Why We Fail to Penetrate the Eternal Propaganda Machine of the Elite

In the United States, “we the people” elect the government. Sounds like a straightforward, transparent, and reliable way to ensure that the government represents the source of its legitimacy, the people. But we know it’s not that simple. Not everyone is necessarily considered a person, with personhood determined in some cases by the government itself. “We the people” changes over time, the result of arduous, internecine processes that deliver something often loathed by the body politic: new spirits breaching the husk of the molted insect to declare themselves ready to be counted, further complicating the tissue of “we the people,” a substance already heavily complex, sensitive, nuanced, fragile. 

North America’s young republic had different degrees of personhood: people with property and people with none, males and females, masters and slaves, citizens and savages. Your location on this spectrum determined your right to vote, your right to liberty, your right to live. Women were granted personhood, but spared the burden of enfranchisement. Slaves were not persons, but property preserved for the sake of its utility. Savages were trampled underfoot and forgotten. 

At the onset of the U.S. drama, “we the people” were male property owners. John Adams expresses the wisdom of this restriction to James Sullivan on May 26, 1776, in a letter in which he muses about the qualification of American voters: “. . . men in general, in every society, who are wholly destitute of property, are also too little acquainted with public affairs to form a right judgment, and too dependent upon other men to have a will of their own . . . They talk and vote as they are directed by some man of property, who has attached their minds to his interest.”¹ If Adams’ assessment is correct, granting those without property a vote would indeed be pointless. The outcome would be fated to represent the will of the propertied class whether “every man who has not a farthing” voted or not. 

Adams’ opinion notwithstanding, by the 1820s all states had dropped the property requirement, enfranchising all white males of voting age.² In 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment granted all male citizens regardless of race the right to vote. The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 granted women suffrage. “We the people” had molted, but no butterfly emerged. The newly enfranchised simply lumbered from one vermiform larva into another, the responsibility of being a constituent weightier than ever. 

Oddly, the changed complexion of the U.S. constituency triggered the very dynamic against which Adams had warned. Far from having too much influence over the judgment of the propertyless man, the elite feared the rogue independence of a voting rabble. Efforts to gain control over that vote were in order. And what efforts they were. 

It’s no surprise that those efforts continue to this very day. What is surprising is that, after being targeted for generations, we are still vulnerable to their influence. How could any messaging today confuse us about what our interests are? After decades of exposure to their double-talk, why have we not penetrated the rhetoric to detect the razor-wire core meant to shear our souls from our hides? 

Three obstacles at least can be cited to excuse our poor performance.

The first obstacle: our upbringing. As proud members of a capitalistic society, we were weaned on advertising. We’ve spent hundreds of hours dutifully watching glorious images that exist nowhere but in American ads, most of which cost more than the life of an average citizen. We’ve gazed at packages of Bayer aspirin set next to hot-water bottles and boxes of tissues hundreds of times. Strung altogether, we’ve spent scores of hours staring at an empty six-ounce Coca-Cola bottle resting against an abandoned tennis racket by a deserted red-clay court, or something very similar. Far from resisting these hollow narratives and their images, we cooperate. We accept a company’s right to present to us any series of images it chooses in the hope that those images will induce us to buy its products. Where’s the problem? We want to buy its products. We want to support that company because we want to support free enterprise because we want to support America because we are Americans and Americans are free. That psychological bridge was welded into our outlooks as toddlers watching cartoons on TV. 

So far so good, for the elite, that is. They had only one tiny step to make from the commercial to the political. And they made it. Only we didn’t notice. We remained willing, open, cooperative, complicit, ready to buy.

Our second obstacle is ignorance. We are unaware of the stakes. By seducing our opinion to win our vote, the wealthy stand to gain kingdoms. Not knowing this, we naturally do not suspect to what lengths they are willing to go to capture our vote. If the effect weren’t so detrimental to our well-being, the attention might be flattering.

