Defining The Establishment

Or:  The Material Structure of Ideology and Politics:  Part 7



Of the ideological-institutional clusters I have described so far, Bridge Conservative is the largest. Rivaling Bridge Conservative is another cluster that I am calling Liberal-Centrist. I use the word "liberal" to signify affinity to classic liberalism - primarily a mix of economic liberalism, civil rights, and secularism, embedded within a grand narrative of Progress. Furthermore, Liberal-Centrist ideology corresponds most closely to the mainstream of the Democratic Party, although figures from both parties are prevalent in this cluster. I appended the word "centrist" to clarify that the word "liberal" was not synonymous with "left wing" in this case, as this ideological position is often identified as the center of the political spectrum.

The Liberal-Centrist cluster does not contain any shadowy advocacy groups writing legislation behind closed doors (at least, not that I am aware of), unlike Bridge Conservative; however, the Liberal Centrist cluster does not need this sort of activism to maintain political influence, because it is, more than anything else, The Establishment.

The infrastructure of the Liberal-Centrist cluster consists of highly influential think tanks such as the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment, the RAND Corporation (a think tank created to serve the interests of the Dept. of Defense), and the Council on Foreign Relations, along with advocacy groups such as the controversial National Endowment for Democracy (often accused of meddling in foreign affairs and supporting the overthrow of elected governments). The funding for these institutions comes from large foundations (Ford Foundation, Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, MacArthur Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, Rockefeller Foundation, etc.), U.S. government agencies (the Dept. of Defense, USAID, the Federal Reserve, DHHS, etc.), foreign governments, the World Bank and other regional development banks - in other words, the most powerful governmental and financial institutions in the world. Allying with these institutions is an impressive roster of establishment political figures such as Leon Panetta, Madeleine Albright, Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Chuck Hagel, Susan Rice, and Dianne Feinstein (notice all the connections to the State Department), along with equally establishment media outlets like The Washington Post, TIME, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, and MSNBC.

The ideology of the Liberal-Centrist cluster differs from Bridge-Conservative more in style than substance. Both are committed to neoliberalism, with Liberal-Centrist advocating some economic controls to ensure stability (and Bridge Conservative professing adherence to strict Friedmanism). Both support militarism (e.g. "stopping ISIS"), though the Liberal-Centrist support is framed in the secular rhetoric of humanitarian intervention and spreading democracy (Bridge Conservative employs more religious framing - good vs evil, etc.). Liberal-Centrist ideology is more amenable to civil rights than Bridge Conservative in theory, though often the commitment to competition, market freedom, and other matters take priority. In other words, Liberal-Centrist figures like to profess the value of protecting and enhancing civil rights - it sounds and feels very nice (whereas it makes many Bridge Conservative figures feel like they're being attacked) - especially as it pertains to other countries, but they are unwilling to make the deep, structural analyses that would allow them to actually do anything effective in that vein. One of the biggest differences between the Liberal-Centrist and Bridge Conservative clusters is that while the latter concerns itself with the assault on traditional values, the former takes a keen interest in technological innovations and "green" alternatives (environmentalism is perhaps the biggest point of departure between the two clusters). Another difference is that Liberal-Centrist ideology is more compatible with international collaboration, foreign aid, and support for transnational organizations, such as the UN, while Bridge Conservative, especially to the extent that the Radical Right and libertarians are influential, is more suspicious of internationalism and foreign aid - even though, in practice, foreign aid and transnational organizations are employed as leverage to further the same economic and political goals abroad.

The Liberal-Centrist cluster also enjoys a wellspring of corporate support. My own research indicates the financial, pharmaceutical, and arms industries to the be the most prevalent private benefactors. The support of the arms industry (which now also provides a variety of other important defense and security services) makes sense, considering that the military/defense/security establishment is embedded within the Liberal-Centrist cluster. Similarly, with the cozy relationship between the Federal Reserve/federal regulators/development bank execs and the financial industry - complete with revolving doors and bailouts - it is not hard to understand that source of support either. And the pharmaceutical industry has had success within The Establishment, writing the portions of the Affordable Care Act relevant to its interests

In some crucial ways, conservative politicians are correct when they align themselves with Main Street and link Democrats/liberals with the interests of Wall Street. It is true that the conservative ideological clusters have more power at state and local levels, hold more sway over teenage boys who've discovered Ayn Rand, blue collar workers who fear the effects of immigration, the 80-year-olds who spend the day watching Fox News, and the religious fundamentalist family next door. It is also true that the Liberal-Centrist agenda is hegemonic and institutionalized at larger - national and transnational - levels. Yet, there is a common substance of support for the ideas and institutions that constitute the global power structure - American hegemony, the military, capitalism, economic growth. In the one case it is packaged in a rhetoric of tradition and religion that resonates more with the wary masses who need something to fight for; in the other, it is packaged in the rhetoric of Enlightenment philosophy and science that appeals to the idealistic technocrats and professionals who work tirelessly within the global power structure to serve "the greater good."

