A short while back Ralph Nader published an article, Who Owns America?, which begins:
There was a time in the Depression of the 1930s when conservative thought sprang from the dire concrete reality of that terrible era, not from abstractions.
They did not use the word “conservative” very often, preferring to call themselves “decentralists” or “agrarians.” Eclectic in background, they were columnists, poets, historians, literary figures, economists, theologians, and civic advocates. In 1936, Herbert Agar, a prominent author, foreign correspondent, and columnist for the Louisville Courier-Journal and Alan [sic—Allen] Tate, poet and social commentator, brought a selection of their writings together in a now nearly forgotten book: Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence.
They believed, in simple terms, that the monopoly capitalists owned America. This analysis could be, and often should be, expanded to a more complete answer, as I did in Who Are the American Elites and Are They Conspirators? where I was responding to an article, These Are The Ten “People” Who Run The World (For The Last 20 Years), about the ten dominant corporations in the world as of last September or so—I don’t think the list has changed since then. In my essay, I wrote:
Let me turn to a historian of a recent generation, Carroll Quigley. In Tragedy and Hope—available in larger libraries and also on the Internet as a pdf-file for free download, Quigley engaged in history verging on journalism. In the early sections, dealing with the period which happens to have been the time in which the American Empire was expanding outside of North America—the decades around 1900, Quigley claimed there to be three groups of elite power-holders, the bankers and the politicians and the monopolistic capitalists. In terms of the American turn to empire, three good examples are JP Morgan, William Howard Taft, and John D Rockefeller. (By `bankers’, Quigley meant not the mortgage officers at old-fashioned local banks; he meant investment or merchant bankers and the closely allied central bankers. And note that Rockefeller’s heirs were bankers, the result of a transition he began by moving from Cleveland to New York City where he began to control his largely industrial empire through banks.)
I don’t think Quigley’s scheme works for the world after 1950 or so and I think the power-holder groups were under transformative stresses for a couple decades or so before the breakdown. Yet, it is the only analysis of this sort I find fully convincing…
What did Tate and the other Agrarians or decentralists think of the idea of government coming to our rescue by regulating the corporations and bringing them under control? Nader tells us:
Nor did they believe that a federal government with sufficient political authority to modestly tame the plutocracy and what they called “monopoly capitalism” could work because its struggle would end either in surrender or with the replacing of one set of autocrats with another. As Shapiro wrote in the foreword, “while the plutocrats wanted to shift control over property to themselves, the Marxists wanted to shift this control to government bureaucrats. Liberty would be sacrificed in either case. Only the restoration of the widespread ownership of property, Tate said, could `create a decent society in terms of American history.'”
Although the decentralists were dismissed by their critics as being impractical, as fighting against the inevitable wave of ever-larger industrial and financial companies empowered by modern technology, their views have a remarkable contemporary resonance given today’s globalized gigantism, absentee control, and intricate corporate statism, which are undermining both economies and workers.
I think we can see the issue more clearly if we define it as did Quigley, realizing that few—if any—are the times in history when one group of power-holders was in absolute control. In my essay I referenced and quoted from above, I expressed doubt that we have any good understanding of the current power-elite comparable to Quigley’s proposal that the American power-elites fell (from some time in the late 1800s to about 1930) into the three groups: investment bankers, monopoly capitalists, and politicians. Yet, there must be some way of cutting across these ways of exploiting others to find the ties that bind all the investment bankers and monopoly capitalists and politicians who summered together at Newport back in the good ol’ days. There are more dimensions to this problem than we account for with our modern theories of economics and politics and society in general; more than we can account for with our the theories of human nature underlying so many theories and practical studies in the departments of our academic institutions. Hold this thought in suspense for a few paragraphs.
