The Great Turning

by David C Korten

  Yet the middle-class ascendance of the post–World War II years was in fact an extraordinary demonstration of the possibilities of democracy grounded in a belief that everyone should share in the benefits of a well-functioning society. Unfortunately, however, it turned out to be only a temporary popular victory in the war of the owning class against the rest that is a defining condition of Empire and that has defined the American experience from the day Columbus first set foot on a Caribbean island. All the disparate popular struggles of our history to achieve justice for workers, women, and people of color, as well as the struggles for peace and the environment, are subtexts of a larger meta-struggle against the cultural mindset and institutions of Empire.

  The owning classes have long recognized that their imperial class privilege is placed at risk by a unification of the oppressed. The claims 216of identity politics based on race, gender, and occupational specialization are tolerable to Empire because they emphasize and perpetuate division. Discussion of class, however, is forbidden, because it exposes common interests and deeper structural issues with a potential to lead to a unified resistance.

  The enduring class divide is between owners and workers—between those who live on the returns to capital and those who live on the returns to their own labor. Jefferson sought to close the divide by making every worker an owner. Hamilton sought to secure the position of an elite ruling class by assuring that ownership remained concentrated in its hands.

  As I document in the next chapter, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the heirs to the Hamiltonian vision reminded us of their presence and their commitment to the dominator relationships of Empire even as the changing human condition renders their vision untenable. I still find it difficult to accept that there are those among the leaders of the most powerful U.S. institutions who pursue Empire as a holy mission and are prepared to use every means —from lies to assassinations to perpetual war—to block progress toward justice for all and to roll back the gains already achieved. I can no longer deny, however, that such people do exist, that they have successfully manipulated the culture to achieve substantial followings, and that a necessary part of the work of the Great Turning is to neutralize their power by exposing their lies, methods, and imperial agendas.

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  CHAPTER 13

  Wake-Up Call

  America is lurching to the right.… Until the 1960s, there had been almost no relevant right-wing organizations in America.… By the 1970s, the Right had been transformed into an institutionalized, disciplined, well-organized, and well-funded movement of loosely knit affiliates.… The New Right network supports whoever shares its desire for radical political change and its resentments of the status quo. As such, the New Right is anything but conservative.1

  Alan Crawford

  The evil was very grave: the Republicans, entrenched in power, cynically abused it; they subverted the integrity of the vote, and of the press; they mocked the spirit of the Constitution through partisan legislation, and copying the tactics of tyrants, used overseas wars to deflect attention from their actions.2

  José Martí, Cuban poet and independence hero on the U.S. election of 1884

  Following World War II, the United States developed a broad middle class that made it the envy of the world. Achieving this took a devastating depression, a labor-friendly president who refused to field federal troops to fire on striking workers, a world war, and a strong, well-organized labor movement. Those elements combined to create a dynamic that for a time moderated the excesses of Empire.

  The reforms, however, did not challenge Empire’s underlying institutions and culture. Ownership remained concentrated and economic power remained vested in a few large corporations. The labor unions were themselves organized as imperial hierarchies headed by labor leaders as jealous of their power as any corporate CEO or incumbent politician. In the manner of an immature democracy, the political culture focused on individual rights, with little sense of the civic responsibility required of a mature democracy. Then a deeper cultural challenge began to emerge.

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  CULTURAL AND ECONOMIC CHALLENGES TO EMPIRE

  The 1960s were a time of cultural ferment. A new generation told the corporate plutocrats, “We don’t buy into your consumerism and your wars.” It told the theocrats, “We have no use for your narrow interpretations of biblical authority and rigid standards of sexual morality.” African Americans and women of all races were telling both plutocrats and theocrats, “We reject your efforts to define us as something less than fully human; we demand recognition of our humanity.” Traditional lines of authority, including those of the traditional family, were eroding.

  There was also a growing global environmental consciousness that challenged the conventional wisdom of economic growth. The Club of Rome’s study, Limits to Growth, published in 1972, pointed out that the human burden on the ecosystem was rapidly approaching the limits of what the planet could sustain. Although the study was dismissed by economists as doomsaying, many of the planet’s crucial natural systems were already in decline. A sharp rise in oil prices precipitated by actions of the OPEC oil cartel focused attention on the limits of global petroleum reserves and the vulnerability of the U.S. economy’s dependence on foreign oil. The environmental movement began to gain strength. The foundational values of a new culture of Earth Community were finding growing acceptance, posing an increasingly serious challenge to the institutions of Empire.

  At the same time, the United States faced serious economic challenges from abroad. In addition to the political and military threat of the Soviet Union, several nations of Asia, including Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore, were developing strong export-oriented economies that were challenging U.S. corporations at home and abroad. Other nations were telling U.S. corporate plutocrats: “We can play the game of global competition better than you can, even on your home turf.” These developments threatened not only the hegemony of U.S. corporations but also the jobs of American workers.

