Rule by the illusion of choices

Michael Moore, speaking at a rally in Madison last month, mentioned that “Just 400 Americans — 400 — have more wealth than half of all Americans combined.” That’s an interesting statement, and coming from Moore instead of, say, Joseph Stiglitz, it needs to be analyzed carefully. (Try here.) But I think it is safe to say that there is probably more concentrated power each year nested in Bohemian Grove than at Burning Man, so that Moore’s statistic, while perhaps indicative of a huge imbalance of wealth in this country, is not worth haggling over. It’s a nice talking point.

The question can be rephrased in the following manner: Who has more power: The 69 million people who voted for Barack Obama in 2008, or the people who decided that our only available choices were to be Barack Obama and John McCain? That terribly oversimplifies a complex process, but the bottom line is this: If not those two men, it was going to be two others, and those two would be determined by an apparent voting process that was mere Kabuki Theater. There were perhaps a dozen viable possibilities, and none of that dozen would be objectionable to Bohemian Grove. Burning Man, on the other hand, was high as kite and could not care less.

The problem is academic: How does power work? Even more academic: What is power?

Power is the ability to make another person do things in your favor even if that person does not want to do those things. The essential power relationship is parent-child, where the child is dependent on the parent for sustenance. “Good” kids are submissive to parental authority. From there we enter school, and the authority transfers to teacher/coach/administrator, and the “good” students again, are submissive. From there it is the strained relationship that virtually all of us endure forever – boss/employee.

We are so inured to power that we accept it, usually without question. It never occurs to us that bosses should not have such power over other people – we accept it as normal. We accept absurdities as normal … health insurance companies can exclude us from access to the health care system; mobile phone providers can insist that we use only their phones and sign two -year contracts; the president, once elected, will abandon campaign rhetoric (and even acknowledge that much of it was a lie).

Wait a minute! We accept that campaigns are meaningless exercises?

Yes, we do. Just as parents in a household might allow children to have an opinion, schools have student councils, and bosses have a “suggestion” box, campaigns and elections are transparent fictions that willfully ignore the power equation. But we willingly go through them because, honestly, if we didn’t have that, we’d have nothing.

Moving on then, how do the people at Bohemian Grove* manage to exercise their authority over the rest of us, controlling our choices for elected office and rendering our vote meaningless? What are the mechanisms?

My thoughts on this subject pop up here every now and then, but are not well-developed. I fall back on ethereal notions like “propaganda” and “illusion,” each very real, but also vague enough to lack real explanatory power.

If I stop here and say that I don’t know how it works, but do know that it does work, can I get on with my day?

I’ll stop. I have so much more to learn. But a good starting point can be found in William C. Donhoff’s 2005 essay, The Class-Domination Theory of Power. The roots of this essay go much farther back in his career, and the essay is really just a capsule of a 1967 text book, Who Rules America.

I’ll have more to say, of course, as blogging is a Latin term that roughly translated means “Can’t STFU.”
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*The annual gathering at the Bohemian Grove complex is a weird orgy of rituals and substance abuse, like Burning Man, but the phrase is used here to mean the 1/10 of 1% of us who hold real power.