The final obstacle: We don’t recognize their propaganda as such. Forget the red-and-yellow poster with a hammer and sickle on it. Their material has been packaged to resemble the most respectable sources of information of our age, the very source of information they are in fact attempting to rebut: scientific information. To do so, they have founded mind banks, think tanks, academies, institutes, research centers, and special-focus departments embedded in renowned universities. The output — “scientific” reports, “academic” papers, and “analyses” — are published on highly polished Web sites and presented by “science” specialists on talk shows of all sorts. The conclusions of this work consistently reflect the mandate each agency received from the Big Money funding it: cast doubt on truths the wealthy find inimical to their business. 

The propaganda is highly effective because we do in fact consume it as they intend us to: as conscientious scientific research exposing critical gaps in seriously flawed, immature science peddled by alarmist amateurs with questionable motives. Since the propaganda looks just like the genuine science to us, we predictably conclude that the experts can’t agree, so how are we supposed to know? And because the statements are diametrically opposed to each other, frustration results. Factions form. Antagonism percolates until no one can discuss the topic reasonably, and those who try get nowhere. Confusion prevails. As have the elite. 

We are so confused now that we can’t agree on what liberty is, or prosperity. We think the bigger the breaks the wealthy get, the better off we will be at some point down the road. That funneling the bulk of the national income to armaments keeps us safe. That pinching off support for school lunches foils socialism. That the Israel-Palestine conflict is controversial and complicated. That being a slave has its benefits. 

We have become so distrustful and so cynical that we no longer believe anyone speaks the truth. All we get is jaded opinion lobbed at us from Internet war rooms along with social media shrapnel we accept as salt-of-the-earth wisdom. Adams’ gloomy prediction about the horrors of letting the poor vote has come true. Our minds have become “attached” to the interests of men of property, but not for the reason he foresaw. The rich worked hard to establish that attachment afterwe got the vote. Our job is to regain our balance, our focus, and our independence. 

Adams discussed how to do that in the same letter. Admitting that power invariably endows those with property, he stated, “The only possible way . . . of preserving the balance of power on the side of equal liberty and public virtue is to make the acquisition of land easy to every member of society.” By so doing, he believed “the multitude will have the balance of power, and in that case the multitude will take care of the liberty, virtue, and interest of the multitude, in all acts of government.” 

There you have it from John Adams himself: Equal distribution of wealth among the people is requisite for turning out a mature constituency that will vote rationally in its own interest, thus electing a government that will attend to the interests of that multitude, thereby preserving a true democracy.

So how do we do that? Most of us can’t go out and buy a farm, or a house, or a condominium, or any kind of property. But we don’t need to. All we have to do is open our eyes, and we can do that by revisiting a sophisticated propaganda campaign Big Tobacco conducted for decades in the very recent past. The stakes couldn’t have been higher: keep its business healthy by keeping its customers smoking and dying. In the meantime, it had to find a customer base to replace us, its current smokers. The genuine research R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company conducted — which it did not publish — yielded invaluable advice: the earlier in life customers are brought on board, the more likely it is they will become heavy, lifelong smokers, just what was wanted. The result: Joe Camel posted within lunch-break distance of the schools where all those prospective clients hung out.

And we now all know. What a surprise. There is a link between smoking and cancer, something Big Tobacco knew all along. So how do we respond now that we find ourselves in the crosshairs of a similar campaign, even more deadly, yet higher stakes, the calling out of the so-called hoax about burning fossil fuels causing global warming? They’re deploying the same techniques, using the same “think tanks,” in many cases trotting out the same experts, and all fueled once again by their cash, lots of it. Shouldn’t we be equipped to handle this one? Surely, we can see through the familiar, shabby garb. A hackneyed old saw rings rancid but true: Fool me once, shame on you . . .

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1. Adams, John. The Works of John Adams, vol. 9 (Letters and State Papers 1799-1811). Little, Brown, and Company, 1854. ↩︎
2. Most older states with property restrictions dropped them by the mid-1820s, except for Rhode Island, Virginia and North Carolina. No new states had property qualifications although three had adopted tax-paying qualifications – Ohio, Louisiana, and Mississippi, of which only in Louisiana were these significant and long lasting, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Voting_rights_in_the_United_States&oldid=1183190475 ↩︎