[Peace-discuss] Regressives

[C. G. Estabrook]

A century ago, in the more free societies it was becoming more difficult to 
control the population by force. Labor unions were being formed, along with 
labor-based parliamentary parties; the franchise was extending; and popular 
movements were resisting arbitrary authority, not for the first time to be sure, 
but with a wider base and greater success. In the most free societies, England 
and the US, dominant sectors were coming to recognize that to maintain their 
control they would have to shift from force to other means, primarily control of 
attitudes and opinion. Prominent intellectuals called for the development of 
effective propaganda to impose on the vulgar masses “necessary illusions” and 
“emotionally potent oversimplifications.” It would be necessary, they urged, to 
devise means of “manufacture of consent” to ensure that the “ignorant and 
meddlesome outsiders,” the general population, be kept “in their place,” as 
“spectators,” not “participants in action,” so that the small privileged group 
of “responsible men” would be able to form policy undisturbed by the “rage and 
trampling of the bewildered herd.” I am quoting from the most respected 
progressive public intellectuals in the US in the 20th century, Walter Lippmann 
and Reinhold Niebuhr, both Wilson-Roosevelt-Kennedy liberals, the latter 
president Obama’s favorite philosopher.

At the same time the huge public relations industry began to develop, devoted to 
the same ends. In the words of its leaders, also from the liberal end of the 
spectrum, the industry must direct the general population to the “superficial 
things of life, like fashionable consumption” so that the “intelligent minority” 
will be free to determine the proper course of policy.

These concerns are persistent. The democratic uprising of the 1960s was 
frightening to elite opinion. Intellectuals from Europe, the US, and Japan 
called for an end to the “excess of democracy.” The population must be returned 
to apathy and passivity, and in particular sterner measures must be imposed by 
the institutions responsible for “the indoctrination of the young”: the schools, 
universities, churches. I am quoting from the liberal internationalist end of 
the spectrum, those who staffed the Carter administration in the United States 
and their counterparts elsewhere in the industrial democracies. The right called 
for far harsher measures. Major efforts were soon undertaken to reduce the 
threat of democracy, with a certain degree of success. We are now living in that 
era.

--from <http://www.zcommunications.org/quo-vadis-by-noam-chomsky>