Janine Wedel - Shadow Elite - How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market

THE REDESIGN OF GOVERNING, the end of the Cold War, and the advent of evermore complex technologies have profoundly shaped not only the profile of the influencers who play in the state, but also its very nature. In the years following the end of the Cold War, some prominent political analysts posited challenges to the sovereignty of the state: a “retreat of the state” (Susan Strange), a “power shift” away from states that are “sharing powers . . . with businesses, with international organizations, and with a multitude of citizens groups” (Jessica Mathews), the shift from the “unitary” to the “disaggregated” state (Anna-Marie Slaughter), and the “increasing inability [of states] to regulate economic and cultural exchanges” and the concomitant “decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule” (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri). Of course, some states asserting their national interests are much more exempt than others from such diminution of sovereignty—“gigantic powers like China, India and Brazil emerging on the global scene as nation-state projects that seem to have their own logic,” as another political analyst put it. To whatever extent a particular state is retreating, sharing power, or failing to regulate arenas of activity, the point is that the state—whatever its involvement—is a crucial partner in new institutional formations that meld official and private power. 34

For instance, today’s economic crises are leading to new institutional fusions of power as firms “too big to fail” are partially nationalized, unprecedented power is concentrated in “Government Sachs,” and cross-national links with melded state-private executive authorities are built. The new institutional arrangements rely heavily on monopolies of information and executive power. All this has created even more opportunities for the “regulators” and the “regulated” to be one and the same, and for the privatizers of power to do their thing and then to perform their way out of public responsibility. “Our political economy is run by a compact elite able to fuse the power of our public government with the power of private corporate governments in ways that enable them not merely to offload their risk onto us but also to determine with almost complete freedom who wins, who loses, and who pays,” assesses Barry C. Lynn, an analyst of America’s political economy. Meanwhile, the means by which citizens could know what is going on—much less have some input into it—are ever-elusive. 35

Slouching Toward Truthiness

The fourth transformational development—the embrace of truthiness —builds on the first two, and paradoxically also has been enabled by the technologies and networks of the “information” era that are part of the third development. The grand narrative here is that these technologies keep us better informed than in the past. That is sometimes the case. Yet powerful cultural and economic forces also work to do the opposite. Performing is an essential ingredient in today’s public sphere, often at the expense of objectivity, expertise, and accurate information. Neoliberalism’s encouragement of performance helped spur the emphasis on self-presentation that is today crucial to anyone building a career. 36Society today cultivates this fertile ground by fostering an environment in which players can easily get away with stage-managing their self-presentations, portraying themselves in ways that baldly contradict their previous presentations and realities. Comedian Stephen Colbert captured this when he coined the satirical term “truthiness” to distinguish fact-challenged accounts gussied up as truth from evidence-based accounts. Listed as Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year 2006, “truthiness (noun)” was defined as follows:

1: “truth that comes from the gut, not books” (Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report , October 2005)

2: “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true” (American Dialect Society, January 2006). 37

Frank Rich, the New York Times columnist and cultural-political analyst, has traced the origins of truthiness to the mid-1990s “when you simultaneously had the rise of the cable-news networks, the rise of the Internet, the rise of networks covering finance and Court TV—this whole apparatus that’s in place now.” Sociologist Manuel Castells similarly suggests that it is this “new media,” entwined with the “new [technology and information-driven] economy,” that creates today’s political arena, not the sovereign states of yesterday. And as politics blends with entertainment, which is all about performance, political coverage itself gets reduced to performance. 38

The performance element is made obvious by the appearances of famous people, who no longer necessarily appear as themselves; they instead play themselves. That is why what is real can mesh so acceptably with what is not and why people appearing as themselves and imposters are mixed in the same frame. The period leading up to the presidential election of 2008 is rife with examples. For instance, in a Saturday Night Live skit of November 3, 2007, Senator Barack Obama appeared as himself while the roles of other politicians were played by SNL cast members. In the skit, Hillary Clinton (played by Amy Poehler) hosts a Halloween party in which she invites all the Democratic candidates to her home. Someone walks in wearing an Obama mask—it turns out to be Obama himself. Then Hillary (fake) and Obama (real) have an exchange about being genuine and having nothing to hide from the American people. 39

Today, it is the idea of reality that is often being performed and sought by the media, leaving the reality much more elusive. Tellingly, the performances of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin are nearly indistinguishable from the parodies of her by SNL cast member Tina Fey. The media toy with reality even further. On Saturday Night Live (October 18, 2008), Palin imitated Tina Fey imitating Palin. Here the reality of Palin is mixed with entertainment using Palin. The idea of reality is being performed, but the reality of reality is more difficult to track and often undermined. The focus is on performance and empty rhetoric, not evidence. The “substance” lies in Fey’s imitation of Palin—not in anything Palin has to say.

Society’s embrace of truthiness is another way in which Western culture has moved away from many of the distinctions it once made. Not only are state and private, bureaucratic and market boundaries blurring, but distinctions between politics and entertainment, work and play, truth and fiction, often are also amorphous. Take the hard line between truth and fiction that is nowadays blurred. Satirical fake news programs, such as Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show , would be considered fiction by traditional journalism but, much like court jesters of medieval times, they regularly connect the dots and express insights more incisive than the network news. At the same time, market-driven “news” programs, often broadcast by networks owned by multinational corporations, frequently cover more entertainment and features than they do hard news. CBSNews.com’s Dick Meyer concludes that “We’re so jaded by the continuous supply of intentional lies and deceptions by politicians, celebrities, ‘the media’ and marketers that we need a word to replace truth, which is obsolete and naïve. . . . Truthiness does [the trick].” 40

The ideological conflict of yesterday has been superseded by politics disconnected from authority and centered more and more in truthiness. As one philosopher notes, truthiness is associated with a society in which the authority of objective knowledge in general, and science in particular, is subject to question. In America, at least, this authority is under attack from both the academic left and, more recently, the political and religious right, such as with efforts to ban the teaching of evolution. 41The collapsing of truth and fiction, which reflects this loss of authority, affords people a new kind of legitimacy: They can make up their own standards of evidence while living in ever-diverging universes of facts.