The whole world looked on with astonishment at the events at the US Capitol on 6 January. The commentators and politicians berated the orgiastic attack on the ‘beacon of democracy’; this attack gave a performance usually associated with other parts of the world (and often paid for by the US government). However, another thought went through millions of minds: have Americans gone mad?
This question arose not simply because of the violence on the day but because the participants were unrestrained in expressing their beliefs about what was going on in the US, and crystallising five years’ worth of tirades about conspiracy and ‘fake news.’ But this was only the tip of the iceberg. There has been a ready acceptance in a growing proportion of the American population to believe the most bizarre stories about what is going on in their country. Consider these: that the ‘deep state’ ruling the country is composed of (Democratic, of course) Satan-worshipping cannibalistic paedophiles; Californian wildfires were started by alien Jewish lasers; the Parkland school shooting was staged to attack the gun lobby; the Covid vaccination campaign aims to inject Bill Gates’s microchips into the population. All these went alongside the Trump ‘Stop the Steal’ campaign and the 6 January attack on the Capitol in Washington. Readers will be aware of these stories. The current outbreak of conspiracy theories and the street actions of the far right in the United States entitles itself to be viewed as a pandemic of madness.
All human societies can have their bouts of insanity: among the European societies of the past seven centuries there were several outbreaks of witch-hunts; That particular craziness had its echo in Salem, Massachusetts, at the end of the 17th Century. More recently, Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China was perhaps the most striking. These, and many others, can be associated with periods of profound societal stresses, social uncertainty and distress, and all had the ruling classes acting as steers following their own factional interests. But what gives rise to such craziness – particularly intense in the US – as we have seen over the past years? And how is it being steered?
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In the broadest sense, the global capitalist socio-economic system is a madness generator for the bulk of the world’s population. Its wars and crises, its drive into evermore precariousness of existence for not just millions but billions of people, its repression, its pandemics, its increasing commodification of all things social and psychological; all these are manifestations of what Marx termed the real domination of capital, the ongoing process that has gone far, far beyond what could be possibly imagined in his time. (I touched on some of this in my article DSM-5: Recipes for Madness in IP58/59, Winter 2013.) Worldwide, humanity is suffering not only physically but also mentally. There are strong parallels with the conditions of, say, the European populations of the Sixteenth Century who had to deal with wars, famines, the breakdown of religious institutional certainties and the emergence of new political forces – and plagues. Social anxieties were expressed in many ways, including witch-hunting and millenarianism. Capitalism has had its share of war, genocides, famines, political uncertainty, purges, and plagues; but these are taking place today in new contexts that have emerged from novel historical processes. Let’s consider some of these.
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One of the first post-war conspiracy theories began with what was later described as a UFO sighting at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. The Air Force explained the debris as a crashed weather balloon and interest diminished. In the 1950s, Area 51, Nevada, stimulated further interest in UFO activity. These remote, scarcely populated, areas in the US South-West have been used for secret flights – often at night – for a succession of high-performance aircraft – such as the U2, SR-71 Blackbird and F-117 – each of which looked nothing like contemporaneous aircraft. So the mysterious lights, restricted areas, strange noises that accompanied these research programmes were further fuel for conspiracy theories, to be joined by growing suspicion of alien activity. The Air Force was perfectly happy to have these rumours circulating – better the sightings were of alien spaceships than information about a state-of-the-art aircraft. It was in the context of increasing anxieties about the state of the world, especially after multiple threats of nuclear war, that these ideas began to take on cultural traction. In the 1970s, interest in UFOs built considerably and, given suspicions about what was going on inside the state, became coupled with government secrecy: they were not telling people what was really going on. The fact that successive governments had systematically lied to the population about the origins and purpose of the Vietnam War, the clandestine operations in Laos and Cambodia, was proven definitively with the 1971 publication of the ‘Pentagon Papers’ in the New York Times. Furthermore, it was found through the Watergate investigations that the Nixon government had tried systematically to discredit the originator of the Papers, Daniel Ellsberg. In those, post-Watergate, times, Eisenhower’s 1950s’ warnings about the military-industrial complex were morphed into the ‘deep state’ that was really in control. Hollywood cashed in on this sense of paranoia with several films, and later moved it into cultural centre stage with globally-successful television shows such as the X-files. This is one thread of the yarn.
