The Powell Memo and the Teaching Machines of Right-Wing Extremists

Published on October 3, 2009

The quickening construction of Santa’s workshops outside the walls of government and the academy resulted in the increased production of pamphlets, histories, monographs and background briefings intended to bring about the ruin of the liberal idea in all its institutionalized forms – the demonization of the liberal press, the disparagement of liberal sentiment, the destruction of liberal education – and by the time Ronald Reagan arrived in triumph at the White House in 1980 the assembly lines were operating at full capacity.[11]

Any attempt to understand and engage the current right-wing assault on all vestiges of the social contract, the social state and democracy itself will have to begin with challenging this massive infrastructure, which functions as one of the most powerful teaching machines we have seen in the United States, a teaching machine that produces a culture that is increasingly poisonous and detrimental not just to liberalism, but to the formative culture that makes an aspiring democracy possible. This presence of this ideological infrastructure extending from the media to other sites of popular education suggests the need for a new kind of debate, one that is not limited to isolated issues such as health care, but is more broad-based and fundamental, a debate about how power, inequality and money constrict the educational, economic and political conditions that make democracy possible. The screaming harpies and mindless public relations “intellectuals” that dominate the media today are not the problem; it is the conditions that give rise to the institutions that put them in place, finance them and drown out other voices. What must be clear is that this threat to creating a critically informed citizenry is not merely a crisis of communication and language, but about the ways in which money and power create the educational conditions that make a mockery out of debate while hijacking any vestige of democracy.

Notes:
[1] Paul Krugman, “All the President’s Zombies,” The New York Times (August 24, 2009), p. A17.
[2] Lewis F. Powell Jr., “The Powell Memo,” ReclaimDemocracy.org (August 23, 1971), available online at http://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate_accountability/powell_memo_lewis.html.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] See Michael P. Crozier, Samuel. J. Huntington and J. Watanuki, “The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission” (New York: New York University Press, 1975).
[6] Powell, “The Powell Memo.”
[7] Lewis H. Lapham, “Tentacles of Rage – The Republican Propaganda Mill, a Brief History,” Harper’s Magazine (September 2004), p. 32.
[8] Dave Johnson, “Who’s Behind the Attack on Liberal Professors?” History News Network, (February 10, 2005), available online at http://hnn.us/articles/printfriendly/1244.html.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Alan Jones, “Connecting the Dots,” Inside Higher Ed (June 16, 2006), available online at http://insidehighered.com/views/2006/06/16/jones.
[11] Lapham, “Tentacles of Rage,” p. 38.

Henry A. Giroux holds the Global TV Network chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. Related work: Henry A. Giroux, “The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence” (Lanham: Rowman and Lilttlefield, 2001). His most recent books include “Take Back Higher Education” (co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux, 2006), “The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex” (2007) and “Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed” (2008). His newest book, “Youth in a Suspect Society: Beyond the Politics of Disposability,” will be published by Palgrave Mcmillan in 2009. Henry A. Giroux’s latest book, “Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?,” has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan.

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