Those groups, investment bankers and monopoly capitalists and politicians, remain powerful but now there is some serious confusion caused partly by the underground, `top-secret’, nature of some of the power-elite families, a nature which allowed them to move into the OSS/CIA and into various groups that carried out criminal conspiracies on a regular basis, as a `normal’ means of exercising power rather than as a readily-deployed but extraordinary means. Even J P Morgan who conspired so successfully to create the Federal Reserve Bank system generally worked by more normal means of bribes and intimidation. (For those who always doubt the existence of criminal conspiracies on the part of powerful figures in the United States—see the article posted at the website of the Federal Reserve Bank, A Return to Jekyll Island: The Origins, History, and Future of the Federal Reserve and remember this article is posted by one of the organizations created by a Morgan-selected group which gathered, secretly after being transported from New York City in a sealed train-car with blackened windows, to write legislation and propose central banks which would restructure the American economy. The article is right though that the meeting was only part of the process but fails to note that some historians think Morgan deliberately aggravated the panic and near-collapse of the American economy in 1907 at least partly because of the increasing influence of local and regional banks. I think it likely that Morgan and the other founders of the Federal Reserve Bank system were helping his fellow Americans the way that George W Bush helped the peoples of Iraq.)
Some of the agencies of the modern world might serve the groups of power-elites and some might have ascended to some sort of gathering of, say, `deep-state’ criminals embedded inside the most `respectable’ of modern governments. There are, of course, the military-industrial complex and the national security complex. Both of those complexes overlap each other greatly and also overlap the complexes run by investment bankers, monopoly capitalists, and politicians. But how do they really operate and what do the overlaps mean? And—which are servant agencies and which are actually gatherings of powerful men who have a role in calling the shots? I don’t know and we don’t seem to have a Quigley to propose a plausible structure to the exercise of power in the modern world.
In my essay, Radical Individualism and the Misunderstanding of Modern History, I had claimed there to be a blindness of sorts on the part of modern historians and I specifically discussed Barbara Tuchman’s March of Folly as a clear example. In the chapter on a string of Renaissance popes, some morally irresponsible in their duties as popes and some downright morally degenerate, she clearly noted the way in which family duties and family ties overrode their duties and ties to the Catholic Church. The intelligent or generally competent men were as busy as the nitwits in securing or increasing family wealth and power while the problems festered which led to Luther’s revolt and the damaging of the unity of Christian Europe. In the earlier chapter on Vietnam, all was presented in terms of institutional and individual failures. Blood-ties and their proxies had disappeared and the freestanding individuals were organizing themselves into groups of the sort studied in courses in the business school and political science department. A large book devoted to the American problems in Vietnam, The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstram didn’t have this problem; Halberstram saw clearly that the mistakes we made in Vietnam and in other regions of the world at the time were due to the beliefs and behaviors and self-images of the power-elite partially describable as blue-bloods and the technocrats recruited into the worldview of that power-elite. But even Halberstram didn’t “follow the money” as the modern simplification would have it. He noted class biases but not class profit-seeking.
On the whole, mainstream histories and mainstream news-media seem to assume that we defeated Karl Marx by causing the disappearance of classes and families and religious communities as he knew them and replacing those communities by metrosexual and multicultural clubs of various sorts, some to do charitable work and some to organize trips to the baseball games and some to sing hymns. And meanwhile, there are others who are building highways to take us to the malls and office complexes, military bases in central Asia to protect us, government buildings to provide good working environments for the politicians we elect from small lists—also provided by those kind and largely invisible men and women—as well as the various professional murderers and instigators of revolution and those who educate our children and provide us with health-care and so on. We have a full-blown welfare, warfare state with some profiting and many accepting, but with increasing doubts, the claim that the United States is a country of patriotic, freestanding individuals. Send your sons, and now daughters (the horror increases), to fight wars in all those oil-rich countries where the evil inhabitants hate us for our freedoms. Public policy is made by those processes described in your freshman political science course rather than the conspiratorial way of past centuries or those benighted countries such as Iran and Russia and China. Gangsters are perhaps intermingled with politicians and industrialists and bankers in Turkey but never the United States or other advanced countries where people know how to dress and talk like real human beings.
In an earlier essay, We’re All Barbarian Children on This Bus, also written in response to Tuchman’s The March of Folly, I discussed some of the foundational ideas and facts which argue rather strongly against understandings of human nature, and human history, in terms of freestanding individuals who only form communities by voluntary contract.