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Another is the evolution of religious institutions. The first European settlers came over to the Americas with all their prejudices from their home nations – whether fleeing religious oppressions or bringing it with them. The Puritans, in particular, brought their millenarian beliefs with them; the sheer size of the country and the spreading out of the population weakened centralised religious controls and belief systems diversified. Adding to the white churches came a swathe of black churches after the Civil War. These denominations continued to separate and recombine into different organisations. And today we have a country strewn with a multitude of institutions looking more like the pick-and-mix section of a religious supermarket. So, too, grew the opportunities for conmen to benefit: with Elmer Gantry being the template for a thousand and one to follow; a fictional representation of what was already happening. Technically, the preachers moved on to radio and television with many of them able to get followers to make contributions and buy modern equivalents of relics and indulgencies. This became a multi-billion-dollar industry.
With the money comes a deep involvement between religion and the state. The American Constitution separates church and state but gives religion a free hand; significantly, the state gives tax benefits to institutions that call themselves religious. This provides rich seams of voters that political parties can mine. In recent years, the Republican Party has been foremost in mining the Christian churches – getting the preachers to deliver the votes in return for the preservation of tax breaks. This gave a boost to the development and substantial growth of Christian nationalism. Along with the political positions – anti-abortion predominating in a misogynistic world view of control over women – is the religious aspect which encourages the acceptance of the mystical. The variations in belief cover a multitude of evangelicals, charismatics, fundamentalist of many hues – but then, if you can believe in transubstantiation you can believe in anything. Among their beliefs: the Rapture, which gives eschatological connection to end-time with one 1950s group The Seekers, also known as The Brotherhood of the Seven Rays, claiming that aliens, not Jesus Christ, would seize the Elect. (As an aside, Pompeo is a rapturist.) This acceptance of mysticism and its connections to mainstream politics as well as to alien tales permeates all strata of American society, and contributes to the further weaving of threads into the fabric. Jihadism for the Christian Right.
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Technical evolutions have escalated what once were cottage industries into weapons-grade onslaughts: these have fundamentally changed the predominant ideological vectors in society. The US has been at the forefront of these changes. After end of the Second World War the dominant ideological messages were carried from the state to the population by newspapers. Through the 20th Century, the role of television and radio grew at the expense of the printed word.
In the US, television news and analysis was dominated by three networks: NBC, ABC and CBS. The dominant national newspapers were located on the East (such as The Washington Post and The New York Times) and the West (such as The Los Angeles Times) coasts, and the round the Chicago mid-West.(such as the Chicago Tribune). The country was covered by a network of local television stations and a mass of local newspapers who syndicated a great deal of the news and its analysis from the majors and re-interpreted it for local consumption. This situation endured for decades and it continued to fulfil the role of – stable – ideological messaging. The stability was ensured in large measure by the 1947 enactment by the Federal Communications Commission of the Fairness Doctrine which required ‘balanced coverage’ of controversial topics of public interest. But in 1987, in a landmark ruling, the FCC abandoned the Fairness Doctrine which was to change the ideological conveyer belts profoundly.
Americans spend far more time in their cars and trucks, than most other nationals – making radio a very important conduit for the benefit of the music industry and news broadcasters. After 1987, radio also became a platform for the right-wing shock-jocks, the radio hosts of opinion programmes that have an immense number of phone-ins which give them considerable knowledge of the populations likes and, most importantly, resentments and hates; effectively, the leash was taken off them and they concocted a toxic industry. (Trump’s appreciation of what this contributed to him was marked by his award of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Rush Limbaugh, just deceased, the point man for Resentment and Hatred.) Almost simultaneously, the Murdoch publishing empire was creating Fox News (to rival the three network majors) and this organisation grew without any experience of the previous restraints on news broadcasting.
