Another article from Lucy Hamilton on John Menadue’s ‘Pearls & Irritations’ titled ‘Think tanks’ call for ‘freedom’ really promises authoritarianism’ (13 Nov. ‘21); backgrounded by media narratives round Covid19 with demands for, using the Americanism, (Kochian) ‘freedom & liberty’ from regulation and government, with much authoritarianism.
Very complex ecosystem of relationships and dynamics, hence, understanding almost requires an ever evolving 3D helix to show the dynamics, interwoven relationships, ideology, etc. over time, as it’s a long game that transcends politics, parties and electoral cycles, especially the Anglosphere of Australia, UK and US, plus less developed democracies.
‘Ideological think tanks campaigning for ‘freedom’ are really pushing us further into a competitive authoritarianism regime.’ and ‘public choice theory’….
Demographic influence of social-Darwinism or eugenics of Galton and concerns about humanity of Malthus, equates with authoritarianism, while ‘freedom’ fits with Adam ‘invisible hand’ (of God) Smith, later Hayek, Friedman et al. morphing into Chicago School of Buchanan’s ‘public choice theory’ i.e. racial Kochonomics*; survival of the fittest, protecting themselves from (disruption by) the lower orders, presented as freedom of choice but needing authoritarianism to ensure the right choices are made.
*According to Bethany Moreton in a review of Nancy MacLean’s ‘Democracy in Chains’, titled ‘Kochonomics: The Racist Roots of Public Choice Theory:
‘Virginia’s nationally prominent stand against desegregation and voting rights was the inescapable context of public choice theory.’
A disturbing example was Chile, post ‘70s coup and during the Pinochet regime, had the required military backed autocracy, domestic security services and social class division for their Chicago School experiment. However, this experiment suggests that radical right libertarian economics requires autocracy, without constraints i.e. no society, no community, no unions, no free press, control by security services, no empowered middle class, low regulation, low taxes and small government, to function?
Soft authoritarianism, ageing electorates, eugenics, environment and ‘Big Oil’
Galton’s eugenics and Malthusian Population control movement reemerged after the embarrassment of pre and WWII experiments with eugenics and the Nazis; strategic in making population and immigration an environmental ‘hygiene issue’ to both deflect from fossil fuels and use as a dog whistle (to channel eugenics sentiments).
Key people in ZPG Zero Population Growth were falsely described as ‘progressive’ i.e. Tanton and Ehrlich (plus Watson of SeaShepherd fame); all had visited Australia from the early ‘90s, or before, to develop an Australian version of ZPG, post white Australia. This was well before population was spiked by the (2006 UNPD defined) NOM Net Overseas Migration temporary churn over inflation (with below replacement fertility in the permanent population), climate science pointing to carbon emissions’ negative impact on the environment and post PM Howard, carbon mitigation policies being denigrated and voted down.
How does nativism fit into authoritarian yet supposedly libertarain socioeconomic practice?
ZPG in Australia morphed into SPA Sustainable Population Australia. In addition to deflecting from mooted fossil fuels and carbon regulations or constraints by accessing naive or complicit media in platforming immigration, NOM and population growth as environmental issues of our time…..
‘The fight against the masses …. allowing the worker the freedom to associate was dangerous.’
Again a feature of the eugenics movement informing radical right libertarian socio-economic policies to oppose an equitable electoral franchise, unions, workers’ rights, welfare, higher education and empower citizens; achieved by clever agitprop under various guises in legacy media by influencers and commentators using memes, ‘sciency’ PR, local vs. immigrant workers, and general disruption of social narratives.
We have observed often in Australia, with declining union membership, the ongoing demands for constraints on unions, including proxies such as union or industry superannuation funds.
Products of PR Meme factories, repackaging old theories, tropes and agitprop
It’s been alleged that in Delaware there exists a meme factory that is an assembly line of memes designed for traction in both legacy and social media. If not to help the libertarian radical right libertarians, but used by fringe media, far right, white nativists and conspiracists to oppose progress and importantly, disrupt joined up narratives.
