Cultures, like families and tribes, exist because they maximize the survival chances of their members. Homo sapiens survives better in groups, and groups survive better if they have a common frame of reference. This frame of reference is necessarily both about continuity, usually resident in the language and traditions of the culture, and change, whether inspired from within or without. Any culture will respond to new ideas, alliances, wars, inventions, explorations, mutations, relocations, or resources lost or found. You could even define “culture” as the set of intellectual, social, and moral responses a particular group of humans makes to their physical environment over time.

In contrast, the current “America” is largely a product of cultural engineering by professionals: political consultants, media experts, intelligence organizations, and the like. Academics will no doubt say that all cultures everywhere are always constructed in such a manner, but that idea is obviously false to anyone who values empirical observation. Yes, all cultures are “constructed” in the way that post-structuralists employ the term. Not all cultures have small, elite groups that come up with a map of political and economic activity that take the culture in a direction assuring their dominance (as well as destroying the basic social contract).

It began with the 1972 Powell memo, well-known to many liberals and leftists as the origin point of the Reagan (counter) revolution, modern media consolidation, and K Street. For those troubled by the canard of the ever-present “conspiracy theory,” rest assured, there was no conspiracy here. It’s just that no one called attention to what was being done in the open. In the early 1970s, the national Chamber of Commerce, panicked at the fact that the American government was occasionally saying “no” to it, distraught at the twin spectres of paying black men the same as white men and cleaning up the pollution caused by their manufactures, begged their friend, lawyer Lewis Powell, to help them.

Else, they and Powell thought, “American business as [we] know it will cease to exist.”

The overriding first need is for businessmen to recognize that the ultimate issue may be survival — survival of what we call the free enterprise system, and all that this means for the strength and prosperity of America and the freedom of our people.

Communism was on the march. Powell knew that “Communism” was on the march via the great institutions of American culture and the American democratic process, but this did not, apparently, give any of them cause for self-reflection.

The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism come from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians. In most of these groups the movement against the system is participated in only by minorities. Yet, these often are the most articulate, the most vocal, the most prolific in their writing and speaking.

Maybe that's because these critics were not Communists, but merely intelligent people who did not subscribe to capitalism as a state religion.

Powell, unfortunately, was a highly intelligent man, intelligent enough to understand that his friends in big business could not win their political battles head on. The only way for them to win was to change political conditions in the country, and the only way to do that was to change American culture. Powell laid out several steps that would have to be taken in order to, in essence, establish authoritarian corporate control over the perceptions of the American public, and make sure that the government answered only to the rich. In other words, Powell came up with the necessary steps to dismantle the American republic.

Essentially, his advice was to buy the culture’s great institutions, such as its government and its press (through aggressive corporate mergers). Once these institutions were well in hand, public funding of other institutions would be under the control of Lewis’ Chamber of Commerce friends, (education was a particular target, especially higher education) and they could starve them or twist them into other shapes at their leisure. What's frightening is how sure Powell is that he is defending, rather than transforming, America, even as he entitles a section "What Can Be Done About the Public?" and talks about monitoring all television programs for "Communist" content.

I can't stomach quoting more of Powell. I suggest that you all read as much of it as you can stand. It's the document, more than any other, that has defined the entire political lives of every American under 55.

Greenpeace has posted it here: https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powell-memo-a-corpora...

Once Reagan took power, Lewis Powell’s friends were able to work to transform the American republic from within the government as well as from the private sector. The late, great journalist Robert Parry (famous for his work on the Iran/Contra scandal)

discovered, while he was working in the Reagan library, that the first Reagan Administration was worried about the American public having "Vietnam Syndrome," by which they meant that they didn’t want the American public filling the streets with large, well-organized left-wing movements.
The CIA suggested that they had methods for preventing this eventuality that had worked well in foreign countries, and they were more than happy to try these methods stateside. So a program was instituted to propagandize the American public, a program which had an actual liaison between the CIA and the White House, with an office and a budget line. Again, this was not done in secret; it simply was not noised abroad. The Obama-era law that stated that it was all right for the U.S. government to propagandize its own citizens was simply open justification of something that had been happening for decades already.

In the 1980s, the Reagan team pioneered “perception management” to get Americans to “kick the Vietnam Syndrome,” an ongoing propaganda structure now justifying endless war, wrote Robert Parry in 2014.

To understand how the American people find themselves trapped in today’s Orwellian dystopia of endless warfare against an ever-shifting collection of “evil” enemies, you have to think back to the Vietnam War and the shock to the ruling elite caused by an unprecedented popular uprising against that war.

While on the surface Official Washington pretended that the mass protests didn’t change policy, a panicky reality existed behind the scenes, a recognition that a major investment in domestic propaganda would be needed to ensure that future imperial adventures would have the public’s eager support or at least its confused acquiescence.

This commitment to what the insiders called “perception management” began in earnest with the Reagan administration in the 1980s but it would come to be the accepted practice of all subsequent administrations, including the present one of President Barack Obama.

https://consortiumnews.com/2016/04/13/the-victory-of-perception-manageme...

The reason I have brought up the twin architects of our current situation--the Chamber of Commerce of the 70s and the CIA of the 80s--is that it seems to be becoming increasingly difficult to criticize the subversion of American culture that began fifty years ago. The critic of our recent history, if she expresses her views in public, will invariably encounter one of two responses. One is America has always been this way. If you think there’s been a change in the past fifty years, you’re ignorant, or a fantasist. Believing that America has always been as it is now has the salubrious effect, for the elites, of removing the evidence of their crime. If an object is unchanged, you can’t have damaged it. If the horrors of the current American situation have always been part of the nature of America, then no one, at least no one alive recently, can be held responsible.

The idea that America has always been the same helps the powerful in other ways as well. It’s the dream of every authoritarian to erase history, because history includes times and places where their power was not absolute. Pretending that things have always been the same is the only way to convince people that there’s no outside to the power of the current elites. It inclines people to resignation. If something has never changed, what hope have you of changing it?

The other rejoinder made to critics of our current situation is that inventing America in the first place was an evil act. Therefore, subverting American culture isn’t a problem. If you think damage has been done by twisting American culture using a conservative corporate counterrevolution, you’re probably a racist who thinks slavery and genocide are justifiable.

However, contrary to what many liberals and even leftists believe, Thomas Jefferson’s atrocious embrace of the institution of slavery neither trivializes nor justifies the Patriot Act. The massacre at Wounded Knee does not make the invention of K St inconsequential, nor the control of Congress by Wall St. desirable. Those who think it does seem to be thinking in a brutally simple way, something along the lines of: well, America was always bad anyway; who cares if somebody smashes it to rubble. Hundreds of millions of people suffer, tens of millions die needlessly, and the very life of the planet is threatened, all because of the corporate velvet coup that took over America in the 70s and 80s. Yet these facts vanish into the ether, along with the fact that many tens of millions of those who suffer are black and brown, both inside the United States and out of it. Apparently two wrongs do make a right.

I just remembered the third rejoinder one gets if she brings up the fact that we had a velvet coup and have been living under it for 25-45 years, depending on how you count it.

TRUMP!