The Right's Architecture of Power
http://www.planetnetopia.com/blog/view/id_70/title_the-right%E2%80%99s-architecture-of-power/
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[ BR]The Right's Architecture of Power
Tom Barry writes: "Over the past three decades, the strategists and
ideologues of the right wing have designed a new architecture of
power. This architecture currently frames most of the country's
policy debate and has attracted the allegiance of most sectors of
Corporate America. At the same time, it has mobilized a reactionary
populist movement to support its anti-popular economic and
undemocratic agenda. Following Bush's 2000 election, this
architecture of power also incorporated into its structure the
Republican Party and the executive branch of our federal government."
The Right's Architecture of Power
By Tom Barry | April 22, 2004
(This is the third article in the Chronicle of the New American
Century series written by Tom Barry for the Right Web project of the
Interhemispheric Resource Center.)
Over the past three decades, the strategists and ideologues of the
right wing have designed a new architecture of power. This
architecture currently frames most of the country's policy debate
and has attracted the allegiance of most sectors of Corporate
America. At the same time, it has mobilized a reactionary populist
movement to support its anti-popular economic and undemocratic
agenda. Following Bush's 2000 election, this architecture of power
also incorporated into its structure the Republican Party and the
executive branch of our federal government.
The architecture of power is a work in progress. Its designers and
planners, while loosely committed as a team to the same ideologies
and political goals, work independently to bolster the structure of
the right's power and influence. Rather than operating from a single
blueprint, these architects of power are constantly renovating and
expanding their web of power in the form of new institutes, front
groups, media outlets, and political projects.
The architecture of power is a post-modern structure that has no
central office or main lobby, no fixed foundation, no elevator that
takes you to different levels. Instead, it is an expansive complex
that closely resembles a web whose principal skeins and cross-woven
filaments constitute both its foundation and frame.
Within the United States, liberals and progressives have similar
networks but none so immense, so closely knit, or so ideologically
driven and so closely tied to the agendas of the most aggressive,
reactionary sectors of Corporate America. When compared with the web
of multidimensional movements and institutions of the right's web of
power, the other networks competing for public, corporate, and
policymaker support seem more like aging cobwebs—which unless
similarly invigorated by integrated ideologies and visions of the
future may eventually be swept away.
The architects of power are not conspirators or members of a secret
cabal. Rather they come from a long tradition of all leading
political actors that have operated in all variegations of the broad
political spectrum. They are a collection of ideologues,
intellectuals, scholars, strategists, visionaries, demagogues, and
political officials and political operatives that share common
critiques of liberal and progressive policy paradigms and uphold the
principles of a new radical conservatism. Over the last three
decades, this architecture of power has, according to Chip Berlet of
Political Research Associates, "yanked politics to the right."
Dimensions of the Right's Power Complex
The most potent force in this architecture of power is the package
of cultural, economic, political, and military ideologies propagated
by the right's think tanks such as the American Enterprise
Institute, Heritage Foundation, Hudson Institute, and Hoover
Institution. Less prominent think tanks that advance neoconservative
views on foreign policy include the Jamestown Foundation, Foreign
Policy Research Institute, and the Manhattan Institute. Also
important on the right but situated outside the neoconservative
family is the prominent Center for Strategic and International
Studies (CSIS). Other less prominent foreign policy think tanks on
the right are the Lexington Institute and the Nixon Center.
Closely connected to these think tanks are scores of policy
institutes that address the core issues of the right's agenda in
international affairs. These include a set of militarist institutes
such as the Center for Security Policy, National Institute for
Public Policy, and the Jewish Institute for National Security
Affairs. Second-tier institutes focused on military policy include
High Frontier, U.S. Space Foundation, and National Strategy
Information Center.
One of the major achievements of the neoconservatives has been the
integration of social conservatives, the religious right, and
foreign policy hawks. Key to this success have been a small circle
of interlinked neocon institutes including Empower America,
Institute for Religion and Democracy, and the Institute for Religion
and Public Life. Among the prominent neoconservatives associated
with these institutes that promote the superiority of Judeo-
Christian values and culture are Michael Novak, William Bennett,
Hillel Fradkin, George Weigel, Elliott Abrams, and Richard Neuhaus.
Running in tandem with the right's think tanks and policy institutes
are its regionally focused advocacy groups and front groups. Some of
these are permanent institutions such as the Middle East Forum and
Washington Institute for Near East Affairs. One of the newest and
fastest growing policy institutes is the Foundation for Defense of
Democracies, which like all neocon institutes and think tanks backs
a right-wing Zionist agenda in the Middle East.
