more aggressive than in the past’. And the main battlegrounds would be universities and the ideas that they produce because ‘the campus is the single most dynamic source’, and because the ideas learnt at university by ‘these bright young men’ will then be used ‘to change a system which they have been taught to distrust’, ‘they seek employment in the centers of the real power and influence in our country, namely: (i) with the news media, especially television; (ii) in government, as “staffers” and consultants at various levels; (iii) in elective politics; (iv) as lecturers and writers, and (v) on the faculties at various levels of education’. And ‘In many instances, these “intellectuals” end up in regulatory agencies or governmental departments with large authority over the business system they do not believe in.’
For this ‘guerrilla warfare’, William E. Simon (1927–2000), who was Secretary of the Treasury under Richard Nixon before becoming president of the Olin Foundation, coined the term counterintelligentsia (taken from the military notion of counterinsurgency) because ‘Ideas are weapons – indeed, the only weapons with which other ideas can be fought.’4
Powell states that to fight this guerrilla war, ‘business must learn the lesson, long ago learned by labor […] This is the lesson that political power is necessary; that such power must be assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination – without embarrassment and without reluctance […]’. Once it has been established that ‘strength lies in organization, in careful longrange planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations’, Powell went on to articulate the objective of how to ‘restor[e] the balance’ in universities through the financing of courses, departments, professorial roles, textbooks, essays and magazines. He then broadened the remit to include secondary education, the media, television, advertising and politics, making justice for businessmen more palatable across the board. In short, he outlined ‘total warfare’, a von Clausewitz strategy for the reconquest of ideological hegemony.
The Midwest Enters the Fray
Powell’s appeal resonated.5 Not in exactly the way he had proposed – a centralized, national coordination of counterintelligentsia by the US Chamber of Commerce, a sort of Leninist party of the businessmen – as that would have been a slavish (not to mention outdated) imitation of the early twentiethcentury Bolshevik structures. It was instead taken up by a handful of billionaires from middle America.
We must be clear that we are not talking here of a plot; there are no hidden motives or conspiracy theories. Everything happened in broad daylight; the movement of funds are available to everyone, detailed official budgets that can be downloaded online. The objectives met and the methods with which to meet them – strategies and victories – are praised in numerous self-congratulatory articles by institutions that are the protagonists of this counterintelligentsia.
Of those financing the conservative revolution, we have already met John Olin who moved between Illinois and Missouri. The other five families who exerted the most influence on the reactionary counter-offensive were the Mellon Scaifes (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), the Bradleys (Wisconsin), the Coors (Colorado), the Smith Richardsons (North Carolina) and the Kochs (Kansas).
These are only the most aggressive and ostentatious of the ‘assault foundations’. However, we could also include the foundations of the Earharts (Michigan) and McKennas (Pennsylvania), as well as the JM Foundation (Virginia). Soon to join the conservative front were the Waltons (Arkansas), the DeVoses (Michigan) and a myriad of other magnates.
Among these five families, the most considerable wealth is held in Pittsburgh by the four foundations of the Mellon Scaife family, which in 2017 were worth $1,764 million dollars (respectively: the Scaife Family Foundation: $79 million (data from 2012); Sarah Scaife Foundation: $746 million6; Colcom Foundation: $509 million7; and the Allegheny Foundation: $430 million).8 The Mellons are bankers, oil tycoons (they own Gulf), majority stakeholders in Alcoa (aluminium) and big players in uranium. The foundation made its aggressive swing to the right when Richard Mellon Scaife was in charge of the family fortune, a man who, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal, was nothing less than the ‘financial archangel of the intellectual conservative movement’. Over the years, Richard Scaife financed figures such as Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon and Newt Gingrich (who in the 1990s led the Republican swerve to the right). Gingrich himself defined Scaife as one of the people ‘who had truly created modern conservatism’. It might be useful to remember that already in the 1960s, Richard Scaife and his conservative friends thought it inadequate to compare the decline of the United States to the fall of Rome, finding much more fitting its comparison to the fall of Carthage, which collapsed when its affluent elites refused to adequately support Hannibal who had reached the gates of Rome. As such, Scaife and his men founded a League to Save Carthage, which in 1964 became the Carthage Foundation and merged in 2014 with the Sarah Scaife Foundation.
