Funding behind regressive right wing electoral success
Wondering how the right wing has been able to achieve electoral success in recent elections? Such as just occurred in British Columbia? Here’s an excerpt about the “Powell Manifesto” from my book Follow the Money; How China Bought the World. It describes the vast fundraising and media machine that right wing groups have built since urged to do so by former US Supreme Court judge Lewis Powell back in the day. It’s mostly about the USA but Canadian regressives are catching up fast….
The Powell Manifesto
Starting with just a handful of groups, including the Heritage Foundation in the early ’70s, the conservatives built a new generation of organizations — think tanks, media monitors, legal groups, networking organizations, all driven by the same over-arching values of free enterprise, individual freedom and limited government. Then there is the ‘investment banking matrix,’ about 200 key people who personally invest hundreds of thousands of dollars a year; 135 of them also serve on the boards of the ‘Big 80’ groups.
Then there is also the conservative media machine, which operated at full power to get George W. Bush and Donald Trump elected. Conservatives and their allies were able to magnify their message through a network of right-leaning TV and radio channels, including Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel, which provides the Far Right with a 24/7 campaign infomercial — for free. Here was a news network with more viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined, constantly repeating, often verbatim, the messages out of the White House under any Far Right administration.
More help comes from religious broadcasters. “Under the radar screen, the Christian Church community has created a formidable electronic media infrastructure and now plays a major role influencing public opinion,” wrote Jeffrey Chester, Executive Director of the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD). “The religious media are producing and distributing ‘news,’ commentary and cultural guides, and their reach and influence are undeniable.”
The Far Right’s electoral victories have proved that the conservatives have achieved dominance over the flow of information to the American people, says the CDD, so much so that even a well-run Democratic campaign stands virtually no chance for national success without major changes in the media system. The Republican victories highlight perhaps the greatest failure of the Democratic/liberal side in American politics: a refusal to invest in the development of a comparable system for distributing information that can counter the Far Right’s potent media infrastructure. Democrats and liberals have refused to learn from the lessons of the Republican/conservative success.
Let’s give the last word to Noam Chomsky, the well-known leftish speaker and activist for democracy, speaking about the Powell manifesto in 2017. “Powell didn’t actually say that business is losing control. What he said is it’s being beaten down by the massive forces of the left, which have taken over everything. He says they’ve taken over the media, they’ve taken over the universities, they’re practically in control of the whole country. And meanwhile, the poor, embattled business community can barely survive under this incredible assault. It’s a very interesting picture.”
“You should pay attention to the rhetoric,” said Chomsky. “It’s kind of like a spoiled 3-year-old who expects to have everything, and somebody takes a piece of candy away from him, and they have a tantrum. The world’s ending! That’s pretty much the picture. The Powell Memorandum is literally a tantrum. It’s saying that democracy is simply a threat. The population has to be restored to passivity, then everything will be fine. The quite remarkable fact is that mortality is increasing among middle-class, lower-middle-class, working-class white Americans, middle-aged white Americans. That’s something unknown in developed societies. Mortality keeps declining there. Here it’s increasing. And the roots of it are what are called diseases of despair. People don’t have hope for the future, and for pretty good reasons if you look at the facts of the matter.”
