The whole world looked on with astonishment at the events at the US Capitol on 6 January.\u00a0 The commentators and politicians berated the orgiastic attack on the \u2018beacon of democracy\u2019; this attack gave a performance usually associated with other parts of the world (and often paid for by the US government).\u00a0\u00a0 However, another thought went through millions of minds:\u00a0 have Americans gone mad?<\/p>\n
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\u2019 worth of \u00a0tirades about conspiracy and \u2018fake news.\u2019\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But this was only the tip of the iceberg.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 Consider these:\u00a0\u00a0 that the \u2018deep state\u2019 ruling the country is composed of (Democratic, of course) Satan-worshipping cannibalistic paedophiles; Californian wildfires were started by alien Jewish lasers;\u00a0 the Parkland school shooting was staged to attack the gun lobby; the Covid vaccination campaign aims to inject Bill Gates\u2019s microchips into the population.\u00a0\u00a0 All these went alongside the Trump \u2018Stop the Steal\u2019 campaign and the 6 January attack on the Capitol in Washington.\u00a0\u00a0 Readers will be aware of these stories.\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
All human societies can have their bouts of insanity:\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 More recently, Mao\u2019s Cultural Revolution in China was perhaps the most striking.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 But what gives rise to such craziness \u2013 particularly intense in the US – as we have seen over the past years?\u00a0\u00a0 And how is it being steered?<\/p>\n
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In the broadest sense, the global capitalist socio-economic system is a madness generator for the bulk of the world\u2019s population.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 (I touched on some of this in my article DSM-5:\u00a0 Recipes for Madness in IP58\/59, Winter 2013.)\u00a0\u00a0 Worldwide, humanity is suffering not only physically but also mentally.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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 \u2013 and plagues.\u00a0\u00a0 Social anxieties were expressed in many ways, including witch-hunting and millenarianism. \u00a0Capitalism 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.\u00a0\u00a0 Let\u2019s consider some of these.<\/p>\n
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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.\u00a0\u00a0 The Air Force explained the debris as a crashed weather balloon and interest diminished.\u00a0\u00a0 In the 1950s, Area 51, Nevada, stimulated further interest in UFO activity.\u00a0\u00a0 These remote, scarcely populated, areas in the US South-West have been used for secret flights \u2013 often at night \u2013 for a succession of high-performance aircraft \u2013 such as the U2, SR-71 Blackbird and F-117 \u2013 each of which looked nothing like contemporaneous aircraft.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 The Air Force was perfectly happy to have these rumours circulating \u2013 better the sightings were of alien spaceships than information about a state-of-the-art aircraft.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 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 \u2018Pentagon Papers\u2019 in the New York Times.\u00a0\u00a0 Furthermore, it was found through the Watergate investigations that the Nixon government had tried systematically to discredit the originator of the Papers, Daniel Ellsberg.\u00a0\u00a0 In those, post-Watergate, times, Eisenhower\u2019s 1950s\u2019 warnings about the military-industrial complex were morphed into the \u2018deep state\u2019 that was really in control.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 This is one thread of the yarn.<\/p>\n
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Another is the evolution of religious institutions.\u00a0\u00a0 The first European settlers came over to the Americas with all their prejudices from their home nations \u2013 whether fleeing religious oppressions or bringing it with them.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 Adding to the white churches came a swathe of black churches after the Civil War.\u00a0\u00a0 These denominations continued to separate and recombine into different organisations.\u00a0\u00a0 And today we have a country strewn with a multitude of institutions looking more like the pick-and-mix section of a religious supermarket.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 This became a multi-billion-dollar industry.<\/p>\n
With the money comes a deep involvement between religion and the state.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 This provides rich seams of voters that political parties can mine.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In recent years, the Republican Party has been foremost in mining the Christian churches \u2013 getting the preachers to deliver the votes in return for the preservation of tax breaks.\u00a0\u00a0 This gave a boost to the development and substantial growth of Christian nationalism.\u00a0\u00a0 Along with the political positions \u2013 anti-abortion predominating in a misogynistic world view of control over women \u2013 is the religious aspect which encourages the acceptance of the mystical.\u00a0\u00a0 The variations in belief cover a multitude of evangelicals, charismatics, fundamentalist of many hues \u2013 but then, if you can believe in transubstantiation you can believe in anything.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 (As an aside, Pompeo is a rapturist.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 Jihadism for the Christian Right.<\/p>\n
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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.\u00a0\u00a0 The US has been at the forefront of these changes.\u00a0\u00a0 After end of the Second World War the dominant ideological messages were carried from the state to the population by newspapers.\u00a0\u00a0 Through the 20th Century, the role of television and radio grew at the expense of the printed word.<\/p>\n