After those belonging to the Mellon Scaifes, the wealthiest of the foundations is the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which, in 2017, had $893 million at its disposal.9 The Bradley brothers founded the company of the same name dealing with industrial electric components, with its headquarters in Wisconsin. Their foundation was created in 1943, but it only became relevant in 1985 when the Bradleys deposited a large part of the profits from the sale of their family business to Rockwell. In 1958, Harry Bradley was one of the founders of the John Birch Society, an extreme right association that believed the United Nations was ‘an instrument of global Communist conquest’, the movement for civil rights an attempt to create an ‘independent Negro-Soviet republic’ and the Republican president (and commander-in-chief during the Second World War) Dwight Eisenhower ‘a zealous and knowing agent of the Communist plot’. Other communist agents who had infiltrated the US state were, according to the John Birch Society, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and the director of the CIA, Allen Dulles.10
Continuing in order of wealth, next we have the foundation of the Smith Richardson family of Vicks VapoRub fame, which was worth $707 million in 2016.11 The foundation was created in 1935 but only decisively veered right and increased its activism in 1973, when Randolph Richardson became president.
Since 1873, the Coors family in Colorado have been producing what Paul Newman called ‘the best American beer’ (I beg to differ) but also running from its coffers is a river of money that has been watering the extreme right for 50 years. The Adolph Coors Foundation, with assets of $177 million in 2014,12 was created in 1975 by Joe Coors (who had also previously supported the John Birch Society) and who, between 1993 and 2011, created his own sub-foundation, Castle Rock. This was how Joe Coors’ obituary read in 2003:
Joe Coors, was definitely a man of the right. He was a free-market enthusiast […] He was also an early supporter of Mr. Reagan […] He went on to become a member of Mr. Reagan’s trusted ‘kitchen cabinet.’ Yet his most important legacy (lies) in philanthropy: Coors spent millions of dollars making sure people would hear from the right. The conservative movement simply would not exist in the form it does today without the profound influence of Joe Coors.13
The Koch family, however, are in a league of their own, with a long tradition of supporting the most extremist of conservative causes. The patriarch Fred Koch (1900–1967) was (him too!) one of the founders of the John Birch Society, even if he had initially made his millions in the USSR in the 1930s, extracting oil for the Bolsheviks. But the influence of the Kansas oil tycoons has grown exponentially only in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, when the family fortune was left in the hands of his two sons, Charles (1935–) and David Koch (1940–2019). It was at this time that the two brothers financed, shaped and essentially invented the Tea Party movement. Up until then, the Kochs were rarely discussed, to the point that the exhaustive book Invisible Hands (2009) by Kim Phillips-Fein on the genesis of the conservative movement from the New Deal to Reagan14 referenced only the Koch brothers’ father, Fred, even if, by the early twenty-first century, their presence had become so outsized that the term ‘Kochtopus’ was often used to describe them. Since David’s death in 2019, Charles has become the sole heir to the family’s fortune, valued at $128 billion15 in 2022, making it the third largest on the planet, with the Walton family of Walmart distribution chain fame claiming first place with their $224 billion (this is shared among various relatives though the three brothers hold the lion’s share with around $65 billion dollars each16). The Kochs’ power lies in the fact that Koch Industries is private (it has no public shareholders) and therefore does not have to notify anyone as to its investments or political donations.
The Three Stages of the Reconquest
The strategy adopted by foundations like those belonging to Bradley, Olin, Mellon Scaife, Richardson and Koch following Powell’s memorandum was explained in detail in 1976 by a then 25-year-old Richard Fink, who would later become the president and director of various Koch foundations.17 Fink gave Charles Koch The Structure of the Social Change,18 a concise directive to determine how ‘investment in the structure of production of ideas can yield greater social and economic progress when the structure is well-developed and well-integrated’.