A more transient component of this architecture of power includes ad
hoc citizen committees created to give the impression of broad
public support for particular legislation and objectives. The latter
sector includes such groups as the U.S. Committee on NATO, Project
on Transitional Democracies, Americans for Peace in Chechnya,
Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, U.S. Committee for a Free
Lebanon, and the Coalition for Democracy in Iran. Neocon operatives
such as Bruce Jackson, Randy Scheunemann, Gary Schmitt, and Michael
Ledeen are the central figures in most of these ad hoc groups. While
some of them are strictly neocon affairs, others function as front
groups that aim to build bipartisan support for their objectives.
Conservative Democratic Party figures such as Senator Joseph
Lieberman and Progressive Policy Institute president Will Marshall
are found in such neocon front groups as the Committee for the
Liberation of Iraq.
The right's architecture of power extends into the infrastructure of
the U.S. government. In the late 1990s, the two congressionally
organized commissions on missile defense and space weapons chaired
by Donald Rumsfeld were organized by legislators associated with
such neoconservative institutes as the Center for Security Policy.
Neoconservatives and their supporters have also been key to the
establishment of several permanent government or quasi-government
agencies, including U.S.-China Commission, U.S. Commission on
Religious Freedom, and the National Endowment for Democracy.
Getting the Message Right
Neoconservatives have a long tradition in publishing, dating back to
the involvement of neocon forerunners in such anticommunist
magazines as Encounter and right-wing Zionist magazines like
Commentary. Today, the Weekly Standard, closely associated with the
ideological agendas of the Project for the New American Century and
the American Enterprise Institute, has established itself as the
leading political voice of the neoconservatives. Commentary served
until the late 1980s as the flagship publication of neoconservatism,
but its influence among both neoconservatives and the Washington
policy community has now been far surpassed by the Weekly Standard.
Owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, the Weekly Standard
regularly features Project for the New American Century analysts
such as Reuel Marc Gerecht, Ellen Bork (daughter of AEI scholar and
prominent Federalist Society member Robert Bork), Gary Schmitt, and
Thomas Donnelly in addition to founders Kristol and Kagan. According
to the Nation magazine's media critic Eric Alterman: "The magazine
speaks directly to and for power. Anybody who wants to know what
this administration is thinking and what they plan to do has to read
this magazine."1
From the perspective of Old Guard conservative Paul Gottfried,
neoconservatives beginning in the late 1980s took control of
the "New York-Washington" media corridor. Old Guard conservatives
and paleoconservatives could no longer find an outlet for their
analysis, even in the letters section of National Review, which had
veered toward neoconservatism as has the Wall Street Journal. As
Gottfried observed in 1993, neocons not only dominated the right's
main journals and magazines, they also raised prominent voices on
the editorial pages of traditionally liberal media such as the
Washington Post, New Republic, and Atlantic.2 In syndicated columns
and national radio and television programs, such neoconservative
analysts as Charles Krauthammer, Ben Wattenberg, Linda Chavez,
William Bennett, and Morton Kronracke have injected neoconservative
thinking into the mainstream of the American body politic.
Other right-wing publications with a marked neoconservative
perspective include Public Interest, with founder and senior
editorial associate Irving Kristol, American Spectator, with chief
editor R. Emmett Tyrell, Jr. and board members Richard V. Allen and
Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Washington Times, owned by Reverend Moon and
featuring Frank Gaffney, a prominent PNAC associate and head of the
Center for Security Policy.3 Also key to the neoconservative
information network are publishers that cater to neoconservative
authors. Encounter Books, a San Francisco publishing house run by
Peter Collier, produces a steady stream of books by neoconservative
authors in collaboration with such entities as the Project for the
New American Century and Commentary.4
Center of the Neocon Matrix
At the center of the architectureof power are two closely associated
institutions: American Enterprise Institute and the Project for the
New American Century (PNAC).
PNAC's offices are located in what seems to be the core of the
neoconservative matrix. Entering the 12-story building in downtown
Washington, you see the office directory, which includes the stellar
lineup of American Enterprise Institute scholars including Irving
Kristol and Robert Bork. Like many neoconservative institutes, the
AEI lost many of its best and brightest hawks and ideologues to the
Bush II administration.