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Change doesn’t stop. Post-1987, there were further developments in this territory. First, newspaper and television ownership went global and the rules of capitalist (and especially advertising) economics tore into the industry. Worldwide, deregulations have turned the concentrations of state control of ideology transmission over to commercial interests – or, in other words, money control. The effects of these economic forces ravaged the locals to the point that the US has been described as being transformed from a newspaper forest to a desert. This has weakened local cultures, submitting them to the hegemony of central powers . Secondly, the major platforms for news began to shift from terrestrial broadcast, first to cable and then to the internet. With these shifts in technology came other, predatory developments. On the back of the internet came social media with technologies that could tie individuals to their tastes and preferences, aggregate individuals to groupings in localities, and tie all this to micro-advertising. Aside from the commercial advantages to advertisers, this opened up enormous opportunities for political parties. A population could be analysed by constituency and then be further dissected into categories that could be dealt with specifically: such categories could be fed micro-ideological messages. Cheaply, too.
This novel ideological vector runs on positive feedback, where on so much social media people only get the news, or information, they ‘like’, diminishing access to challenging views. Whatever a person’s political inclinations, the television channels and social media can provide more reinforcement. The world is separated into black and white. The transmission of ideology is determined by who is paying for the channel. But, most importantly, these positive feedback systems lead to instability. There is no self-correction. Scepticism goes out the window. And into this febrile ideological cauldron cults such as QAnon injected the most bizarre conspiracy stories to an audience less and less able to apply personal sceptical moderation. And, further, this enabled participation of white supremist organisations such as the KKK, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. The gun lobby too – the Second Amendment defenders – was never out of sight. The traditional market censorship has been replaced by cancel culture – of both the Left and the Right – that only shouts. The cacophony on this socio-political stage was crying out for orchestration. Into this role stepped a reality television host, Trump, comfortable with chaos and psyched up to intensify it for his personal benefit.
Trump’s mass rallies – during the campaign and during his presidency – afforded settings for hyping the narrative about fake news, witch-hunts and (latterly) the Steal. Fox News, QAnon and others reinforced the messages and the quasi-hysteria around them. A significant number of people regard Trump almost mystically with complex explanations for his actions and how to interpret them. For example, he set up the Mueller Inquiry, some explain, with Russia-gate as a cover for its real purpose – to investigate the paedophiliac cabal at the heart of government. When he makes speeches at his rallies – and especially on 6 January – even his hand movements are parsed so that his followers can understand what his instructions really are. This is a classic response of those that swallow conspiracy theories. On that day, and right up to the moment of Biden’s inauguration oath on 20 January, many were convinced that something major was to happen to stop the Steal. They were left with the emotions familiar to all followers of prophesies that fail and whose beliefs are disconfirmed.
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Is belief in Rapture today madder than standard beliefs in ‘respectable’ religions (resurrection, angels, devils)? Is belief in ruling class conspiracies groundless? Is the idea of electoral fraud ridiculous? No to all of these. Americans are neither more intelligent nor more stupid than anyone else. The specific madness rampant in the US is a creation of 21st Century capitalism and is contagious, appearing in other parts of the world albeit it muted – as in the UK.
The world is a difficult place to understand and capitalism’s evolution and the bourgeoisie’s manoeuvres challenge us hugely. The developments outlined here describe how relatively stable, nationally-shared perceptions in American society were morphed into antagonistic interpretations of reality. The cultural dissonance is palpable. The turbulence is considerable. The entire population is stressed.
Where do we see the working class questioning this whole madhouse? There were few workers among the participants arrested at the Capitol on 6 January; indeed, most of them were small business owners. Although some working-class votes went to Trump, in the midst of this psychological mayhem there have still been strikes against employers’ indifference to workers’ Covid vulnerabilities, health industry workers have still worked for the benefit of the sick, and there has been active participation into anti-racist movements. But that is not enough. The challenge of consciousness is not to be settled between bourgeois visions of reality, whether stable or chaotic, but for the proletariat to develop a shared perception of reality, to see the world through the lens of class. The material and ideological forces thrown at it by bourgeois society are formidable and they have to be seen for what they are.
Marlowe
27 February 2021
Very good. Congratulations!