|
Here's an example of something I've been thinking about lately:
People on the extreme right, especially right-wing businessmen, have always hated the New Deal, and Social Security in particular. When the Republicans took control of Congress in 1947, it was their unconcealed desire to undo the New Deal -- but their attacks on it didn't get very far and actually helped ensure Truman's re-election.
At that point, repeal of Social Security stopped being part of the official Republican agenda -- but it remained very much alive on the extreme right. For example, it was one of the goals of the John Birch Society. At the same time, the right started fostering a cult of extreme individualism and self-reliance which could be used to make the end of Social Security seem philosophically attractive to people for whom it made no economic sense.
Then, perhaps fifteen years ago, the idea started to be spread around that Social Security was going to go bankrupt, that it wouldn't be there by the time younger workers were ready to retire, that the system was doomed. In retrospect, it seems clear that this idea was being spread very deliberately by right-wing fundraisers and advocacy groups, but at the time it just seemed like common wisdom -- something everybody knew and believed implicitly.
And now we see the fruit of that whispering campaign in the form of Bush's attempt to dismantle Social Security in the name of saving it.
So -- is there a conspiracy at play here? Over the last fifteen years, quite possibly, if by conspiracy you mean a unified group of people who share common goals and consciously work towards them behind a variety of false fronts.
Over the last sixty years, on the other hand, there's been something going on that doesn't quite rise to the level of conscious conspiracy, but also can't be dismissed as merely coincidence or "shit happens." It's more like a loose network of like-minded people, extending over several generations, sharing a very definite goal and pressing towards that goal at every opportunity and in the face of all opposition.
What's more, those same people have also been working steadily towards related goals, including repeal of the progressive income tax, health and safety regulations, and environmental protections.
So what do you call that sort of long-term collusion? It doesn't depend on "the result of some carefully coordinated and complex plan" cooked up by an evil mastermind in his basement laboratory. Instead, it's based on common goals, supported by a lot of ad hoc coordination and in-the-moment adaptation to circumstances. But has exactly the same result as the classic notion of a conspiracy.
And it does make sense of an awful lot of the crap that has been going on in this country. It says that the situation we find ourselves in right now is exactly the situation that a lot of nasty old men wanted to put us in going back to 1947 -- and that this is no coincidence. And it says that there is no need to keep trotting out that tired old whipping boy of "human stupidity" as an explanation for anything and everything, when the alternative explanation that a bunch of rich guys are getting together to fix prices or screw the poor will cover the bases for more efficiently.
Back around 1971, I believed I had stumbled on the secret of the universe, and the secret was this: Human history isn't nearly as messy as they want you to believe it is, and anybody who tells you differently is probably trying to hide something from you.
A lot of the blinding revelations of 1971 have turned out to be not-so-blinding after all, but I've never had reason to doubt that one. Human history is like a series of copycat threads at DU -- people running changes on one another's ideas and then tossing them back into the mix. The same themes keep coming round with small variations, forming a grand improvisational symphony where even the bits that may not have fit in originally eventually get picked up and woven into the larger whole.
One bad thing happening to one person may be random shit. But when a whole slew of bad things keep happening to the same class of people -- for example, when the news tells us that black men in America are currently undergoing four differend kinds of catastrophe all at once -- I find it very hard to believe that isn't happening because a certain group of people decided thirty years ago that they wanted it to happen.
And I don't regard myself as a crazy conspiracy theorist for thinking so.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