There are two major errors in the mainstream view of human nature:
- Human nature has both individual and communal `components’.
- We are tied to family lines by emotions and feelings at the deepest levels of our bodies, thoughts and acts as well but not quite as obviously.
These two factors overlap. Our first communities, the primary part of our communal natures, come from our ties to family lines, though we can be fooled, for good and bad, into treating some as being more or less related to us than they really are. We can, in fact, use our minds to `fool’ ourselves by way of proxy relationships and, thus, form ever more complex and larger communities, culminating in that most complete and perfect of all human communities—the Body of Christ.
For more discussion and a proposed framework for understanding our individual and communal human beings, download my book: A More Exact Understanding of Human Being.
So… Who owns America? Easy. The rich people, some of whom are parts of multi-generational streams of power and wealth, families and classes, and some of whom are flashes in the pan. Few there are among historians and amateur seekers of historical answers who consider families when they analyze the major events of modern times, not even those who understand the importance of families in past ages. We know how important family was for the `true’ Caesars (actually Julius Caesar was a member of the gens or family Julia, Augustus Caesar and his descendants were members of the plebeian family of Octavii though Augustus was adopted by Julius Caesar, his maternal great-uncle, into the gens Julia), for the Merovingian and Carolingian royal families, the family (loosely defined) of Mohamed and other Islamic ruling families, the large number of Chinese dynastic families, the de Medicis, the Rothschilds of Europe and the Sasoons of Asia, the descendants of Napoleon, the Morgans and other banking and robber baron families from before World War II, and others. Some of these families destroyed themselves; some great warrior families seem to have carried a brutal form of bipolar disease leading to homicidal rages, sometimes directed against their own families. Genes carry dangerous traits from one generation to the next as well as neutral or advantageous traits, but even self-destructive families might hold wealth and exercise power for a number of years.
We should expand our understanding from families to classes which are formed by acknowledgment of even distant blood-relationship or by proxy relationships which come from living together intensely, perhaps starting early at private resident schools. By such means, sibling-like friendships and loyalties are forged as well as possible marriages to the sibling of a close friend. Then we can conjecture the United States is owned by families in a way not so different from the situation a century ago described in Empire and the succeeding novels in Gore Vidal’s American Empire series—the earlier volumes partially describe how we got to that point. In any case, there were the Morgans and the Rockefellers and the Paynes and the Whitneys—the latter two families being perhaps the most powerful because of their intermarriages into other great families. Common folk, such as the children of John Hay, would marry into those great families—some of which families were well-known because of flamboyant individuals and some were quiet and hardly known to be so powerful and wealthy. I would suggest the blood-ties and proxy blood-ties to have been more important than the tools of corporations or central-banks. Tools can be invented, but human nature is what it is, for the founders of secretive dynasties or the founders of open Christian communities.
The rich who hold on to their wealth and power over generations are different from the rest of us because they don’t believe the crap common American folk do about this freestanding individual business. John D Rockefeller may have seemed to play that part of a rugged individualist but he was a rugged dynasty-founder and not a man who placed any `idealistic’ interests ahead of those of his children nor did he raise his sons and daughters to be different in that regard. John D Rockefeller would have shaken his head over those many middle-class parents who brag openly about planning to spend all their money before they die because their children are doing well enough. Americans of Jewish or Chinese descent seem to act differently—somehow the disease of individual selfishness and biologically implausible denial of blood-ties infects mostly Americans of European Christian descent. This is the disease we must fight because it makes us ready and willing victims of those centralized powers which, once in place, are to be rightly feared. It also makes it impossible for us to form stable and greater communities which build upon our biological natures rather than building self-destructive communities of the modern `liberal’ sort which deny our biological natures or even fight against them.