Material Structure of Ideology and Politics: Part 6

Tying together the Religious Right, Neoconservative, and Libertarian clusters is an ideological-institutional cluster that I have termed Bridge Conservative. This is where the heart of the Republican party and major organs of political action lie. I could have dubbed it "Mainstream Conservative" - however, I wanted to emphasize the most important aspect of this cluster: it is not a distinct ideological position in itself, rather a collection of material networks connecting (hence, "Bridge") and bringing together ideas and figures from Religious Right, Neoconservative, and Libertarian clusters - and to some extent even the Radical Right.

The Bridge Conservative cluster consists of numerous think tanks including the Heritage Foundation, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and Citizens Against Government Waste; media outlets such as townhall.com, The American Spectator, the Wall Street Journal, the National Review, and the Fox News Channel; and advocacy groups like Americans for Prosperity, Americans for Tax Reform, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). All of the institutional infrastructure receives financial support from a wide array of corporations and foundations such as the Olin Foundations, the Bradley Foundation, Scaife Foundations, and the Koch Foundation.

What this coalition amounts to, in practice, is a solid foundation of neoliberalism (deregulation, privatization, spending cuts), general flag-waving and fist-shaking in the direction of terrorists and "bad guys" (though exact foreign policy positions vary, with support for intervention more likely when Republicans are in charge), and a good dose of "traditional values" and the White Christian Persecution Complex (one need only look at how gay rights issues are currently being handled by the Republican Party to see variations here as well).

As neoliberalism is the common thread uniting these institutions, neoliberalism accordingly serves as the focal point for political action. Perhaps the most notorious mechanism linking the intellectual world of think tanks to real legislative action is the work of ALEC. It has come to light in recent years how much influence ALEC has exerted at the state level. Ideas become incarnate via model legislation crafted by ALEC, which is then passed on to conservative lawmakers and often introduced word-for-word as bills in state legislatures. ALEC's legislation can predominately be characterized as neoliberal - e.g. Right to Work, opposition to environmental regulations, corporate tax cuts, privatization of education - although some effort goes into maintaining structures of discrimination against people of color (Stand Your Ground, Voter ID. Three Strikes laws, border security).


The extreme neoliberal policies promoted by this activist coalition certainly coincide with the interests of many corporations, and indeed, corporate funding in this arena is not lacking. Perhaps the most prominent source of corporate funding of Bridge Conservative enterprises is the energy industry. Although Exxon, the most profitable corporation in the industry, spreads its money fairly widely across the spectrum, it appears that most of the focus of the industry is on Bridge Conservative institutions. The oil companies certainly benefit from the relaxation of environmental regulations. It is worth noting that other significant contributors to Bridge Conservative causes also abide in existential conflict with government regulations - specifically, the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries. The latter is to some extent impeded by safety regulations, but more importantly, their extraordinary profits depend on a lack of pricing regulations - i.e. their ability to set prices arbitrarily high.

The Bridge Conservative cluster allows for the political collaboration of a variety of individuals and institutions committed to neoliberal orthodoxy, with support from some of the most profitable corporations. It definitely exists within the realm of the Establishment, but it is the next cluster I will discuss that really defines the Establishment.

Material Structure of Ideology and Politics: Part 5

Another ideological-institutional cluster bearing certain similarities to the Neoconservative cluster is the Libertarian cluster. The Libertarian infrastructure is composed of think tanks like the Cato Institute, the Ayn Rand Institute, the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, the Reason Foundation, and the Heartland Institute, along with the advocacy group Americans for Limited Government. Much of this institutional infrastructure has notoriously received financial support from the Koch brothers and their associated organizations.

The parallels between the Libertarian and Neoconservative clusters consist of the facts that both are more intellectually/academically based (though Libertarian much, much more so than Neoconservative) and that both have carved out niches for themselves within the Establishment from which they can exert varying degrees of influence over policy. The similarities end there. While the Neoconservative cluster has religious undertones, the Libertarian cluster is mostly silent on matters of religion (and some people associated with the "libertarian" label are anti-religious, though I will have more to say on the variation momentarily). Secondly, while neoconservativism almost verges on a form of "soft fascism" with its celebration of executive power and military conquest, libertarianism advocates the limiting of all federal government power and is predominately isolationist.