The following memes to be opposed would be familiar to all in the Anglosphere i.e. PC political correctness, empowerment, CRT critical race theory, BLM black lives matter, women, minorities, LGBT, curricula, education, learning, assessments, science and research, especially universities and higher education.
Autocracy and censorship in the public sphere round media, informing, secrecy and communicating
Australia has witnessed many of its ‘top people’ in an egalitarian society use their power for self protection whether LNP Ministers, MPs, business or even some journalists, to shut down or nobble reporting, discussion and analysis.
The popular tools to threaten investigative journalists, civilians, whistleblowers, lawyers, innocent bystanders etc. are: claiming freedom of speech to denigrate, spiking articles, journalists losing jobs, removing article comment functions, but more recently, wanton use of authoritarian power via defamation laws for vexatious suits i.e. SLAPPs, according to The Conversation in ‘Slapps: the rise of lawsuits targeting investigative journalists’
(October 27, 2021):
‘A type of legal action is increasingly being used by powerful people to shut down criticism from activists, academics, whistleblowers, and journalists. This is known as a strategic lawsuit against public participation, or Slapp’
Electoral campaigning, astroturfing, imported tactics and ideology
The US Koch related State Policy Network is another web of think tanks including the ‘bill mill’ ALEC American Legislative Exchange Council which externally lobbies mostly GOP Reps who are insiders, to vote for or oppose specific bills e.g. oppose environmental regulation of fossil fuels.
However, one would argue that the now nominally agrarian based National Party in the Australian LNP Liberal National Party coalition government, acts like ALEC, but from inside the coalition. This is to oppose Liberal and National moderates following climate science and demanding more done for achieving Net Zero; seemingly informed by think tanks.
More recently ALEC’s and the Atlas Network’s influence emerged to promote Voter ID under the guise of solving a non-existent problem, but in fact to suppress votes. This was introduced by news media into both UK and Australian political narratives, simultaneously; unlikely to have any short term impact, but likely to be mooted again. At minimum it acts as a distraction to solve a non-existent electoral issue, but one day may come to fruition and follow the US GOP tactic of voter suppression; threatened by emerging younger working age demographics, more diversity, plus voters more educated and empowered, hence, unlikely to vote conservative.
White Australia policy, refugees, immigration, NOM, population and borders as a security issue for autocratic solutions or a ‘Trumpian but ‘virtual wall’
Something achieved in post white Australia is having rhetoric or PR aka the GOP, policies and proxies to deliver similar agitprop, satisfy sentiments of many ageing Anglo-Celtic, European heritage Australians, dog whistling and appear to be ‘not racist’. Accordingly, we had fossil fuel supported ZPG imported from the US, with liaison of deceased racist John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton with Paul ‘Population Bomb’ Ehrlich, later becoming SPA Sustainable Population Australia. It’s role has been to focus upon the ‘virtual wall’ aka incoming NOM then conflating with permanent migration, then spruiking alarm about population growth as an environmental ‘hygiene’ issue.
The eugenics based focus upon humanity avoids scrutiny of fossil fuels and needs for environmental etc. regulation, by using (non science/data literate) media to inform social narratives or word of mouth; the latter is the most powerful form of messaging and reinforcement because it’s trusted (like organic search engine results vs. paid ads).
SPA access media under the guise of ‘environment’ and patrons too, who include former NSW Labor Premier & Federal Senator Bob Carr, Tim Flannery and Dr. Katherin Betts who has collaborated with ‘Australia’s best demographer’ Dr. Bob Birrell at APRI Australian Population Research Institute. Both of the latter contributed to John Tanton’s journal TSCP The Social Contract Press which is part of what is known as the Tanton Network, described by SPLC Southern Poverty Law Center in John Tanton’s Network as:
‘The organized anti-immigration “movement” is almost entirely the handiwork of one man, Michigan activist John H. Tanton.’