In this brief text, Fink adopts a ‘managerial’ perspective: he considers ideas products of investment in a commodity to impose on the market, to be first produced and then sold. Fink wanted to answer the question of how foundations can choose who to give their money to when
Universities, think tanks, and citizen activist groups all present competing claims for being the best place to invest resources […] The universities claim to be the real source of change. […] The think tanks and policy development organizations argue that they are most worthy of support because they work on real-world policy issues, not abstract concepts. […] Citizen activist or implementation groups claim to merit support because they are the most effective at really accomplishing things. They are fighting in the trenches, and this is where the war is either won or lost.
(Note again how the bellicose metaphor is wound into commercial, managerial jargon.)
Fink explicitly refers to the production model put forward by Austrian economist Friedrich August von Hayek and lays out a strategy in three stages:
The higher stages represent investments and businesses involved in the enhanced production of some basic inputs we will call ‘raw materials.’ The middle stages of production are involved in converting these raw materials into various types of products that add more value than these raw materials have if sold directly to consumers […] [t]he later stages of production are involved in the packaging, transformation, and distribution of the output of the middle stages to the ultimate consumers.
Applied to the production and sale of ideas, this model translates into an initial phase that sees investment in ‘intellectual raw materials, that is, the exploration and production of abstract concepts and theories. In the public policy arena, these still come primarily (though not exclusively) from the research done by scholars at our universities’. However, these theories are incomprehensible to the public and so – bring on the second stage:
to have consequences, ideas need to be transformed into a more practical or useable form. […] This is the work of the think tanks and policy institutions. Without these organizations, theory or abstract thought would have less value and less impact on our society. But while the think tanks excel at developing new policy and articulating its benefits, they are less able to implement change. Citizen activist or implementation groups are needed in the final stage to take the policy ideas from the think tanks and translate them into proposals that citizens can understand and act upon.
As Charles Koch summed it up: ‘To bring about social change requires a strategy that is vertically and horizontally integrated’ that must span from ‘idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to political action’.19
Assault Think Tanks
In reality, the three stages outlined by Fink were undertaken separately only in theory. In practice, the several families from the Midwest enacted them simultaneously, overlapping all three.
In 1973, thanks to financial support from Joe Coors, what would become one of the most authoritative conservative think tanks opened its doors: the Heritage Foundation. However, the majority of donations to this foundation came from the Mellon Scaife family, who were naturally joined by Bradley, Koch, Smith-Richardson and all the other magnates until, at the beginning of the 1980s, the ironclad divisions of US capitalism began to appear among the Heritage’s leading corporate financiers: Amoco, Amway, Boeing, Chase Manhattan Bank, Chevron, Dow Chemical, Exxon, General Motors, Mesa Petroleum, Mobil Oil, Pfizer, Philip Morris, Procter & Gamble, R.J. Reynolds, Searle, Sears-Roebuck, SmithKline Beecham, Union Carbide and Union Pacific.20 But by that point, Ronald Reagan was already in the White House.
It is interesting how many similarities there are between Reagan and Donald Trump’s stories. Not only are they both outsiders – one a b-list Hollywood actor, the other a real estate mogul with varying fortunes (and several failures) who became famous as a television star thanks to a reality show – but both were held to be entirely ignorant and unsuited to the presidency, and both were destined to be impeached within a matter of months. Both candidates were also shunned by the extreme right because they were considered unreliable, but were assisted and piloted after being elected.
The similarity between the way in which conservative think tanks remote-controlled Trump and Reagan is staggering. The term ‘remote-controlled’ should be taken literally. For example, on 3 July 2020, this was the title of the first article on the Heritage Foundation’s website: The Nation Under Attack – What Must We Do To Stop the Socialist Programme of the Left. The next day, in a rally held in front of Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, Donald Trump stated that ‘the nation’s history is under siege from “far-left fascism”’.21 But it is in the government programme in particular that the influence of the Heritage Foundation can be felt: ‘208 Heritage policy recommendations adopted by the Trump administration’, the Heritage Foundation proudly boasts in its Annual Report 2017, released in May 2018. A few pages later under the heading ‘The Price of Success’, Heritage added: ‘[We] bid farewell to some great people in 2017. The Trump administration snapped up more than 70 of our staff and alumni.’22 The smugness was repeated the following year (2019) with the boast regarding the Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership and: ‘the Trump administration’s embrace of 64% of Heritage policy prescriptions through its annual budget, regulatory guidance, or other actions’.23
This self-congratulatory tone suggests that, beyond a whimsical, humorous appearance and a possibly disastrous end, even if Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential elections was a surprise to even the most dogged US conservatives, they were entirely prepared to seize the opportunity presented by this unexpected opening. And the successive political action – the fiscal, environmental and religious in particular – was anything but improvised, actually appearing increasingly shrewdly manoeuvred.
