How to take three million people hostage

For three decades Susan George has written expansively on the effect of neo-liberal economics on the poor, influencing writers such as Naomi Klein. Here, she explains the background to her new book Hijacking America which shows how neo-con thinking came to dominate all aspects of American society.

SOMETIMES accused of being a conspiracy buff, I plead not guilty. I don’t believe in conspiracies. I do believe in power, money, clarity of purpose and single-minded determination. New proof of these assailed me daily as I researched and wrote Hijacking America.If you are under forty, your entire life has unfolded in the time of a barbaric faith called neo-liberalism or, particularly in the United States, neo-conservatism (the nuances would take too long to explain here). Its missionaries have fanned out across the world to spread the doctrine, though its Mecca is still the USA and its triumphs - along with the startling advance of the evangelical Christian right - are the subject of this book.

You’ve witnessed the creeping, insidious progress of this faith but perhaps not given it a name. Its consequences are all around us. Over the past three decades, society has everywhere grown less fair and the rich/poor gap has assumed Grand Canyon dimensions both within and between nations. Gains that working people once believed permanent have been put on the block, while relentlessly inventive bankers blithely plunged the world into chaos. The neo-liberal watchwords are private over public, deregulation, free trade, and the market knows best.

Are such changes akin to acts of God, as inevitable as the weather or some sort of unavoidable cyclical phenomenon? Not on your life. They are entirely man-made, bought and paid for by the US political right wing, happy to spend well over a billion dollars to get exactly what it wanted. What it wanted was simple and straightforward: everything, with no argument please.

You have probably heard of the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci who died in 1938 in one of Mussolini’s fascist prisons.  Gramsci invented the concept of “cultural hegemony”; he explained how a class that wanted to take real power had to accomplish “the long march through the institutions” in order to capture hearts and minds.  No class can rule by force and repression alone: it must obtain the assent and the acquiescence of the people. To do so, it must occupy all the institutions, especially those where ideas are created and disseminated — the schools and universities, the media, the courts of law; the political and religious Establishments, even the family.

By no imaginative stretch could the American right-wing be called Marxist yet it instinctively seized upon Gramsci’s cultural programme and, after some post-war trial and error, set out seriously on its pilgrimage through the institutions in the early 1970s.

It was led by neo-liberal and/or neo-conservative intellectuals, many of them former Communists or Trotskyites like Irving Kristol.  According to his analysis, one had to aim at the “New Class” which was not only hostile to the free-market, private sector capitalist ethos but had also successfully taken over the bastions of ideas - the top universities, think tanks and foundations, the media and movies. This class acted as the “legitmiser of ideas”, all of which Kristol and his rightist backers sought to change.

His answer to what he saw as “liberal” ideological hegemony (in the American, moderately leftish sense of the word) was to build the right’s own rival institutions, supported by philanthropy from corporations and conservative foundations. Decades later, now that neo-cons are part of the furniture on every TV talk show and newspaper editorial pages are plastered with conservative conformist comment, you can still hear the right complaining about the “liberal media”. The word “liberal” itself has become the “L” word - as dirty as the “F” word you can’t print or say on the airwaves.

Kristol’s aim of creating a dense network of neo-con institutions and scholars was explicit from the start; his strategy focused on the capacity to influence national policy debates, inside and outside Washington. The concept was brilliant and its success breathtaking - not just in the United States but throughout the world.

The results of the institutional long march were called “Reaganism” in the US, “Thatcherism” in Britain, “The European Commission” in Brussels, the “Washington Consensus” (IMF, World Bank, US Treasury… ) in the District of Columbia and a variety of less polite names in progressive and activist circles. The modest beginnings of this right wing movement had blossomed and ripened into rich fruit.

Writing Hijacking America was a rather scary departure for me, an expedition into contemporary history. Beginning in the late 1970s, I had written various books about the impacts in the broadest sense of the neo-liberal doctrine. I was preoccupied with big problems like hunger, third-world debt, dignity-destroying poverty, vast inequalities — all of them in my view, and for the first time in human history — unnecessary.

Absorbed by this work and the responses it provoked from readers in many countries, able to perceive the ideological grounding of the world’s ills, I had still never stopped to examine the doctrine per se or ask why it had become so successful.

Let me illustrate the grand sweep of the ideological transformation of my native land (I now have French nationality as well as American) in two short sentences separated by thirty-seven years. In 1965 the mainstream US weekly Time Magazine chose as its “Man of the Year” John Maynard Keynes, who had died almost twenty years previously. The cover title was “We are all Keynesians now”. No one anywhere, according to Time, would dream of following any other economic model which had brought the United States and the world the greatest material prosperity in the history of humankind. Keynesianism promoted economic success and social cohesion — everyone in the US, or nearly, could pursue the American dream.

