The Battle for the American Mind

“Isn't it odd that so many foundations, big businesses, newspapers and colleges that once called themselves patriotic and pro-free market –- even some that still do -- fund their declared culture-war opponents? Once upon a bloodstain the size of several continents, Lenin said that we Americans would sell our enemies the rope with which they’d hang us. As usual he was wrong.

“We don’t sell rope to our enemies. We don’t even give it to them for free. We pay them to take it, and then we send advisors to teach them how to make a hangman’s noose.”

These are the views of a couple of pretty smart fellows from Indiana, who don’t wish to reveal their real names as yet because they like their jobs. We will call them, for simplicity’s sake, Indiana Smith and (you knew this was coming) Indiana Jones. Smith and Jones have started an e-mail “newsletter” to publicize their mix of conservative and libertarian views, and are in the process of building a newfangled “point/counterpoint” website with some friends of the liberal persuasion.

A different yardstick

Wait a minute: Can people with opposing views really be friends?

“How sad that it has come to that,” says Indy Smith, “as if politics was the most important thing in life, the only reason people banded together.” Smith says he has all kinds of friends, for all kinds of reasons, and that there are more important things to agree on than to argue over. Smith, Jones and what they call their “loony left buddies” have decided to band together in common cause, to fight a common enemy: bad thinking.

“That’s the new yardstick,” Indy Jones asserts. “More important than the belief itself is the process by which you came to it. For many people, TV soundbites and bumper stickers have replaced thinking. We are advocates, from the left and right and center, for good thinking.”

A member of the loose consortium overseen by Smith and Jones wrote an article, "Putting Descartes Before the Hordes," concerning critical thinking and the famed philosopher's Procedural Rule. Although the Indy Boys liked it, they disagreed with the notion that Americans would take to critical thinking by the example of a 17th century European smart aleck. The “proper thinker to put before middlebrow America may not be René Descartes,” Jones intones. It was Smith who wrote the most instructive passage, however.

Bart Simpson, philosopher

"We wholeheartedly agree with the ‘Descartes’ article. However, we have to reach the hordes on the level of Bart Simpson. When Nikita Kruschev told the United States, ‘We will bury you,’ he meant from within, not from without. How do you do that? You have to get control of the media, the education establishment, and privately owned guns. Uncle Sam has succeeded in the first two and is working on the last.

"We work in management at a steel mill in America’s heartland. [Understand why they use pseudonyms now?] Our concern is how to reach the guy out on the floor, who only watches the first ten minutes of the evening news, reads the front page of the local newspaper and believes he is being presented with an unbiased version of truth?

“It appears the masses that work on the floor are content with their paycheck and the government taking on their responsibilities so that they don't have to. Debunking political myths one person at a time is too slow, and it can always be counteracted by the evening news. Perhaps some rich conservative guy needs to purchase a major network or cable channel and present the news with their own biases, to counter the existing biases."

Crunched numbers

That’s what Smith and Jones think, anyway. What first comes to mind is that, besides a network, they would still need to battle it out among the decision-makers, leaders, politicians, the Fourth Estate – which means they’d still need the print media. Then, too, there’s the Internet (Fifth Estate? Sixth?), e-mail, which they’re already using, and other alternative delivery methods. They need what's called “bandwidth” –- and plenty of it.

Here's an angle on the publishing side of the equation: For political mags, a hundred thou is a lot of subscribers, but most of the mags lose money unless they're owned by a conglomerate or do some kind of fundraising on the side. But among the non-leftist (and non-conglomerate) periodicals, American Spectator has, I think, 200,000+ subscribers and National Review has 175,000 or so, and if you add in Reason, Insights on Liberty, Human Events, Liberty, St. Croix Review, The Independent Review, Insight, American Enterprise, Weekly Standard, etc., you get maybe three-quarters of a million, total.

These are so-so numbers for magazines, especially considering that, between them, TV Guide and Reader’s Digest have a circulation of over 20 million. For direct communication with 300 million Americans, or even just the 25 million voting-age ones to whom Smith and Jones would provide remedial critical thinking classes and civics lessons, the 11 mags listed above are next to worthless.

Change is inside out

The indirect, gradual changes that actually take place in societies and civilizations work from top to bottom, and inside out. That means that the larger social impact of influential, persuasive, consequential ideas upon the "cognitive elite" is diluted and delayed, as those ideas move through layers of society, as well as through time and space, creating their own resistance, friction and drag. And don’t forget that this ameliorative motion is against a current of PC blather and high-tech hogwash, professionally wrought to mislead and distract, at least according to Smith and Jones.

Now, Indy Boys, for argument's sake, let’s say you’ve got your large, well-funded, perhaps even profitable multimedia enterprise –- a few TV stations, some radio, a strong web presence, movies, publishing. Okay, then what?

Then you're still dealing with people whose minds you wish to change. How do you do that in a (still somewhat) free market with ubiquitous TV remote controls? How do you keep on proselytizing while losing viewers and consequent ad revenue? Face it, Indy Boys, “clear thinking” is a niche market with, at best, a few million Americans who are hip to what's happening. And hard truths alienate people, especially when they’re on pay-TV; folks just wanna have fun, y’know? As any good “marketer” will tell you, the trick is to make people both think and feel that they need what you have –- and feel strongly enough about it to part with hard-earned dough.

Like most of life, the Indy Boys insist, the process involves a seller, a buyer, a contract and a consummating transaction. The real business of America, President Coolidge said, is business; some 70-odd (some very odd) years later, restoring the power and reach of the American government to something approximating the Coolidge administration’s, one of Smith’s and Jones’s pet projects, should be the business of all real Americans. That’s what the Indy Boys say, anyway.

Issues of the future

Some folks say that America is a conservative nation. That would so completely depend on definitions –- semantics -– that commenting on the notion would take another whole article. But, starting with Bill Clinton in the 1990s, it does appear that mushy conservatism teamed up with pennypinching liberalism to create those great, gooey centrist positions that still poll well and sound sort of, well, mushily conservative and pennypinchingly liberal.

But GOP-Demo goo like charter schools and 2% tax cuts are hardly cutting edge with true believers, who prefer to tackle fundamental issues like, say, deleting half the cabinet departments and bringing every American serviceman home. Smith and Jones are likewise concerned with high-tech “assaults on our freedom” like video surveillance, e-mail and phone tapping, GPS-equipped license plates and other Big Brother moves.

“It’s starting to look like London in some big American cities,” Jones claims. “It started with surveillance cameras for catching speeders, a real soccer-mom kind of end-run around privacy concerns.” He goes on to say that, every time he hears a politician talk about “video security” in terms of fighting crime and protecting citizens, he knows it’s “really something else they mean” -– video surveillance of the populace.

These Indy Boys just do not trust their elected officials. “We don’t trust the government, either,” Smith adds cryptically, “which is a separate thing, of course.” Now, see, Indy Boys, you’ve got to watch what you say and how you say it. If you take this terminology, and these angles on the issues, to a GOP platform committee in any state of the union you will be sorely disappointed. If you’re not used to being called wackos, get used to it.

The reason is simple. The fact is, as a nation, we're really not that conservative. We’re complicated, capricious, complacent and comfy. And a lot of us just don’t want to think clearly about things, because that will put the multimedia show of modern life on hold.

How do you fight that? How do you convince spoiled kids of all ages, who live in Disneyland on a subsidized ticket, to grow up? This is what the Indy Boys are wondering.

I trust you're not in a hurry for the answer.