America's Media, Advocating a Suppressive Ideology, Is Pravda's Cousin

Don't confuse Pravda with Prada.  Pravda was the Soviet Union's newspaper, and its Orwellian name means  truth. Prada, in contrast, is the Prada family's fashion label. It was publicized by David Frankel's The Devil Wears Prada.

The American news media is Pravda's cousin, even while it writes about Prada.  Wall Street influences it as well as the federal government.  It is not that the United States has a Pravda-style state controlled media, it is that Wall Street influences the media, the government and the university system so that American political debate is monotone: "Bailout, bailout, bailout."  Progressivism, the variants of which are Rockefeller Republicanism and the Democratic Party's progressive-liberalism, is a totalitarian ideology that suppresses dissent in a more sophisticated way than the Soviets did. It permits but ignores dissent, suppressing dissenters through carrots such as academic jobs and sticks such as refusal to air dissidents' views.

Last night I was reading Robert McNamara's memoirs that focus on the Vietnam War, In Retrospect.  McNamara paints a picture of government decision making that ought to be of interest to organizational scholars.  He and his cabinet colleagues got strategy in Vietnam wrong because they were unable to think coherently. They reversed their assumptions in 1965 for no explainable reason.  Prior to 1965 they believed, for good reason, that the South Vietnamese had to fight the war.  In 1965 they took over the fighting for the South Vietnamese because the South Vietnamese would not fight, committing themselves to a conflict that would, in their own view, have the same ultimate outcome as retreat.   They themselves did not see their own strategy as leading to success.

According to McNamara, the cabinet's inability to think rationally about Vietnam was not due to the military's manipulation, as David Halberstam claims in The Best and the Brightest, and it wasn't due to groupthink as Irving Janis speculates in Groupthink.  Rather, it arose from inability to come up with an imaginative, effective strategy of the kind that Col. Thomas X. Hammes describes in The Sling and the Stone.  In other words, the decision making was a failure attributable to bounded rationality that James G. March and Herbert Simon describe in Organizations.

This explanation differs from any that appeared in the news media at the time and from any that appears in the news media today concerning government policy making. The federal government is unable to solve problems because it is corrupt and because it lacks the ability.  But progressivism is based on the assumption that government can solve problems.

News media personnel are educated in universities that respond to Wall Street's needs and then work in firms that Wall Street owns.  To advance they must please managements whom Wall Street hires.  The American news media, like Pravda, offers a steady stream of propaganda that defends the interests of a failed political establishment, a totalitarian state and a corrupt elite.

Groupthink and Rigidity of the Statist-Liberal Consensus

Progressivism led to a consensus that the state is necessary to manage the economy. Republicans like William Howard Taft emphasized the free market to a greater degree than did Democrats like Woodrow Wilson, but both political parties have been committed to a state managed big business system. Unfortunately, the system has not performed well. The subsidies that the state has provided the financial sector have been squandered on excessive salaries and incompetent management. When the financial firms prove to have been ineptly run so that they near bankruptcy, the public bails them out further despite years of mismanagement, poor decision making and excessive salaries. Income transfers from the public to state-supported managers, to include CEOs in the corporate manufacturing and service as well as in the financial sector, have resulted in increasing income inequality even as firms are not managed competitively by global standards. Despite the failures of the Progressive model, few observers question its merits. In particular, the peculiar argument that society should evolve, so that the adoption of the Progressive model was appropriate in 1910 and is also appropriate today begs the question: why is the Progressive model appropriate today if society evolves? And why are academics, politicians and businessmen so defensive about the Progressive model given its repeated failure, its tired history and its antiquated assumptions about the importance of scale, mass production and stability?

Part of the obsessive commitment to the Progressive model results from the liberal groupthink that was necessary to its foundation. Progressivism was first and foremost a mode of transfer of wealth from the general public to corporate interests. It accomplished this by reducing competition and establishing preferred access to credit by large business. Smaller business may have been accomodated to a degree, but the most important source of business innovation, entrepreneurial start-ups, are missing from the Progressive model. The result was a decline in American competitiveness during the twentieth century. The major business innovations after 1940 were Japanese, not American.

Liberal groupthink plays a key role in defending progressivism. Liberalism establishes a hierarchy of media that is imitative, much as in many mid-century industries firms followed a price leader or followed pattern collective bargaining in their industries, in media there is a unitary point of view that reflects the opinions of liberal leadership. Such opinions are costly to believe if you are an investor. They are costly for society to follow. They have destroyed New York City. They have caused the loss of competitiveness in American industry. But the comfort that liberal groupthink provides to its acolytes provides a critical bond, much as religious belief does.