One has only to examine the American Enterprise Institute to
appreciate the degree to which Corporate America has aligned itself
with the right's think tanks. Its board of directors includes the
CEOs of such corporations as ExxonMobil, Motorola, American Express,
State Farm Insurance, and Dow Chemical. Its board of trustees is
also littered with corporate representatives, although a couple of
the most prominent or infamous of them have left the board, such as
Halliburton's Richard Cheney and Enron's Kenneth Lay. Expanding upon
the existing stream of donations from the nation's leading right-
wing foundations, the AEI has achieved a diversified funding base
among corporations from just about every sector of the economy—
ranging from General Electric and AT&T to Ford and General Motors to
Amoco and Shell to Morgan Guarantee Trust and American Express.5
Many former AEI minds now at work implementing the peace-through-
war/Pax Americana strategy of the Bush administration previously
worked with the PNAC coalition, including Vice President Cheney,
Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton, and Director
of International Broadcasting Seth Cropsey. Other PNAC-AEI members
have retained their ties with these neoconservative organizations
while serving on administration advisory boards, including Jeane
Kirkpatrick, Eliot Cohen, and the omnipresent Richard Perle. A quick
scan of the list of AEI scholars and officers in the lobby's office
directory reveals at least a dozen PNAC associates, including such
luminaries as Joshua Muravchik and Michael Novak. PNAC's Middle East
director Reuel Marc Gerecht and PNAC's military analyst Thomas
Donnelly number among the AEI associates who have signed PNAC's
public statements.6
Conveniently located in this neoconservative warren is the
Philanthropy Roundtable, a right-wing association of foundations
that split from the Council of Foundations in the early 1980s. Just
as the Business Roundtable was created to unite Corporate America
around conservative policy agendas, the Philanthropy Roundtable
joined the counter-establishment matrix in the tradition of "shadow
liberalism"—creating institutions and campaigns that parallel those
of liberals and progressives.
Michael Joyce, longtime president (1986-2000) of the Bradley
Foundation, served until 2003 as chair of the Roundtable's board of
directors.7 Bill Kristol, like his father, has cultivated close ties
with Bradley and other right-wing foundations that now exhibit a
decidedly neoconservative cast.8 Joyce feels it was inevitable that
Bush would embrace the neoconservative agenda. "I'm not sure
September 11 did more than push the timetable up," Joyce noted.9
Commenting on the special role of right-wing foundations, Michael
Grebe, current president of the Bradley Foundation and one of the
five directors of the Philanthropy Roundtable, said: "We have a role
in sustaining a conservative intellectual infrastructure." To that
end, Bradley granted AEI $14 million between 1985 and 2002, and
during the same period AEI received $6.5 million from the Olin
Foundation.10 A handful of archconservative foundations not only
sustain the right-wing power complex but form part of the
architecture of power through revolving door relationships. Michael
Joyce, for example, beyond just providing start-up funding for
Kristol's Project for the Republican Future and PNAC, is a signatory
of PNAC statements, a trustee of Freedom House, and a member or past
member of various presidential and national commissions. Richard
Mellon Scaife, who heads the Scaife family foundations and is a
major PNAC supporter, was a member of the second Committee on the
Present Danger and has been a trustee of the Hoover Institution and
the Heritage Foundation.
Right-wing foundations have provided the start-up funding to get
PNAC, AEI, and most other idea brokers of the right-wing's power
complex into high gear. Although early right-wing donors such as
Coors and Amway have dropped off, the top tier of the right's think
tank all continue to drink from the same collective trough of right-
wing foundations. The Bradley, Sarah Scaife, Olin, and Castle Rock
foundations all funded the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage
Foundation, Hudson Institute, Hoover Institution, and Manhattan
Institute in the 1997-2001 period.
PNAC "Set the Table" for Bush Administration's Foreign Policy
With funding from the Bradley Foundation, William Kristol
established the Project for the Republican Future in 1993 in
anticipation of the 1994 congressional elections. Following the
resounding victory of right-wing Republicans, he founded Weekly
Standard in 1995 in the vacated offices of the Project for the
Republican Future. The next year Kristol and Robert Kagan
established the Project for the New American Century, which
describes itself as a "nonprofit educational organization supporting
American military, diplomatic, and moral leadership."