You cannot build good communities as if human beings were bloodless sorts of creatures who submit themselves to roles imagined by those sorts of abstract thinkers who would impose nice, neat schemas which look so good in the organization charts which can be formatted on nearly any computer or many smart-phones, nor can you properly understand human communities now or in past generations by assuming human beings to be what they clearly are not. Whether used for analysis or to reshape existing human communities, the tools of modern management sciences are inadequate and distorting. And so it is that our minds are deformed. After all, tools shape the thoughts of their users to some extent and can greatly shape the thoughts of weak or poorly developed minds and this is one major reason for the likely impending collapse of the great families of the United States and Europe—they’ve come to depend upon tools which deform human nature and sap the strength and energy of the West. Likely it is that some members of secretive dynasties actually do believe in the myths of freestanding individuals and maybe even share the bloodthirsty jingoism nearly as common among American youth as the cynicism so well-founded but so destructively dispiriting. Likely it also is that some of those semi-underground families are struggling to protect their children from these factually and morally wrong ideas so well-accepted in our days.
How do we get to an understanding which can help us to build a better country? After mostly talking about concrete matters, such as blood-ties, I’ll now claim we need good-quality abstract thought (see The Need for Abstractions in Moral Self-understanding). Good abstract thought isn’t drawn from some Neo-Platonic realm by acts of mental magic; good abstract thought draws first upon reality and then can subjected to various processes which produce understandings of a wide variety of phenomena and entities in this concrete world of things. Good abstract thought, whether it deals with possible relationships between entities of a human type or with the far more abstract relationships between formal and mathematically describable entities (group theory and the like), can then be applied to understandings of history or of nuclear particles, as appropriate. I suspect there to be a very high layer of abstract thought where relationships of the objects physicists study and the entities historians study will be the same but I know we are a long ways from being able to comfortably and sanely produce a description of such a layer of abstract thought. To impose improper and inadequate categories upon our efforts to understand human history and human communal relationships—including those of economics and politics—is to guarantee at best a shallow understanding which falls apart with the slightest change of circumstances. It is to deal with images from a hall of distorted mirrors as if they were accurate images of the flesh-and-blood human beings walking through that hall.
We need first to accept reality, to describe human beings as they are and then to try to understand the sorts of communities they have formed and can form. This doesn’t mean I deny that human political communities have their own natures nor that I deny that human beings are changed by their relationships to various sorts of human communities as they develop to ever greater levels of richness and complexity. Quite the contrary, we are creatures of complex minds and complex feelings and complex behaviors and those are formed by processes of acts-of-being, of shaping, which are the result of back-and-forth movements between abstract relationships and the concrete entities and relationships they create or shape. In our proper understanding of this formation of human beings, we encapsulate in our minds the reality of movements and changes in created being. I do deny that `groups’ of human beings which reproduce successfully will act as if they are radical individuals in a capitalist-democracy or a Marxist society or any other society shaped to wrongful understandings of human nature. We remain killer apes when we gather to try to form secure societies and we remain sex-crazed when we try to bring those societies to a state of moral order. See the essay, Repeat After Me: The Church Has Accepted Evolution and Our Ancestors Were Sex-Crazed, Killer Apes, which begins with:
I distort for the sake of modern men who have trouble focusing upon reality. Apes are our cousins, not our ancestors; the terms used for the common ancestors of men and ape seem to change every few years or so. And those ancestors were only killers part of the time, perhaps less often than modern Americans would desire for themselves—see my essay, Quietly Charitable or Quietly Murderous But Always Quietly American. The sex-crazed business is perhaps less of an exaggeration for us and for our ancestors.
We should try to nurture societies proper to our natures in the way that good parents help to nurture a child according to its own talents and inclinations so that he becomes a healthy adult and not a twisted creature superficially corresponding to some false dreams of the not-so-good parents.