One example is enough to demonstrate this. Just two weeks after Trump’s inauguration at the White House, on 4 February 2017 the New York Times published the document A Roadmap to Repeal: Removing Regulatory Barriers to Opportunity, released by Freedom Partners (a group financed by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch) in which it was suggested to Trump that he repeal regulations and issue presidential decrees on various issues (such as repealing the moratorium on new coal mines or withdrawing from the Paris Agreement on the limitation of greenhouse gas emissions). In the margin, the New York Times observed how ‘Congress approved this repeal the past week’ and ‘President Trump issued a presidential order on this last Friday’.24 No sooner said than done.
The point here is that history is repeating itself. Already in 1980, Heritage had given Congress and the White House Mandate for Leadership, a voluminous dossier containing 1,077 pages listing more than 2,000 political recommendations for the Reagan presidency, from tax cuts to cuts to programmes helping minorities, and a disproportionate increase in military spending in order to finally free themselves ‘from the tyranny of the Left’ and save them from the strains of ‘Liberal-Fascism’. In 1984, before Reagan’s re-election, The Heritage Foundation reappeared and published Mandate for Leadership II, which recommended (among other things) the privatization of Social Security and the abolition of special funds for supporting the disabled in education. In 1985, the Heritage boasted that 60–65% of its recommendations (curiously, the exact same percentage it boasts of with Trump) had been enacted by the Reagan administration, which over the course of two mandates counted 36 employees from the Heritage among its staff (55 also came from the Hoover Institution and 34 from the American Enterprise Institute, which we shall come to shortly).25 It is alarming that Reagan is remembered today as a great statesman that even Barack Obama considered a vital ‘reference point’.26(We are overlooking the highly documented and incredibly dense network of funding, suggestions and logistical support between these think tanks and US foreign policy, including various actions by the secret services, a discourse that falls outside our remit here.)
As we might expect, the Western nation that has produced the most politically efficient think tanks that most resemble their US counterparts has been the UK. The most noteworthy are the Bow Group, founded in 1951 to fight communism; the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), founded in 1955 by the businessman Anthony Fisher (1915–1988); the Centre for Policy Studies whose founders in 1984 included Margaret Thatcher; and finally, the Adam Smith Institute. The last three were decisive in shaping the politics of the Iron Lady. Furthermore, in 1981, Anthony Fisher founded the Atlas Economic Research Foundation (later called the Atlas Network) in the US, which produced another 150 conservative think tanks around the world and today connects more than 500 similar institutions throughout the five continents.
The think tank is a peculiar entity whose extensive use dates back to the aftermath of the Second World War. The 2020 Global Go To Think Tank Index Report counts 11,175 institutes of this kind throughout the globe, of which 47% (2,932) can be found in Europe and North America. Of the 2,397 North American think tanks, 92% (2,203) are American. But rather more interesting is that 89.9% of think tanks were founded after 1950, that their number doubled in the US between 1980 and 2020, and that the golden decade for the creation of think tanks was the 1980s, when 20% of them were brought to life. Over the last decade, there has instead been a slowdown in their growth in the US and North America.27
To use Louis Althusser’s terminology, the think tank is a new kind of ‘ideological apparatus’ that sits upstream of the traditional ideological apparatuses (school, church, military indoctrination) and even the more recent ones (mass media, especially radio, TV and, today, social networks).28 The aim of this particular institution is to supply, feed, provide theses and arguments to both traditional ideological apparatuses (schools) and modern ones (mass media and social networks).
