It's a Totally New Game

First, please be patient with me.  I'm working in an environment where trust is very important. Some people feel they've been burned by the media and they know of blogs that focus on dishing dirt. I've got to gain some trust before I can blog about work.  That said, most  people have been incredibly nice, both at work and in town. I've also been working long hours, which leave little access to non-work topics and little time to write.  I barely even got to see the blue sky and sunshine that was out part of the day.

But I have  been expecting the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. I've had some thoughts as this decision was coming up. They've all probably been made by others, but I haven't seen anything.

1. I think with this decision, the fiction that the Conservative court would be a strict constructionist court and not an activist court is revealed to all who are open to the obvious.
2. When  the majority says this is about free speech and people's right to hear all views,  they are either:
a. exceptionally duplicitous,
b. ideologically blind, or
c. incredibly naive.

We know from modern advertising, from the Nazi, Soviet, and North Korean Propaganda machines, and from Fox News, that if you say something often enough, if you know how to appeal to their emotional fears, you can get many of them to believe anything. With corporate interests unleashed to spend as much as they want on political propaganda, the idea of free speech, the idea of democracy is endangered by a huge imbalance of money to shape how people see the world. (I haven't read the decision yet, so if you have, please make appropriate adjustments where I mischaracterize the scope of the decision.  If you haven't read it either, take what I say about the specific direct consequences with a grain of skepticism.)

3. Is this the end of democracy in the US and the beginning of a corporate dictatorship? Not necessarily. There are still some limits.
a. There are things like the internet, though if corporate interests can buy laws that favor them to take over and control access and content, the internet may not last as a mild west of free speech.
b. Nothing lasts forever. Even the powerful become smug and fall. But how bad will it get before that happens?
c. There are already people working on a Constitutional Amendment to limit individual constitutional rights to living human beings and not corporate entities.  But will corporate America's new expanded spending freedom create advertising against such an amendment kill it?
d. Will there be an unexpected vacancy on the Supreme Court that would allow Obama to shift the balance? Probably not.
e.  Will the perceived-as-more-enlightened corporate wealth at the Googles and Apples counter  the more conservative companies?  I suspect their messages may sound somewhat different, but they also, are large corporations, that have common interests with the Bechtels and Exxons.

My parents grew up in Germany, so it is a reference that I have some knowledge of. I don't raise these analogies lightly.  My comparisons here are not to concentration camps, but to the manipulation of language to shape people's view of the world.  The Nazis were elected to power democratically. In his two volume diary, I Shall Bear Witness, Victor Klemperer (cousin of the conductor Otto Klemperer), documents his daily life as a Jewish professor in Germany during World War II. His parents had converted to Christianity and he had been baptized if I remember right.  He was married to an Aryan. He'd also seen combat in WW I. All these factors gave him more protection, longer than most other Jews. He writes about daily life, how he slowly loses parts of his University job until it is totally gone.  He chronicles the erosion of other rights as his options are restricted more and more.  But he also documents the use of language by the regime to encourage support for the government and the war effort through manipulation of language to disguise setbacks on the battlefield and to create the idea of a great Aryan nation and the racially inferior others.

While these ideas are spread throughout Witness, they are extracted and expanded in Klemperer's Language of the Third Reich (LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii).  The link is to the Google book version.  It is pretty academic as it attempts, through exhaustive counting of the use of words and the evolution of the meanings, to show how language was manipulated to control what the German people thought.  (You can enlarge the text below by clicking on it.)

You can already see this happening among many Fox addicts. They live in a Fox shaped reality.   A more accessible, though limited, glimpse into LTI is in Wikipedia's coverage of this book.  
 
My great concern about this court decision is how it takes off the limits on corporations' ability to shape how we view the world, using the tools they've perfected by selling us cars and deodorant and, increasingly, candidates.   Up to now, there have been limits on how much corporations can spend,  But now they will market their sacred role in society and demonize those who oppose them with far more power at elections.  One has to twist logic to the extreme to believe this is about first amendment rights.


Here's a related BBC video on Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, who took his uncle's ideas from psychology and used them to create what we know today as public relations. (Thanks for this link goes to a commenter on the Victor Lebow post.)




Wikipedia says of Bernays:

Combining the ideas of Gustave Le Bon and Wilfred Trotter on crowd psychology with the psychoanalytical ideas of his uncle, Dr. Sigmund Freud, Bernays was one of the first to attempt to manipulate public opinion using the subconscious. . .

Adam Curtis's award-winning 2002 documentary for the BBC, The Century of the Self, [the video above] pinpoints Bernays as the originator of modern public relations, and Bernays was named one of the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th century by Life magazine.^[2]

Already, there is scurrying to study how this decision is going to affect a myriad of state laws across the country, including in Alaska.  The most obvious impact will be on campaign limits and campaign disclosure laws.  This may well prove to be among the most significant Supreme Court decisions of the century.  I take solace in the fact that nature seems to move toward balance, and when a system goes off into one extreme, it comes back.  So, Nazi Germany fell as did the Soviet Union.  But if this tips the balance as greatly as I suspect, and in a way that allows sophisticated marketing techniques to shape the thinking patterns of enough people to win elections into the future, then how far will this swing us, before we come back to some semblance of the sort of democracy we know today?