  Elitist plutocrats and theocrats felt the foundations of their power and privilege eroding. Empire was at risk. The movement to choose a more democratic human future was in ascendance. Earth Community was in gestation. Empire mobilized to strike back.

  Television was transforming how people used their time and related to the world. Beginning about 1960, passive forms of participation in public life began displacing more active forms. People were patronizing 219fast-food outlets, professional sporting events, and gambling casinos with greater frequency. There were corresponding declines in voter participation, newspaper readership, Parent Teacher Association membership, union membership, frequency of family meals, philanthropic giving, and perceptions of honesty and morality.3 Relationships among people were not so much changing as simply eroding. People were feeling increasingly vulnerable and disconnected. There was a troubling sense in the air, particularly among self-identified conservatives, that the moral and social foundations of society were disintegrating. The uncertainty and resentment created fertile ground for the demagogues of Empire.

  Renewing the Historic Alliance

  Historically, rejection of the democratic ideal in America has coalesced around one or both of two fundamentalisms. Plutocrats, heirs to the vision of Alexander Hamilton, embrace a market fundamentalism that legitimates unaccountable rule by persons of financial means. Theocrats, heirs to the Calvinist vision of John Winthrop, embrace a religious fundamentalism that legitimates unaccountable rule by those of a prescribed faith and celebrates wealth and power as a mark of God’s favor. Although plutocrats give priority to material values and theocrats to spiritual values, their shared drive for dominator power and aversion to democracy make them allies of convenience.

  In the late 1960s, a small group of plutocrats and theocrats formed an alliance to avert the fall of Empire and drive the U.S. political center sharply to the right. It proved a powerful combination. The plutocrats delivered the money in record amounts for polit
ical campaigns, think tanks, and media outreach. The theocrats delivered the votes by mobilizing the resentment of the frightened and alienated who felt themselves being pushed out of the middle class. They called themselves the New Right, although their agenda was scarcely new. United by their antipathy for democracy and their drive for power, they worked together to gain control of the Republican Party and move both the Republican and Democratic parties well to the right of the former political center.

  Organizing for Dominion

  The elites of the corporate plutocracy have long organized through trade associations and umbrella organizations like chambers of commerce.4 They also have a long history of supporting conservative think tanks, 220such as the Hoover Institute, established at Stanford University in 1919. The Council on Foreign Relations, founded in 1921 by a group of prominent businessmen, bankers, and lawyers, played a defining role in shaping State Department planning for U.S. global dominance of world resources and markets following World War II. President Franklin Roosevelt formed the Business Advisory Council in 1933 to strengthen ties between the corporate world and the U.S. Department of Commerce. David Rockefeller founded the Trilateral Commission in 1973 to foster cooperation among the elites of Europe, North America, and Japan in advancing neoliberal economic policies and corporate globalization.

  Influential though they were, these institutions generally functioned as polite old-boys’ clubs outside the public spotlight. This changed dramatically as leading plutocrats mobilized to reassert control of the nation’s political agenda. They launched a sophisticated and well-funded campaign to control the mass media, organize new lobbying alliances, mobilize grassroots support, and finance supportive intellectuals, think tanks, and university departments. They offered special courses and junkets for judges and law students, bankrolled friendly politicians, and brought to bear the most advanced tools of corporate advertising and PR to shape the political culture and agenda.

  In 1971, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce sought the advice of Virginia attorney and future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell about what it perceived to be a growing domestic threat to capitalism. Powell responded with a memo titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.” In it, he warned of an assault by environmentalists, consumer activists, and others who “propagandize against the system, seeking insidiously and constantly to sabotage it.” He called on the chamber to mobilize “the wisdom, ingenuity and resources of American business… against those who would destroy it.”5 On Powell’s recommendation, in 1973 the chamber formed the Pacific Legal Foundation to defend corporations against public-interest efforts to enforce environmental regulations, protect workers’ rights, and tax corporate profits.

  William E. Simon, who served as secretary of the treasury under presidents Nixon and Ford, left the Treasury Department in 1977 to become president of the Olin Foundation. There he mobilized conservative foundations behind a strategic effort to align the judicial system with corporate interests and to build a network of influential right-wing 221think tanks. He served as a trustee of the John Templeton Foundation, helped shape the program of the Bradley Foundation, and joined the boards of several right-wing think tanks funded by the Olin Foundation, including the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institute.

  In 1972, the CEOs of a number of America’s largest corporations formed the Business Roundtable to lobby the Congress on behalf of U.S. corporations and their top executives. The Roundtable played a major role in the 1980 presidential election of Ronald Reagan, the passage of tax breaks for corporations, and the Republican takeover of the Congress in 1994. The Roundtable also had a leading role in the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and other trade agreements written by and for corporate interests.

  Before 1970, few Fortune 500 companies had public affairs offices in Washington, D.C. By 1980, more than 80 percent did. The flow of corporate funds to political campaign coffers grew accordingly. Corporate-funded front organizations with misleading names like Keep America Beautiful presented themselves as grassroots citizen initiatives to mobilize political support for corporate-sponsored policy agendas.

