Control the Message Control the Results
How a Small Group of Oligarchs Moved the Overton Window to the Far Right
I have been thinking about the shift in the public discourse that enabled the coup. It started with Reagan. By the time Bill Clinton got in, everybody "KNEW" that welfare recipients were just cheats, and we needed to cut social programs balance the budget, and that corporations were surely people.
Everybody "knew" these things because the big capitalists, working through the right wing, had seized control of the conversation. It was they who got to establish the conceptual framework in which the public conversation would transpire. It was they who would set the intellectual terms by which governments and institutions were judged.
I have seen a great deal of anger against the "neoliberal" Democratic Party. Anger held by the idealistic and pure of heart. They purport to know that the elected officials and party leaders of the Democratic Party are corrupt. This goes along with anger that only the two major parties actually really exist in a political sense.
This makes these idealists hate the Democrats even more because of a belief in what they "should" be. It leads to all kinds of strange results such as those purists insisting that Hillary Clinton is worse than Donald Trump, and that the Democrats are "worse" than the Republicans. If you take one look at them with truly unbiased eyes that contention fails miserably.
So, what is really going on?
Neo-liberalism is the philosophy of capitalists. It is not a political philosophy but rather an economic one. Dating from the late 17th century it was the philosophical underpinning of the type of free market capitalism that is destroying the earth and enslaving its people today. In those days it was known simply as liberal economics. This sort of liberalism's brightest son was a man named David Riccardo who famously said that capitalists should pay workers just enough so that the workers don't actually die. Notice anything familiar about that type of construct?
When the public conversation was coopted by the intellectual heirs of the economic liberals, now known as neoliberals, not nearly enough people noticed. We have been systematically dumbed down for two generations. Most of us were not nearly versed enough in critical thinking to see how the FRAMING of the conversation had been colonized by the right wing agenda.
And so, some strike out against the Democrats because they SHOULD be able to get us social and environment justice. And they so routinely disappoint. Maybe we need at to look at who is setting the underlying agenda. Who gets to determine what "the good" looks like in our society? Right now, and for the last 40 years, it has been neoliberal RIGHT wing free market fundamentalists. And that is how the few have been able to shout down the many.
That is why mainstream Democrats end up sounding like apologists, barely holding on to the shreds of the social safety net. Remember how the welfare act of 1996 came about?
It is assumed that the small government (read--privatization) crowd is basically correct--it's just a matter of how much of the net are we going to keep. Shall we cut food stamps? Or do away with them altogether? No one on the left except those publicly framed as fringe-group progressives step up and say NO--they should be INCREASED and made easier to get!" This is an example of what co-opting the framing looks like.