Prologue
January 6th has meaning other than the ignominious one we now associate with the attack on the United States Capitol building and on American democracy. For Christians, it is the day of Epiphany, or the day the three kings (or wise men) visited the baby Jesus. It is the day of Christ’s appearance to the Gentiles (i.e., Christ is recognized by others outside his own tribe). It also marks the 12th and final day of an older traditional Christmas “season,” which ran from December 25 through January 6th.
The root word of epiphany has been translated to mean “appearance” or “manifestation.” In English usage, epiphany means “a sudden intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something.” It is a response to a wake-up call, or a form of “wokeness” to which we (especially Christians) should aspire.
It has been two years since our twenty-first century day of infamy. During this time, we might want to think that America (or at least some Americans) has “woke up” to the dangers of white supremacy, neofascism, and Christian nationalism. We also see evidence that some of our elected representatives have “woke up” to the need to reform an outdated electoral system, and some Trump supporters have “woke up” to the fact that he is a malignant narcissist sociopath.
Most folks reading this here have already acknowledged the foregoing dysfunctions. Harder to discern is the unseen darker forces driving the behavior that manifests in anti-social worldviews and behavior. Yes, we want to preserve the ideals of “United States” and “democracy,” but we also need to acknowledge how much the system fails to serve the majority of us. Not to excuse what happened on January 6th, but to understand it. Certainly, those who instigated January 6th should be held accountable, but focusing solely on Trump and his co-conspirators without examining the larger forces propelling them will not be enough.
This is the first of a ten-part series which attempts to understand the complex forces that led to January 6th. Our thesis is that the foundations of January 6th can be found in a memo written by former Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell in 1971. We start with historical factors: the conflict between elitism and democracy which has been present since America’s founding; the ascendance of the American corporatocracy and its takeover of our lawmaking and judicial functions; the origins of Christian nationalism and its unholy alliance with big money; and the promise and perils of populism.
We then look at psycho-social factors through the work of Dr. Andrew Lobaszewsky, a Polish psychiatrist who studied behavioral changes in ordinary people during the Nazi and Soviet occupations. Lobaszewsky wanted to understand the relationship between authoritarian systems and the thinking and behavior of regular (i.e., non-psychopathic) people. January 6th was thus a product of our history as well as an inner life (among a certain portion of the population) that is susceptible to (and has been deliberately primed for) delusion and hate.
Below is the first article in a 10-part series. This series is somewhat academic, and there is nothing that is “news” as far as facts. It is more like a synthesis and analysis, which some folks may find boring. Alternatively, because it deals with the dark side of human nature, some folks might find it disturbing. For these reasons, I will provide links to the remaining articles in the series posted on The Great Jobs Deception. An article will be posted each day January 6 thru 15th.
Part 1: Introduction to the Powell Memo and Chaos Theory
“The national television networks should be monitored in the same way that textbooks should be kept under constant surveillance. This applies not merely to so-called educational programs (such as “Selling of the Pentagon”), but to the daily “news analysis” which so often includes the most insidious type of criticism of the enterprise system.” — From the 1971 Powell Memo
A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon rain forest, and three weeks later there is a hurricane on the other side of the world. This is the essence of chaos theory. That is, one small and seemingly insignificant event creates a chain reaction that can produce profound effects in the future. Each event creates a juncture of sometimes only several and sometimes nearly infinite possible pathways forward. This phenomenon provides a plethora of plots for science fiction writers looking for “alternate universe” story ideas. It is also what makes the future nearly impossible to predict.
In 1952, the science fiction author Ray Bradbury wrote a story he called A Sound of Thunder. In the fictional year 2055, time travel is possible. An enterprising company called Time Safari, Inc. takes wealthy hunters back to the past to hunt dinosaurs. Specific animals are selected who are known by the tour company to have died soon afterward. However, hunters are instructed to never leave a levitating path which has been constructed to literally minimize their footprint, because they could potentially cause a disruption in the timeline and change the future. How this levitating pathway was constructed without doing the same is never explained.