Think tanks have existed for a long time – just think of the Brookings Institution (founded in 1916) or the Hudson Institute (1961). With regard to these august institutions, the novelty of the Heritage Foundation and the other think tanks that appeared on the scene in the 1970s and 1980s was their barely disguised factionalism, their openly taking sides and support for the most extreme causes in a full-on collision with the previous façade of bipartisan phariseeism (even if this did disguise a deep-rooted conservatism). These new ‘combat’ think tanks held, and continue to hold, a role of primary importance when it comes to providing an intellectual arsenal to the conservative revolution. It would be useless, and tedious, to list them all, but we must name at least four: the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI), the Cato Institute, the Hoover Institution and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
The Manhattan Institute was launched in 1977 by Englishman Anthony Fisher, whom we have already met, and William Casey (1913–1987), who would go on to direct the CIA between 1981 and 1987. Its funders include the foundations of Bradley, Smith Richardson, Scaife, Koch, CastleRock, Olin, Earhart, Walton and Bill & Melinda Gates.29 As we will see, its hand can be seen in all right-wing ideological campaigns of the last 40 years.
The Cato Institute was founded in 1977 by the Koch brothers. Its name recalled the libertarian ideal of the Roman Cato (first Carthage, now Cato – the problems of ancient empires was a real obsession!). Freedom from all legal binds and regulations, including those establishing a minimum wage, limiting overtime, banning child labour, obstructing monopolies, fighting pollution and governing the use of resources; it is against all such ‘restraints’ that the Cato Institute fights. They have made a utopia of minimal state supported at that time by Robert Nozick and his extreme interpretation of individual rights (Nozick believed that ‘a free system will allow [the individual] to sell himself into slavery’).30 This meant that the Cato Institute campaigned against the welfare state, against the healthcare system, to limit the role of the state as much as possible, and therefore reduce taxation as much as possible (for Nozick, income tax was nothing but ‘forced labour’),31 for the privatization of Social Security, the federal electricity system, the entire scholastic apparatus, the postal service and NASA. The Cato Institute is also against US intervention in foreign affairs and is firmly against ‘corporate welfare’ (the taxpayer-funded subsidies given to large corporations).
The Hoover Institution is one of those cases in which the billionaires of the Midwest brought about a robust swerve to the right in a venerable institution. The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace was founded in 1919 by future president Herbert Hoover and since then, it had been a club for Republican lawmakers, its fellows including the former secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and George Shultz, former attorney general Edwin Meese and former secretary of defence James Mattis. Beginning in the 1970s, however, when regular funds began to arrive from reactionary foundations, the Hoover Institution became more markedly conservative. According to sourcewatch.org, between 1985 and 2012 the Hoover Institute received $11.7 million from Scaife; $5.8 million (up to 2005) from Olin; $5.2 million from Walton; $4.8 million from Bradley; $3.8 from Smith Richardson; $900,000 from Carthage and so on.
The case of the American Enterprise Institute is especially interesting on this score. Created in 1938 as the American Enterprise Association, it was renamed AEI in 1962. In 1964, the upper echelons of the AEI took a leave of absence to organize the presidential campaign for the ferociously anti-communist Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which would outlaw all discrimination based on race, skin colour, sex, religion or national origin. Goldwater was voted for by all the racists of the South (a somewhat ironic fate for the grandson of Polish Jew Michael Goldwasser who emigrated after having taken part in the revolutionary uprisings of 1848), but he was soundly defeated on a national scale by the democrat Lyndon Johnson (38% to 62%).
This defeat calmed the boiling fervour of the AEI until a turning point in the 1970s, when its finances were reinvigorated by conservative magnates, and again in the 1980s, when those same magnates complained that the AEI was too centrist. And just think that until 1982, the editorial director of the AEI magazine Regulation, Journal on Government and Society was Antonin Scalia, the extreme right-wing judge who would be appointed to the Supreme Court and go on to organize the constitutional coup against Al Gore in the presidential elections of 2000. After these complaints, AEI got back in line and the funds started flooding in once more. And it will not surprise you to hear that among the foundations that financed and/or finance the AEI, we find Bradley, Scaife, Smith Richardson, Olin and Koch.