In the US, television news and analysis was dominated by three networks:\u00a0\u00a0 NBC, ABC and CBS.\u00a0\u00a0 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).\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 This situation endured for decades and it continued to fulfil the role of \u2013 stable \u2013 ideological messaging.\u00a0\u00a0 The stability was ensured in large measure by the 1947 enactment by the Federal Communications Commission of the Fairness Doctrine which required \u2018balanced coverage\u2019 of controversial topics of public interest.\u00a0\u00a0 But in 1987, in a landmark ruling, the FCC abandoned the Fairness Doctrine which was to change the ideological conveyer belts profoundly.<\/p>\n
Americans spend far more time in their cars and trucks, than most other nationals \u2013 making radio a very important conduit for the benefit of the music industry and news broadcasters.\u00a0\u00a0 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;\u00a0\u00a0 effectively, the leash was taken off them and they concocted a toxic industry.\u00a0\u00a0 (Trump\u2019s 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.)\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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Change doesn\u2019t stop.\u00a0\u00a0 Post-1987, there were further developments in this territory.\u00a0\u00a0 First, newspaper and television ownership went global and the rules of capitalist (and especially advertising) economics tore into the industry.\u00a0\u00a0 Worldwide, deregulations have turned the concentrations of state control of ideology transmission over to commercial interests \u2013\u00a0 or, in other words, money control.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 This has weakened local cultures, submitting them to the hegemony of central powers .\u00a0\u00a0 Secondly, the major platforms for news began to shift from terrestrial broadcast, first to cable and then to the internet.\u00a0\u00a0 With these shifts in technology came other, predatory developments.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 Aside from the commercial advantages to advertisers, this opened up enormous opportunities for political parties.\u00a0\u00a0 A population could be analysed by constituency and then be further dissected into categories that could be dealt with specifically:\u00a0 such categories could be fed micro-ideological messages.\u00a0\u00a0 Cheaply, too.<\/p>\n
This novel ideological vector runs on positive feedback, where on so much social media people only get the news, or information, they \u2018like\u2019, diminishing access to challenging views.\u00a0\u00a0 Whatever a person\u2019s political inclinations, the television channels and social media can provide more reinforcement.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The world is separated into black and white.\u00a0\u00a0 The transmission of ideology is determined by who is paying for the channel.\u00a0\u00a0 But, most importantly, these positive feedback systems lead to instability.\u00a0 There is no self-correction.\u00a0\u00a0 Scepticism goes out the window.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 And, further, this enabled participation of white supremist organisations such as the KKK, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.\u00a0\u00a0 The gun lobby too \u2013 the Second Amendment defenders \u2013 was never out of sight.\u00a0 The traditional market censorship has been replaced by cancel culture \u2013 of both the Left and the Right \u2013 that only shouts.\u00a0\u00a0 The cacophony on this socio-political stage was crying out for orchestration.\u00a0\u00a0 Into this role stepped a reality television host, Trump, comfortable with chaos and psyched up to intensify it for his personal benefit.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s mass rallies \u2013 during the campaign and during his presidency \u2013 afforded settings for hyping the narrative about fake news, witch-hunts and (latterly) the Steal.\u00a0\u00a0 Fox News, QAnon and others reinforced the messages and the quasi-hysteria around them.\u00a0\u00a0 A significant number of people regard Trump almost mystically with complex explanations for his actions and how to interpret them.\u00a0\u00a0 For example, he set up the Mueller Inquiry, some explain, with Russia-gate as a cover for its real purpose \u2013 to investigate the paedophiliac cabal \u00a0at the heart of government.\u00a0\u00a0 When he makes speeches at his rallies \u2013 and especially on 6 January \u2013 even his hand movements are parsed so that his followers can understand what his instructions really are.\u00a0\u00a0 This is a classic response of those that swallow conspiracy theories.\u00a0\u00a0 On that day, and right up to the moment of Biden\u2019s inauguration oath on 20 January, many were convinced that something major was to happen to stop the Steal.\u00a0\u00a0 They were left with the emotions familiar to all followers of prophesies that fail and whose beliefs are disconfirmed.<\/p>\n
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Is belief in Rapture today madder than standard beliefs in \u2018respectable\u2019 religions (resurrection, angels, devils)?\u00a0Is belief in ruling class conspiracies groundless? Is the idea of electoral fraud ridiculous?\u00a0No to all of these.\u00a0Americans are neither more intelligent nor more stupid than anyone else.\u00a0The 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 \u2013 as in the UK.<\/p>\n
The world is a difficult place to understand and capitalism\u2019s evolution and the bourgeoisie\u2019s 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.\u00a0The cultural dissonance is palpable.\u00a0The\u00a0turbulence is considerable. The entire population is stressed.<\/p>\n
Where do we see the working class questioning this whole madhouse?\u00a0There were few workers among the participants arrested at the Capitol on 6 January; indeed, most of them were small business owners.\u00a0Although some working-class votes went to Trump, in the midst of this psychological mayhem there have still been strikes against employers\u2019 indifference to workers\u2019 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.\u00a0The 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.\u00a0The material and ideological forces thrown at it by bourgeois society are formidable and they have to be seen for what they are.<\/p>\n
Marlowe<\/p>\n
27 February 2021<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The whole world looked on with astonishment at the events at the US Capitol on 6 January.\u00a0 The commentators and politicians berated the orgiastic attack on the \u2018beacon of democracy\u2019; this attack gave a performance usually associated with other parts of the world (and often paid for by the US government).\u00a0\u00a0 However, another thought went … <\/p>\n