In 2002, New Labour’s Peter Mandelson spoke before an assemblage of leftish luminaries including most of the social-democratic leaders of Europe plus Bill Clinton, to whom he announced “We are all Thatcherites now”. My new project entailed finding out what had happened in between these two statements; how this magical metamorphosis had been brought about without “the left” even noticing until it was too late. So I started researching the plot-lines of Hijacking America.

This operation had to be the biggest cultural heist ever organised and I learned that the neo-liberals accomplished it using many “M”s, among them Money, Management, Media, Marketing and a keen sense of Mission. A quite small coterie of right-wingers gradually made their own extremist views seem normal. They were, as I said in the title of chapter one, “manufacturing common sense”.

I soon discovered that in the culture wars, what I came to call “body politics” also played a huge role and here the evangelical armada could be counted on for serious reinforcements. Who could be in bed with whom, at what age and with what prior instruction, if any, hugely preoccupied the religious right.

Obsessed by abortion, gay marriage, teenage pregnancies and the straight-and-narrow generally, they found in the Republican Party a political home-sweet-home, all seventy million of them. Siding for the first time in US history with conservative Roman Catholics and, more surprisingly, with a large slice of the Jewish community, the evangelicals made clear to Congress they would oppose not just homosexual rights but also those of Palestinians; they would support Israel to, literally, the end of time. Anyone in the legislature who did not share these views could look forward to early retirement.

The theological bases for these political options are to be found, if you know how to decode them, in the book of Revelation, but see chapter three for a brief inventory of far weirder beliefs. Religion is not a harmless phenomenon: evangelicals vote more than other Americans. The motto of the late pastor Jerry Falwell, president of the Moral Majority, was “Get them baptised, get them saved, get them registered”.

Nor is religion confined to the spiritual realm: in the US it has consciously, systematically and successfully undermined critical thought and the primacy of science. You’ve already heard about creationism, but the situation is more alarming than you may suppose.

Nearly two thirds of Americans, whether practicing Christians or not, take the Genesis account of creation in six days and the story of Noah’s Ark as the literal truth. Even more believe that Moses parted the waters of the Red Sea in which Pharaoh’s pursuing armies duly drowned. About three-quarters see nothing fishy about miracles.

When one has spent long hours poring over the screeds of myriad millennialists, the American people’s certainty that Weapons of Mass Destruction lay strewn about Iraq and that Saddam had ordered September 11th seemed altogether plausible. The splendid Enlightenment model of the separation of Church and State — one of humanity’s greatest conquests — is buffeted by waves of powerful ignorance. The deplorable state of education for tens of millions of Americans, examined in the last chapter of Hijacking America, is chilling as well.

But now surely, I can hear you saying, Barack Obama has providentially arrived. He can, he must, he will win and all will be changed, changed utterly. Far from me to deny that mericans are inventive, innovative, capable of surprising us all.

I did not foresee the Obama meteor whizzing towards earth. It’s a stunning sight and I want him to win. Furthermore, John McCain is a pretty lousy campaigner who can barely read a tele-prompter. He admits to knowing no economics and, as the son and grandson of top - ranking military officers and a navy man himself, his first instinct in times of crisis might not, shall we say, be negotiation and diplomacy. Even the long-ingrained racism and distrust of blacks in many Americans, especially working class ones, might be overcome and Obama could be elected.

I nonetheless hold firm to the thesis of Hijacking America. The transformation of thought and culture in the United States over the past thirty-some years has been profound and lasting. The country will not swing back to “normal” simply because the present terrible tenant of the White House loses his lease. The right’s well-oiled machine of foundations, lobbies, think-tanks, publications, political cadres, lawyers and activist organisations is still very much present. More important still, Obama is already busily tacking towards the right to the point that many of his most fervent supporters have become dismayed and angry.

One of Bush’s most egregious programmes was to pour at least $40 billion of tax-payers’ money annually into “faith-based initiatives”; meaning social services run by religious organisations. Obama has already promised not just to maintain the programme but to expand it.  So much for Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation” between Church and State.

He has caved in to the powerful National Rifle Association and publically approved the Supreme Court decision that individuals have the right to own guns. He has toughened his stance on abortion (“I don’t think ‘mental distress’ qualifies as the mother’s health”) and even fudged a bit his promises on Iraq (“We must be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in”). He obviously believes his progressive supporters will stick with him, if only because they have nowhere else to go.

Well, maybe. But more than once experience has shown that voters, offered a frankly right wing approach and a slightly paler imitation of the same, will pick the original rather than the copy. If anything can bring down the neo-liberal doctrine of deregulation, skewed distribution of income and wealth, incentives for capital to “create value” and free trade, it’s more likely to be the financial crisis than a new man, even Obama, in the White House.

I would be happy to affirm that a change of occupant at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue could turn my book into a narrative of historical interest only. I fear, however, that it risks emaining relevant well into the foreseeable future.

This article was first published in issue 14 of Product, August 2008.

Hijacking America: How the Religious and Secular Right Changed What Americans Think, by Susan George (Polity). http://www.tni.org/george