Mike Lofgren — The ‘Anti-Knowledge’ of the Elites

In a previous piece, I described how the Republican Party and its ideological allies in the fundamentalist churches have confected a comprehensive media-entertainment complex to attract low-information Americans and turn them into partisans.…

Not just the GOP, but also the Deep State.

Think of Robert Gates, Ashton Carter, Timothy Geithner or Eric Holder. On the surface, they seem the very antithesis of the Tea Party fanatic, gibbering about ISIS training camps in America. The preferred pose of these establishment personages is that of the politically neutral technocrat offering well-considered advice based on their profound expertise.

That pose is nonsense. They are deeply dyed in the hue of the official ideology of the governing class, an ideology that is neither specifically Democrat nor Republican. Domestically, whatever they might privately believe about essentially diversionary social issues (“rube bait”) like abortion or gay marriage, they almost invariably believe in the “Washington Consensus”: financialization, outsourcing, privatization, deregulation and the commodification of labor.

Internationally, they espouse Twenty-first Century American Exceptionalism: the right and duty of the United States to meddle in every region of the world, coercive diplomacy, boots on the ground, and the right to ignore painfully-won international norms of civilized behavior. To paraphrase what Sir John Harrington said over 400 years ago about treason, now that the ideology of the Deep State has prospered, none dare call it ideology.

Let us consider some of the tenets of their faith

I would add that conventional economics based on the principles of economic liberalism is also an ideology based on assumptions derived from and supporting a POV. Conventional economists are agreed that Marxist are ideological economics are ideological, in addition to it being wrong, but they are also agreed that all "heterodox" economics is also either wrong or unworthy of consideration because "the debate over method is settled" — by them. Even though Marxists, Marxians, and Post Keynesians, for example, warned about the approach of the global financial crisis that conventional economists largely missed and haven't been able to address satisfactorily. Their response is denial.

Consortium NewsThe ‘Anti-Knowledge’ of the Elites

Mike Lofgren