A wide range of neoconservatives, representatives from the social
conservative right, and leading national security hawks coalesced
around PNAC. Its founding statement of principles, signed by several
individuals who would later become high officials in Bush II's
foreign policy team (Rumsfeld, Cheney, Abrams, Dobriansky, Libby,
Wolfowitz, Khalilzad, Rodman, and Friedberg) was a document aimed at
reinvigorating and uniting U.S. citizens around a new vision of
America that brimmed with confidence and moral conviction.11
As Kristol and Kagan apparently recognized early on, the Project for
the New American Century—with its focus on American supremacy and
moral clarity—had all the right ingredients of a unifying ideology
for a powerful new front group that could spearhead an elite social
movement for radical political change. Although intent on
establishing the vision and building blocks for a bold new foreign
and military policy, the PNAC 1997 statement of principles avoided
the type of provocative language that was common stock in
neoconservative publications and in-house think tank policy briefs.
There was no mention of a proposed security strategy driven by U.S.
supremacy, no allusion to empire, and no explicit suggestion that
the post-World War II framework of multilateralism should be tossed
in the waste bin of history. Although Wolfowitz, Cheney, Khalilzad,
and Libby—the team that fashioned the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance—
signed PNAC's statement of principles, the unifying document
remained within the traditional "peace through strength" framework
and omitted any language that would have explicitly foreshadowed
PNAC's agenda of preemptive strikes, regime change, and other
measures to block any challenges to U.S. supremacy in the next
century.
PNAC succeeded in integrating the various tendencies and diverse
expertise found within neoconservatism, uniting political
intellectuals associated with neocon publications (Norman Podhoretz
and William Kristol), scholars (Eliot Cohen and Francis Fukuyama),
military strategists (Paul Wolfowitz and Zalmay Khalilzad), and
cultural/religious warriors (William Bennett and George Weigel).
Among its 27 founding members, including cochairs Kristol and Kagan,
only a handful of individuals didn't match the neoconservative
prototype although all shared in the agendas and new ideological
vision of American supremacisim as articulated by the neocon
political and military strategists.
The two most prominent in the small number of exceptions—Dick Cheney
and Donald Rumsfeld—came to their right-wing internationalism more
by way of their ties with multinational corporations and the
globalizing military-industrial complex, high-tech industries, and
energy businesses. Both Cheney and Rumsfeld were corporate CEOs when
they signed the PNAC charter.
Albeit sparsely represented, right-wing social conservatives closely
associated with the Christian Right constituted another important
sector in the PNAC coalition. Among those representing the social
conservative faction were Gary Bauer, former director of the Family
Research Council, and former Vice President Dan Quayle, as well as
two other prominent cultural warriors: cofounder of Empower America
and former Representative Vin Weber and Steve Forbes. Forbes, the
quintessential corporate conservative, was also a former Empower
America director and is associated with other right-wing social
conservative and economic libertarian institutes. In 2002 Forbes,
with his neocon colleagues, was a founding director of the pro-Likud
Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. As PNAC continues to
issue new public declarations, it has maintained its strong
neoconservative backbone while integrating top figures from other
sectors of the right-wing's power complex.
PNAC's Executive Director Gary Schmitt once boasted that
PNAC "helped set the table" for new policy decisions "by setting the
agenda up." Other factors that the none-too-modest Schmitt cites for
PNAC's success include: "We are articulate; we are very smart about
when to say things and how to say it; and do have the advantage of
an echo effect—if I write something, it may be picked up by the
Weekly Standard or repeated by Bill or Bob in various media forums."
Ideology of Power
Contrary to prevailing academic notions that hold that extreme
political movements always revert to moderation, the right wing has
maintained an evolving set of radical ideologies and strategies.
Despite its extremist ideologies and policy agendas, the right-
wing's architecture of power does not operate on the edges of
mainstream society and politics but stands at the very center of our
society. Like all social/political movements, the right wing's
institutional web and its populist constituencies seek political and
social power. Over the past three decades the right-wing
institutions and associated populist backlash movements have
succeeded in undermining liberal policy frameworks and establishing
its radicalism as accepted political discourse.
Lately, the right-wing's architecture of power has reformulated its
concept of power—no longer merely as holding political power but now
as a core ideological concept. In other words, the right-wing's
architecture of power since the late 1990s not only seeks increased
political power and influence but is propagating an ideology of
power that holds that U.S. supremacy—cultural, moral, military,
economic, and diplomatic—is a self-evident truth and right.
(Tom Barry is Policy Director of the Interhemispheric Resource
Center (IRC), online at www.irc-online.org . He is the founder of
Foreign Policy In Focus and directs the IRC's Right Web project.)