P.S. In the last 20 years it has become more difficult to follow the money trail tying billionaire families to the think tanks, often because the donations no longer pass directly from the foundations to the think tanks, but transit through intermediaries who have a similar status to the foundations in terms of their fiscal regime, but have the advantage of guaranteeing anonymity to their contributors. For example, the US contributors to British foundations ultimately transited through the Donors Trust (founded in 1999), an entity affiliated with the Donors Capital Fund. You can get an idea of their most important donors from the fact that their president and CEO since 2015 has been Lawson Bader, who had previously been vice-president of the Mercatus Center founded by Charles Koch and Richard Fink.
Contributions to electoral campaigns have also become untraceable following the Supreme Court ruling in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010, which made unlimited anonymous donations legal. We will talk about this in more detail in chapter 7.
1.
D.H. Petraeus and James Ames,
FM-324 Counterinsurgency
, can be downloaded here:
https://fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-24fd.pdf
. In hard copy,
The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual
. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
2.
Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)’, in
On Ideology
. London: Verso, 2008, pp. 1–60, citations are from pp. 36 and 45.
3.
The pdf of the Memorandum can be downloaded from many sites, such as
https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/powellmemo.html
or
https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powell-memo-a-corporate-blueprint-to-dominate-democracy/
. All citations that follow are taken from the Memorandum unless directly specified.
4.
John J. Miller,
A Gift of Freedom: How the John Olin Foundation Changed America
. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009, p. 56.
5.
The attack of the ruling classes on left-wing ideas certainly began before 1971. You just need to look at nineteenth-century newspapers to see that ‘the war between capital and work’, as they call it in the US, was already an age-old conflict. This ‘narrative’ from 1971 is actually like an autobiography of the reactionary right.
6.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4490939-Sarah-Scaife-Foundation-Annual-Report-2016.html
.
7.
http://colcomfdn.org/files/2018/04/Financial-Statements-2017.pdf
.
8.
http://www.scaife.com/Alleg_2016.pdf
.
9.
cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/4152914/Annual%20Report/2017%20Annual%20Report.pdf
.
10.
John Savage, ‘The John Birch Society is Back’,
Politico
, 16 July 2017,
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/07/16/the-john-birch-society-is-alive-and-well-in-the-lone-star-state-215377
.
11.
Smith Richardson Foundation Annual Report 2016,
https://www.srf.org/p-content/uploads/2017/12/Final-2016-SRF-Annual-Report.pdf
.
12.
2014 tax return,
https://www.guidestar.org/inDocuments/2015/510/172/2015-510172279-0c7adc36-F.pdf
.
13.
‘Joe Coors, RIP. He fermented barley, hops and conservative ideas’,
The Wall Street Journal
, 20 March 2003.
14.
Kim Phillips-Fein,
Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan
. New York: Norton, 2009.
15.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/insights/052416/top-10-wealthiest-families-world.asp
.
16.
The 2022 Forbes list of the 2,268 billionaires on the planet (
https://www.forbes.com/billionaires
). Interestingly, their collective wealth is worth $12.7 trillion (+39.6% on 2018). To give you an idea of just how much $12.7 trillion actually is, the combined annual GDPs of Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Italy is $12.4 trillion (
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD
).
17.
Just to give an example of the accumulation of positions, titles and appointments in the life of these ‘entrepreneurs of ideas’, here is Mr. Fink’s list: he was executive vice-president and board member for Koch Industries Inc.; president of the board and CEO of Koch Companies Public Sector LLC, which provides legal relations, government, philanthropy and community services for the Koch companies. He was also director of Georgia-Pacific and Flint Hills Resources LLC, a refining and petrochemicals company; president of the Charles G. Koch and Claude R. Lambe charitable foundations and administrator of the Fred C. and Mary R. Koch Foundation. Before working for Koch Industries, Fink was an executive vice-president and associate professor at George Mason University. In 1979, at George Mason, he and Charles Koch founded the Mercatus Center, a university research organization. He was a member of the Mercatus board, which he presided over until 1990. Fink sat on the board for George Mason University from 1997 to June 2005. In 1984, Fink co-founded the Citizens for a Sound Economy Foundation and its affiliate company, Citizens for a Sound Economy. In 2003, the foundation changed its name to Americans for Prosperity Foundation; Fink was a member of the board. Together with David Koch and Art Pope, he founded Americans for Prosperity. He sat on the oversight board for the International Foundation for Research and Experimental Economics and was a member of the board for the Institute for Humane Studies, the Jack Miller Center and the Laffer Center for Global Economic Growth. Previously he served on the boards of the American Prosecutors Research Institute, the Bill of Rights Institute, the George Mason University Foundation, the Public Choice Center and the Reason Foundation. He was also member of the Consumer Advisory Council of the Board for the Federal Reserve and President Reagan’s Commission for Privatization.
