Skip to content

Culture war as shock doctrine

How do conservatives advance broadly unpopular programs?

Culture shock concept word cloud background

There’s one born every minute. In the current century, no one knows that better than Donald John Trump (except his handler Vladimir Putin). Press the right buttons and people will believe anything, buy anything. Even things they neither want nor need. Ad agencies and shopping networks are built on that premise.

If people do not want what you’re selling, catch them at their most vulnerable moments when they are frightened and anxious. Tell them there is no alternative (TINA). That’s Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine” about disaster capitalism. No good crisis should go to waste. It works on a national and global scale. Players who are prepositioned know that the time to ram through unpopular policies is when public opposition is in disarray.

And if there is no crisis lying around, make one. Moral panics work like mini-shocks. They both galvanize right-wing voters and create profit opportunities for capitalists.

Dan Pfeiffer’s newsletter points to the effort to use the moral panic over discussing race and gender differences in schools to advance the effort to privatize public schools. “ALEC has theirs. Now they want yours,” I wrote back in 2011:

The impulse among conservatives to privatize everything involving public expenditures – schools included – is no longer just about shrinking government, lowering their taxes and eliminating funding sources for their political competitors. Now it’s about their opportunity costs, potential profits lost to not-for-profit public-sector competitors. It’s bad enough that government “picks their pockets” to educate other people’s children. But it’s unforgivable that they’re not getting a piece of the action. Now they want to turn public education into private profits too.

The answer lies in this question: What is the largest portion of the annual budget in all 50 states? Public education funding is required by state constitutions. The animus toward public education isn’t really about big government or what’s taught there. It’s about corporate America’s insatiable appetite. Wherever there is a nice, recession-proof stream of public money, investors want their cut, if not all of it.

Pfeiffer links to this video: What’s the end-game of Critical Race Theory fear-mongering?

Milton Freidman’s influence, the Koch network, and other capitalist gluttons.

“Most of their policies are broadly unpopular,” says Charles Siler, a former lobbyist for the Goldwater Institute in Arizona. “One of the biggest challenges I faced was how do we take these really unpopular ideas and frame them as broadly popular.”

Couch them as about parental rights, maybe? Name your culture war du jour.

“This isn’t a conspiracy theory. They admitted it,” says Siler who now teaches. “They used the furor surrounding racial equality to sneak in school privatization.”

And to siphon off public funds into education entrepreneurs’ pockets. Into charter and voucher schools.

“Critical race theory is just the latest vehicle for the right-wing’s grievance industrial complex,” says Siler. “The whole plan is to break public schools, to break these community institutions, a place where we all work and can see the power of collective action in a very real and meaningful way in our own lives.”

Hell no. Not if the right people’s pockets are not being lined. And I mean “right” people. Their foot soldiers are dupes and pawns.

In “Is Our Children Learning Too Much?” Christopher Hooks writes:

The moral panic is also useful if your goal is to weaken public education in favor of parochial and other private schools. Christopher Rufo, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, has helped kick-start and nurture the fight over CRT and school “pornography” in the past several years. In early April, he spoke at Hillsdale College, in Michigan, and outlined a teleology of his crusade. “To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from the position of universal public school distrust,” he said. “In order for people to take significant action, you have to make them feel like they have something at stake.” Offering parents a taxpayer-funded choice among public and private schools has been a hard sell, in Texas and elsewhere. Perhaps calling school librarians pedophiles will do the trick.

It’s a scam and a violation of the social contract written into the country’s very DNA. But not capitalism’s DNA.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

Published inUncategorized