In this way, the political and economic agenda of the Libertarian cluster is nearly identical to that of the Radical Right, so much so that the two are sometimes conflated in popular discourse, and some individuals and groups whose views would more properly be categorized as Radical Right - such as the Tea Party and Gary North (representative of Christian Reconstructionism) - have associations with some Libertarian institutions. As a general rule of thumb, one can characterize the difference been the Libertarian cluster and the Radical Right as a matter of social liberalism vs. social conservativism verging on theocracy (and to a secondary degree, intellectualism vs conspiracy theory-laden populism). There are some figures, such as Ron Paul and Andrew Napolitano, who maintain connections to both the Radical Right and the Libertarian cluster and are difficulty to categorize. Ideologically, both Paul and Napitano are religious and pro-life, but otherwise tend to adopt liberal stances on social issues and advocate separation of church and state. Furthermore, and unsurprisingly given libertarianism's intellectual roots, within the Libertarian cluster there have been splits and schisms, and variations in the degree to which social liberalism is emphasized and affiliations with religious conservatives are tolerated.

Given that the Libertarian ideological-institutional cluster is a key source and exponent of the ideas of economic liberalism - the cornerstone of the Establishment order - the institutions and individuals comprising the Libertarian cluster are in a position of real policy influence and hence occupy a small position within the Establishment. However, the Libertarian opposition to most government functions and most military interventions ensure that its position within the Establishment will never be more than marginal.

Material Structure of Ideology and Politics: Part 3

Another very conservative ideological-institutional cluster I labeled the Religious Right (yes, I am relying very heavily on existing categorizations). Belonging to the Religious Right are think-tanks such as the Family Research Council, Ethics and Public Policy Center, and the Council for National Policy; advocacy groups like Focus on the Family, the Christian Coalition, and the National Organization for Marriage; and figures such as James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Erik Prince (the founder of Blackwater), and Tony Perkins. Pat Robertson, for his part, is a Christian media mogul whose ventures include the Christian Broadcasting Network and the 700 Club.

There are two notable features of the Religious Right.

First, there is a certain amount of overlap between the Radical Right and the Religious Right, as some of the same religious figures and organizations have affiliations in both clusters (for example, Cleon Skousen and other extremist elements of LDS). In fact, the Radical Right and Religious Right have a shared religious basis: extremist-fundamentalist Protestants, Catholics, and Mormons. The primary difference between the two clusters is that the ideas promoted by the Radical Right contain a very detailed and consistent political/economic vision that is integrated with social-religious beliefs and attitudes, whereas the discourse and activities within the institutions of the Religious Right privilege religious belief and social issues (marriage rights, abortion, etc.), and pay only secondary (if any) attention to political and economic issues, resulting in a degree of diversity in the political/economic positions held among individuals associated with this cluster.

In contrast to the consistently anti-establishment positions of the Radical Right, the second salient feature of the Religious Right is its tenuous relationship to the Establishment. I will be able to more fully flesh out exactly what I mean by "the Establishment" when I finish outlining the other ideological-institutional clusters. For now, I will briefly explain two aspects of this relationship. First, individuals, such as Irving Kristol and Donald Rumsfeld, who are more closely associated with the Neoconservative institutional-ideological cluster (the subject of my next post), which has carved out a space for itself within the Establishment over the past few decades, also maintain secondary affiliations with institutions of the Religious Right. The extent to which this relationship is strategic or based on genuine religious beliefs is hard to guess. However, there is definitely some degree of strategy involved, and the second aspect of the relationship between the Religious Right and the Establishment is, in fact, the history of a strategic alliance.

The history of the creation the Religious Right in the cooptation of religious fundamentalists by the Republican Party is fairly well known, so there is no need to detail it here. The important point that I want to make is that the institutions that were ultimately employed as an instrument of Republican control over a large voting bloc have actually never had more than a thin connection to other conservative ideological-institutional clusters nor that aspect of the Establishment that is shaped by the Republican Party. It was always a purely pragmatic relationship and the ties could easily be severed. (Witness the problems caused for the Republican Party by recent religious freedom bills and the pragmatic rhetorical shifts taken by some Republican politicians.)

It can be concluded, then, that although the Religious Right has perhaps a stronger institutional base than the Radical Right, it is still rather limited, primarily consisting of a handful of think-tanks, religious organizations, and business ventures. The Religious Right may, accordingly, be viewed as more of an outgrowth of a few related religious movements that was exploited for political purposes. This is not, of course, to deny the religiosity of many prominent politicians and societal power-holders. It is to say that their thinking is guided more directly by institutions and ideologies with clear political/economic agendas that may also happen to harmonize with their fundamentalist religious beliefs.