We remain creatures who have certain traits even while subjected to civilizing processes just because those are the traits which allow for survival and reproduction in this world so well-described by Darwin and his successors. We carry these traits because they allowed our ancestors to survive and reproduce successfully and these traits include some which lead us to accept, even to strongly desire, the bonds and dependencies of complex human social life. It is that total human creature—individual and communal—who forms polities and economies, who is recorded in the pages of history. And he is a creature who can be deformed in the short-term so that these desires are turned to the advantage of the Nazi Party or the Comintern or an imperialistic free-market, but as someone once said (I think Eric Voegelin): the problem with human materiel is that it refuses to be treated as materiel. In most cases and at least eventually. Those groups of human beings who subject themselves to the demands of abstract forms of human polity or economy or religion not true to empirical reality will disappear. In terms used by some: their genes will disappear from the human gene pool—an oversimplification and seen as such by those who realize the gene pools are defined in terms of family-lines and successful family-lines can include individuals who act in biologically implausible ways.
Put that total human creature into a society with political systems and economic systems, educational systems and even church `systems’ (the horror of it all), which are the result of willful misunderstandings of human nature or idealistic efforts to impose dreams upon mankind and you’ll have a society and a population doomed to collapse and perhaps disappearance. In terms of a civilization once reaching out toward the farthest regions of Earth: you’ll have a dysfunctional West in which the core populations are so demoralized as to be unconcerned with reproducing and building up families and concrete communities and greatly concerned with various fads of the current crop of those with schemas but without much in the way of minds.
In the long run, the West has doomed itself by adoption of the centralized forms of organization spotlighted by Tate and his associates and by Nader. We can’t even understand our own selves at the most basic and concrete levels because we’ve been trained to view ourselves as freestanding individuals and our most important communities as voluntary associations culminating in the Hobbesian centralized state which allegedly makes possible a large-scale community of freestanding individuals while protecting them from each other. Or something like that.
We forget our human communal natures as readily as we forget our ties to our kin and to those we have come to accept as if kin, both of these characteristics being regulated by specific and now identified brain structures and hormonal flows. If we are to have expanded ideas and feelings and habits of brotherhood, we have to expand from our true flesh-and-blood selves but not by forming some ideally imagined communities pretending we’re something other than sex-crazed, killer apes—again, see Repeat After Me: The Church Has Accepted Evolution and Our Ancestors Were Sex-Crazed, Killer Apes. We must enrich and complexify our individual and communal natures, especially in those aspects we label as `moral’, but we also can’t forget the basic structures of our brain and the complex behaviors which lead us to strong ties with kin and to generally form human communities.
The West is collapsing, largely because of the corruption of the tremendously powerful United States; we Americans, other than the private organizations of the dynastic families and the communities of some family-centered ethnic groups, have tried to organize our various political and economic communities in ways that make no sense given the biological creature called man. We Americans never accepted the reality of a class forming of wealthy and powerful families and we in the middle-class and working-class taught ourselves that we are individuals forming voluntary associations such as that of the entire nation of the United States viewed as a political community of freestanding individuals born under some sort of strong duty to this community which is bound by voluntary ties despite the fact we are tied in at birth and… Don’t ask, just be a freestanding American individual ready to die at the command of the government which keeps secret it’s actions and justifications for those actions, a government poorly understood by way of the false abstractions of modern political science and economics.
The wealthy and powerful families serve their own needs and we also serve them in strange ways because we convince ourselves that there are no elites who profit from wars or from the construction of, say, the Federal Reserve Banking system. Meanwhile, most Americans are busily acting the part of freestanding, selfish individuals and we dissolve our families and our other “little platoons” as we pursue our selfish goals. (For the meaning of “little platoons”, see the quote from Edmund Burke.)
The end result of Americans seeking to be what men can never be is a nation of deformed human beings, deformed in our individual and communal natures. We Americans are a mixed population of submissive sheep and exploitive wolves in shepherd’s clothing. This general situation is far more important than the fact that the exploiters use certain specific forms of economic organization (corporations or central banks) or political organization (the political machines controlled by two national committees of men and women but imagined to be describable as `democracy’). We can’t just fight corporations or banks or the national committees of the Republican and Democratic parties—we play into their hand when we accept their `game’ as real. We have to start working toward better ways of forming communities and we need to start by paying greater respect to and nurturing our concrete communities of families and neighborhoods and churches or synagogues. I think this was what Tate and the agrarians had in mind based upon their understanding of their own concrete communities in the South.