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

31. The author of Future Shock is Alvin Toeffler (New York: Random House, 1970). The passage is from Don Kash, “The Role of Culture in Organizational-Technological Change,” Lecture at George Mason University, November 17, 2004.

32. The contractor writing the report was Booz Allen Hamilton. For the report, see Art Fritzson, Lloyd W. Howell Jr., and Dov D. Zakheim, “Military Millennials,” Strategy+Business magazine (Booz Allen Hamilton, 2008).

33. Robert Rycroft and Don E. Kash, The Complexity Challenge: Technological Innovation for the 21st Century (London and New York: Pinter, 1999), p. 5. For further analysis on this point, see also Robert Jervis, “Complexity and the Analysis of Political and Social Life,” Political Science Quarterly 112, no. 4 (Winter 1997–1998), pp. 569–593; Paul R. Krugman, The Self-organizing Economy (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996); Woody van Olffen and A. Georges L. Romme, “The Role of Hierarchy in Self-Organizing Systems,” Human Systems Management 14, no. 3 (1995), pp. 199–206.

34. The quote from Susan Strange is from Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996). The quote from Jessica Mathews can be found in Jessica Mathews, “Power Shift,” Foreign Affairs 76, no. 1 (January/February 1997), p. 50. The terms from Anna-Marie Slaughter are found in Anna-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 12–14. The quote from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri is from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. xii. The other political analyst here quoted is John Ralston Saul, The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World (Toronto: Viking Canada, 2005), pp. 232–233. See also Saskia Sassen’s work on the impact of the creation of an economic system focused on global flows and telecommunications on state sovereignty (Saskia Sassen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in An Age of Globalization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

35. With respect to the creation of cross-national links with enmeshed state-private executive authorities, see Kim Lane Scheppele, The International State of Emergency , forthcoming.

With regard to coziness between the “regulators” and the “regulated” and the financial crisis, see, for instance, columnist Frank Rich, who questions whether Larry Summers, President Obama’s chief economic adviser, can “be a fair broker of the bailout when he so recently received lavish compensation from some of its present and, no doubt, future players.” Frank Rich, “Awake and Sing!” New York Times , April 12, 2009, p. WK8. See also the New York Times’ exposé of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s embeddedness with Wall Street, Jo Becker and Gretchen Morgenson, “Geithner, as Member and Overseer, Forged Ties to Finance Club,” New York Times , April 27, 2009, p. A1.

The quote by Barry Lynn is from Lynn, Cornered . James K. Galbraith might describe the American order as a “predator state”—“an economic system wherein entire sectors have been built up to feast on public systems built originally for public purposes. . . . The corporate republic simply administers the spoils system.” James K. Galbraith, The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too (New York: The Free Press, 2008), p. 146.

36. See, for instance, Lisa Adkins, “The New, Economy, Property and Personhood,” Theory, Culture and Society 22, no. 1 (2005), pp. 111–130.

37. Merriam-WebsterUnabridged.com, accessed July 25, 2008. Stephen Colbert’s concept of “truthiness” bears some similarity to the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s notion of “simulacra.” Baudrillard argues that today’s society is constructed around “simulacra,” which (then) become reality. Simulation, unlike pretense, and like “truthiness,” produces real intuitive feelings, emotions, or symptoms in someone, and, therefore, blurs the difference between the “real” and “imaginary.” Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995). The connection between simulacra and truthiness has been made by several other scholars. See, for example, Diane Rubenstein, This is Not a President: Sense, Nonsense, and the American Political Imaginary (New York: New York University Press, 2008), p. 12.

38. The quote from Frank Rich appears in Marc Peyser, “The Truthiness Teller,” Newsweek , February, 13, 2006, http://www.newsweek.com/id/56881/page/3, accessed July 25, 2008. For Manuel Castells’s analysis of the new media and new economy, see Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society , 2nd ed. (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), p. 188.

39. See http://www.broadcaster.com/clip/30543.

40. Dick Meyer observes that “truthiness actually has a long philosophic pedigree. It is called ‘emotivism’,” a term resurrected in 1981 by the Scottish moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue . “Emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and, more specifically, all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling,” according to MacIntyre. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory , 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 11. Building on Maclntyre, Meyer explains that “in this view there is no difference between saying ‘the death penalty is wrong’ and ‘I don’t like the death penalty’.” An “emotive” society lacks objective criteria for evaluating moral truth or judgment. As Meyer points out, “People don’t—and probably can’t—acknowledge their own emotivism; they think their judgments are fact-based and reasoned, not emotional.” Dick Meyer, December 12, 2006, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/12/12/opinion/meyer/main2250923.shtml.

41. For more on the concept of “post-politics,” see, for example, Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject (London, UK: Verso, 2000), pp. 187–190 and 198–200. The philosopher’s observations here are those of Ted Kinnaman, personal communication of July 25, 2008.

42. For New York Times quote, see Jim Rutenberg and Jacques Steinberg, “That Pundit on Fox News? An Upstart Named Rove,” New York Times , May 12, 2008, p. A1.

43. This incident was relayed to me off the record.

Note that truthiness is not quite the same as propaganda. During the Cold War, with its ideological conflict between the two superpowers, propaganda on both sides was devised in the service of ideology, whose truth was taken for granted by believers. But the truthiness game is different. If today’s policy communicators succeed and people buy their message, it is because, as philosopher Jean Baudrillard might argue, the messengers have built an emotional connection with the recipients by dissolving the difference between “true” and “false,” and replacing reality with intuitive “knowing.” Indeed, this is the essence of corporate branding, more and more adopted by everyone, including government policy message-makers. Today’s branding is all about creating a look and feel that consumers intuitively identify with, enough to choose to buy into the seller’s message, product, or service. Consumers become branded and the brand becomes, ironically, a private reality that generates market share for the corporation while helping construct a public identity that is constantly innovating and recreating itself. In this way it is more subtle—and difficult to detect—than garden-variety propaganda. The work of Jean Baudrillard here cited is Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995).