18.
The text was later published in
Philanthropy
, vol. 10, no. 1, Winter 1996, under the title ‘From Ideas to Action: The Role of Universities, Think Tanks and Activist Groups’. I downloaded it from
https://kochdocs.org/2019/08/19/1996-structure-of-social-change-by-koch-industries-executive-vp-richard-fink/
.
19.
Cited by Jane Mayer,
Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
(2016). New York: Penguin Random House, 2017, p. 173.
20.
Ibid., p. 108.
21.
‘US under siege from “far-left fascism”, says Trump in Mount Rushmore speech’,
The Guardian
, 4 July 2020,
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/04/us-under-siege-from-far-left-fascism-says-trump-in-mount-rushmore-speech
.
22.
The Heritage Foundation, 2017 Annual Report, which can be found at
https://www.heritage.org/sites/default/files/2018-05/2017_AnnualReport_WEB.pdf
. The hunt continues: In March 2019, Donald Trump appointed Stephen Moore, a fellow of the Heritage Foundation, to the board of the Federal Reserve (the US central bank) and in June 2019 the ex-chief of staff at the Heritage was interim minister for Defence.
23.
https://www.heritage.org/about-heritage/impact
.
24.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/02/04/us/doc-lobby.html
.
25.
Richard Bonney,
False Prophets: The ‘Clash of Civilization’ and the War on Terror
. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008, p. 36.
26.
Michael Duffy and Michael Scherer, ‘The Role Model: What Obama Sees in Reagan’,
Time
, 27 January 2011,
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2044712,00.html
.
27.
James G. McGann,
2020 Global Go To Think Tank Index Report
, Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program (TTCSP), University of Pennsylvania, 2020, pp. 20 and 10 (some historical data is taken from the previous edition),
https://repository.upenn.edu/think_tanks/18/
.
28.
Demonstrating the abyss separating us from 50 years ago, Althusser’s 1969 list of ideological apparatuses appears irrevocably outdated: religious (the various churches and religions); scholastic (public and private schools); family; legal; political (the various parties); trade unions; informative (printed press, TV, etc.); and cultural (literature, fine art, sport, etc.) in ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)’, p. 83.
29.
Source:
www.sourcewatch.org
.
30.
Robert Nozick,
Anarchy, State, and Utopia
. Oxford: Blackwell, 1974, p. 331.
31.
Ibid., p. 169.
2Ideas Are Weapons
In 1974, the year after the founding of the Heritage Foundation, the Nobel prize for economics was awarded jointly to Swedish social-democrat Gunnar Myrdal (1898– 1987) and Austrian conservative Friedrich August von Hayek (1899–1992). This double consecration marked the last moment of precarious equilibrium between the declining fortunes of Keynesianism and the ascent of the new monetary orthodoxy developed in particular by the University of Chicago, where von Hayek had taught for 12 years before being employed by the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Just two years later, in 1976, the Nobel was awarded solely to Milton Friedman, one of von Hayek’s disciples. From this moment on, the so-called Chicago boys (including Gary Becker, Ronald Coase, Eugene Fama, Robert Fogel, Lars Peter Hansen, Robert Lucas, Theodore Schultz and George Stigler) were showered with Nobel prizes.
The wind had changed irrevocably, the Zeitgeist shifted from the Keynesian orthodoxy of the period immediately following the Second World War, to the point that in his first State of the Union address in 1977, Democratic President Jimmy Carter launched an attack on the welfare state using words von Hayek had written for him: ‘Government cannot solve our problems […] Government cannot eliminate poverty or provide a bountiful economy or reduce inflation or save our cities or cure illiteracy or provide energy […]’.1