In the beginning of the story, we meet a hunter who has paid $10,000 for the privilege of shooting a tyrannosaurus rex. The Time Safari guide is explaining the instructions about “not leaving the path” and potential for disruption to the timeline. The conversation turns to a recent election, where a fascist candidate has been narrowly defeated. Everyone expresses thankful relief and then the hunting party departs in the time machine. When they arrive in the late Cretaceous period and spot a T-Rex, the hunter gets scared. The main guide instructs him to return to the time machine. Meanwhile, the two guides shoot the dinosaur shortly before a tree falls on it (the event that would have killed it in the current time).
The hunter hears the shots and returns to the spot where the dinosaur has been killed. The guides find out he has stumbled off the path in his haste, and threaten to kill him if anything is “changed” upon their return. They travel back to 2055 and at first, everything seems normal. However, some of the words on signs appear to be misspelled. The head guide inspects the hunter’s shoe and discovers a crushed butterfly. Someone asks who won the election, and they learn that the fascist is now in charge. The “sound of thunder” is the sound of the guide’s gun, as he carries out his threat.
* * *
January 6th did not happen in a vacuum, but—as chaos theory suggests—was pushed by something that started a chain of causation that led to its inevitability. Here I make the argument that the “butterfly moment” happened on August 23, 1971, with the publication of a memo written by Lewis Powell and published through the Chamber of Commerce. At that time, Powell was a corporate attorney practicing in Richmond Virginia, where he also represented the Tobacco Institute. As most of us know, Powell was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Nixon less than a year later, where he served until 1987.
The Powell Memo is noted for its brilliant creation of a (mostly) false narrative that is nonetheless extremely compelling. The memo deftly targets the base emotion of fear—more specifically the fear of losing privilege and power—couched in tones of moral righteousness and victimhood. Within this infamous Powell memo is a call to arms that today might seem mild when frothing hate-filled white supremacist groups are roaming public spaces with assault weapons. Yet, the memo contains unambiguous war-themed language: “The American economic system is under broad attack;” The Greening of America, a book by Yale Professor Charles Reich constituted “a frontal assault…on our government.” Powell proclaimed that American business had a duty to “conduct guerilla warfare with those who propagandize against the system.”
Another effective device is the demonization of anyone who opposes you. Powell points a finger at Ralph Nader, labor unions, the ACLU, and anyone else who dared to call out corporate abuse of workers, consumers, or the environment as “shotgun attacks on the system…which undermine confidence and confuse the public.” The charges incorporated tactics and strategies borrowed from the McCarthy era; e.g., branding one’s enemies as communists, “Leftists,” or Soviet sympathizers. Indeed, the interests of business elites, Wall Street and the corporatocracy were made synonymous with America and all it stands for.
According to Powell, nothing less than the “survival of the free enterprise system” was at stake. He called for the Chamber of Commerce to make “significantly increased” investments on a broad front of (1) restoring “balance” on university campuses with instructors who would champion the free enterprise system rather than challenge it; (2) train a new generation of intellectuals who would bring the “right” ideology to news media, government, and regulatory agencies; (3) monitor the content of textbooks for “fair” comparisons of socialism, fascism and communism; and (4) maintain a system of “constant surveillance” of textbooks, television, radio and other media.
Notwithstanding the bellicose framing, we can also discern a subtle whine of victimhood in Powell’s memo. The most powerful, wealthy, and privileged members of society are under attack and must defend themselves to survive!!! We see a nascent form of too much and never enough. The rhetoric definitively connects corporate self-interest to national welfare—the “what’s good for GM is good for America” trope. We also see the beginnings of a style of demonization—anyone who is concerned about the environment, working people, consumer safety, voting rights, or anything else that involves the welfare of the “little people” against the corporatocracy is an enemy of America.
In order to accomplish this broad and multi-front war, Powell recommended that “American business” should earmark 10% (an amount that is analogous to religious tithing) of its total annual advertising budget to this purpose. American business also should get over its aversion to “confrontation politics…[and] consider assuming a broader and more vigorous role in the political arena.” Although nothing changed immediately, we know today that business responded to Powell’s call.
Robert Reich explains how the Powell memo launched the “corporate takeover of American politics.”