  New funds flowed to existing right-wing think tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute (founded in 1943), the Center for Strategic and International Studies (founded in 1962), the Hudson Institute (founded in 1961), and the Hoover Institute. New right-wing think tanks included the Heritage Foundation (1973), which shaped much of the Reagan administration agenda, the Cato Institute (1977), and Citizens for a Sound Economy (1984).

  Building a Voter Base

  Efforts by the theocrats to build a loyal conservative voting base centered on mobilizing conservative white Christians. Early strategists who had been active in Barry Goldwater’s failed 1964 presidential campaign formulated a “family values” agenda and framed the idea of a mass-based “Moral Majority” movement of conservative Christians. To this end, they formed Focus on the Family in 1977 and Concerned Women for America in 1979.6 By the end of the 1990s, Focus on the Family controlled a radio and publishing empire with an annual budget of $110 million, over 1,300 employees, its own zip code in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and a syndicated talk radio show broadcast on some 1,500 222stations in North America and 3,400 stations around the world.7 In 1979, they recruited conservative televangelist Jerry Falwell as point person to recruit conservative white Christian churches to the movement.8

  Weekly meetings of the Religious Roundtable, founded 1979 in Washington, D.C., facilitated coordination of the political efforts of the New Right. Then in 1981, the Religious Roundtable became the Council on National Policy to provide a more formal body to coordinate a broader coalition of secular and religious groups.9 Strategy for the 1996 presidential election was coordinated through weekly meetings convened by Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, bringing together such groups as the Christian Coalition, the National Rifle Association, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Farm Bureau, and the National Right to Life Committee.10

  Outsiders marvel at the success of the Far Right in unifying its fractious base of conflicting interests and values behind a common political agenda. The key is that in the classic dominator relationships of Empire, the coordination of diverse factions and the settling of differences takes place at the leadership level where shared power goals generally override sometimes sharp ideological differences. The leaders tailor their messages to their individual constituencies to gain support for centrally chosen policies and candidates. Since the organizing is from the top down, there is little need for cross-constituency communication and coordination at the grassroots level. This pattern contrasts with the more complex organizing dynamic of global civil society, which self-organizes through interconstituency communication and cooperation at the popular level—the partnership model of Earth Community.

  After the failure of his 1988 bid for the Republican presidential nomination, televangelist Pat Robertson founded the politically sophisticated Christian Coalition and embarked on a strategy crafted by his savvy chief lieutenants, Ralph Reed and Guy Rogers, to take control of the Republican Party. Rogers spelled out the simple arithmetic underlying their electoral strategy at the coalition’s first national conference in November 1991.11

  In a presidential election, when more voters turn out than in any other election, only 15 percent of eligible voters actually determine the outcome.… Of all the adults 18 and over eligible to vote, only about 60 percent are registered.… Of those registered to vote, in a good turnout, only half go to the polls. 223That means 30 percent of those eligible are actually voting. So 15 percent determines the outcome in a high-turnout election. In low-turnout elections… the percentage that determines who wins can be as low as 6 or 7 percent.… We don’t have to persuade a majority of Americans to agree with us.… Most of them stay home and watch television.12

  As Robertson was building the Christian Coalition to mobilize the grass roots, other right-wing strategists and funders were creating two networks o
f think tanks to replicate at the state level the political infrastructure that had been the foundation of their success at the national level. One network, comprising think tanks modeled on the Heritage Foundation, was coordinated through the State Policy Network. The second network, comprising Family Policy Councils developed by Focus on the Family, was loosely modeled on the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. These networks generally functioned as an arm of the Republican Party. Their primary purpose was to market an ideological agenda of conservative economic- and social-policy proposals.13

  STEALTH POLITICS

  The alliance faced a difficult barrier in its effort to mobilize a voter base. The plutocrats’ agenda of subverting democracy, shrinking the middle class, and making a few people fabulously wealthy and powerful at the expense of the rest does not naturally attract a broad popular constituency. It violates basic moral principles of economic and social justice and runs counter to the self-interest of all but the very rich.

  The theocrats faced other challenges distinctive to their faith. First, a major portion of the Christian Right constituency on which they pinned their hopes believes that the earthly world is the domain of the devil and beyond redemption. Many also believe that the Rapture, the time when Christ will return to lift the faithful bodily to heaven, is imminent. Because these beliefs render political action pointless, most Christian groups of such persuasion took little interest in political life and had to be convinced of their Christian duty to engage politically.

  The second challenge for those who sought to mobilize the Christian Right as a political base was the deep influence of the ideas of R.J. Rushdoony, a champion of Christian Reconstructionism, whose articles were regularly published in Falwell’s newspaper. Journalist Frederick 224Clarkson, who specializes in reporting on the Christian Right, explains that