Hedges and Wolin on How New-Style Propagandizing Promotes Inverted Totalitarianism

Yves Smith comments on Hedges and Wolin on How New-Style Propagandizing Promotes Inverted Totalitarianism.

Younger readers may not recognize how radical the transformation of public discourse has been over the last 40 years. While there were always intellectuals who were largely above consuming much mass media, as well as political groups on the far right and left that also largely rejected it, in the 1960s and well into the 1980s, mass media shaped political discourse. … Local newspapers were much more influential in their markets then than now, but they seldom deviated much from the national middle of the road, pro-middle class sentiment. The sort of fragmentation that this interview mentions is in part a result of the Karl Rove strategy of focusing on hot-button interests of narrowly-sliced interest groups, along with media fragmentation which has made it easier to target, as in isolate, them.

Emphasis Mine

The “Inverted Totalitarianism” refers to controls on the foreign populations, rather than the domestic one.

Fragmentation of the subject classes has always been in place for class societies. This fragmentation has taken the form of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and the like.

And in any class society, the lower classes have to be kept in line through a combination of force and propaganda. The ratio changes depending on need.

I think this piece is a reaction to the narrowing of the elite through the economic crises of the past twenty (20) years. The controlling class is being shed as no longer necessary. And former members want to return to the good old days (for them).

Maybe, they should realise that their interests lie with the workers now, not the Capitalists. They should shape their political consciousness appropriately.