Also See:
Tom Barry, "Iraq War Product of Neocon Philosophy of Intelligence,"
online at:
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/analysis/2004/0402pi.php
Tom Barry, "One Year After the Invasion: Baghdad and Beyond," online
at: http://rightweb.irc-online.org/anal...4/0403anniv.php
References:
1 David Carr, "White House Listens When Weekly Speaks," New York
Times, March 11, 2003 .
2 Paul Gottfried, The Conservative Movement, Revised Edition (New
York: Twayne Publishers, 1993), p. 151.
3 Publication committee members of Public Interest include Nicholas
Eberstadt, Roger Hertog, Leon Kass, Charles Krauthammer, William
Kristol, and other neoconservatives.
4 Encounter authors include Norman Podhoretz, William Kristol,
Ronald Radosh, Joshua Muravchik, Leon Kass, Peter Collier, David
Horowitz, Steven Mosher, and Robert Kagan. Encounter published The
Mideast Peace Process (2003) in collaboration with Commentary, and
Present Dangers (2000) in collaboration with the Project for the New
American Century. Another PNAC collaboration was a "just-in-time"
book arguing for a U.S. invasion of Iraq : Lawrence F. Kaplan and
William Kristol, The War Over Iraq:Saddam's Tyranny and America's
Mission (2003).
5 "American Enterprise Institute," Right Web Profile (
Interhemispheric Resource Center , November 2003); Also see:
www.democracyunbound.com/aei.html.
6 Other AEI associates who are also associated with PNAC through
their sign-on statements include Nicholas Eberstadt, Danielle
Pletka, and William Schneider.
7 For more on the influence of Michael S. Joyce, see: Elizabeth
Greene, "Reinventing Philanthropy on the Right," Chronicle of
Philanthropy, August 23, 2001; Also see "The Lynde and Harry Bradley
Foundation," at
http://www.mediatransparency.org/fu...foundation.htm; Sally
Covington, Moving A Public Policy Agenda: The Strategic Philanthropy
of Conservative Foundations (New York: National Committee for
Responsive Philanthropy, July 1997); and Bruce
Murphy, "Neoconservative Clout Seen In U.S. Iraq Policy," Milwaukee
Journal Sentinel, April 5, 2003, at:
www.jsonline.org.com/news/gen/apr03/.
8 Right Web Profiles (Interhemispheric Resource Center , November
2003); Mediatransparency.org. The other major right-wing foundations—
Carthage , Earhart, Smith Richardson, JM Foundation—have also
funded most of these same think tanks.
9 Bruce Murphy, "Neoconservative Clout Seen In U.S. Iraq Policy,"
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, April 5, 2003 , at:
www.jsonline.org.com/news/gen/apr03/.
10 Shawn Zeller, "Conservative Crusaders: Unlike some of their more
liberal counterparts, conservative foundations aren't bashful about
trying to promote their causes in Washington—from school vouchers to
Social Security privatization," National Journal, April 26, 2003.
11 Other signatories of PNAC's "Statement of Principles" also joined
the Bush administration as members of important advisory committees
and quasi-governmental agencies, including Eliot Cohen, Dan Quayle,
Henry Rowen, and Fred Iklé as members of Rumsfeld's Defense Policy
Board; Vin Weber and Francis Fukuyama as NED chair and board member,
respectively; and Fukuyama on the Commission on Bioethics. Stephen
Rosen continued serving as a member of the U.S.-China Commission.
Published by the Right Web Program at the Interhemispheric Resource
Center (IRC). ©2004. All rights reserved.
Recommended citation:
Tom Barry, "The Right's Architecture of Power ," IRC Right Web
(Silver City, NM: Interhemispheric Resource Center, April 22, 2004).
Web location:
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/anal...rchitecture.php
__________________
"The Truth may not always win, but it is always right."
• "To announce that there must be no criticism of the president or
that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only
unpatriotic and servile, but it is morally treasonable to the
American public."
--President Theodore Roosevelt
We shouldn't be opening firehouses in Baghdad and closing them in
Brooklyn. America's homeland security needs to take steps as big as
the threats we face – and give our front lines the resources they
need. John Kerry has a six-point plan to ensure that we are safer,
stronger, and more secure on our own soil.
http://www.johnkerry.com/
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his
government.
--- Edward Abbey
"A popular government without popular information or the means of
acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps
both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean
to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power
knowledge gives." James Madison
Liars are usually easily discredited; it's the truth-tellers who
need to be destroyed.
When fools lie, people die
==========================================
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