Not only have there been allegations of the Tanton Network sharing donors and networks with the Koch’s SPN, related to Tanton Network and SPA, former Australian Labor MHR Kelvin Thomson attended an event in the US by PFIR Progressive for Immigration Reform. PFIR is part of the Tanton Network. Described by ADL Anti-Defamation League in 2012 in ‘Progressives for Immigration Reform Conference Attracts Major Anti-Immigrant Figures’:
‘Despite claims by Progressives for Immigration Reform (PFIR) to be a “progressive” and “environmental” organization, the appearance of several anti-immigrant activists at PFIR’s third annual conference in Washington, DC, earlier this month, further confirms that the group is firmly entrenched in the anti-immigrant movement.’
Thomson’s participation is cited here in 2011 on Philip Cafaro’s website, who is also a key member of Tanton’s Network and presented:
‘Progressives for Immigration Reform panel discussion with Vernon Briggs, Ben Zuckerman and Kelvin Thomson on US Population and the National Environmental Protection Act. October 4, 2011.’
One hopes Thomson realises that PFIR is more about astroturfing and white ‘patriots for immigration restrictions’, i.e. not a progressive environmental organisation, nor is the Tanton Network, which nobbles the centre and left to support the far or alt right.
Australia has become embarrassing with its obstructive policies and behaviour, recently highlighted with COP26 and few concrete measures for the LNP government’s ‘Net Zero’ policies; too easy for ‘owned’ governments in catering to donors and radical right libertarain ideology.
Further Reading:
Lucy Hamilton’s article follows, as do related blogs posts:
Think tanks’ call for ‘freedom’ really promises authoritarianism
Climate Confusion, Astroturfing, Pseudo-Science, Population Movement and Radical Right Libertarians
Past Literature & Ideas on Roots of Radical Right, Nativism & the Great Replacement Today
Eco-System of Libertarian Think Tanks and White Nativism in the Anglosphere
Anglosphere Triangle – Immigration – Environment – Population Growth – Radical Right Libertarians
Lobby Groups, Policy, Government and Influence
Dumbing Down and Gaming of Anglosphere Media, Science, Society and Democracy
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From Arena Australia:
‘NEOLIBERALISM, THE DELUGE AND THE LOGIC OF GOVERNMENT INACTION
PAUL GARDNER
24 MAR 2022
There is an obscure but very real connection between a Queenslander being ferried by a neighbour in a tinny from their inundated home in the recent floods and a small gathering of economists and others in a Swiss Village in 1947. The connection between them provides a logical, if ethically unjustifiable explanation for the reasons why the flood victims, and before them the victims of last season’s bushfires, have largely been abandoned by the Liberal and National Parties, and left very much to ‘get on with it’ by themselves.
The meeting in April 1947, held at the Hotel Du Parc in the Swiss Village of Mont Pelerin, marked the inauguration of a global economic system that has dominated the political ideology of mainstream political parties across the world since the early 1980s Economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, began to devise the blueprint for what has since been termed neoliberalism. Unlike its forerunner, classical liberalism, the neoliberal agenda has included a role for a strong state as enforcer of the ‘freedom’ of the marketplace.
The Mount Pelerin Society (MPS) which has met annually since 1947 has influenced right-wing think tanks in numerous countries for at least seven and half decades. The online fact-finding organisation DeSmog, which counters climate change misinformation, estimates that MPS members are also affiliated with over 100 right-wing organisations around the world. These organisations include the Cato Institute, the Hoover Institution, and the Heritage Foundation in the United States; the Adam Smith Institute in Britain, and the Institute for Public Affairs in Australia. For two years from 2006, Greg Lyndsey, founder of another Australian neoliberal think tank, the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), was also MPS president. The sole purpose of these think tanks has been to implement economic, social, cultural and political change through their alignment with right-wing political parties. Far from being independent, CIS has hosted John Howard, Tony Abbott and Milton Friedman himself, as well as British Conservative politicians. The legacy of the MPS is a lineage of right-wing think tanks allied to right-wing governments across the globe, including the current Australian government.
Hayek and Friedman’s economic plan was realised in the dictatorship of General Pinochet in Chile and the governments of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Living in Britain throughout the 1980s and 1990s was to experience not only profound political and economic shifts but, more deeply perhaps, the social and cultural transformation of the moral fabric of the nation. Thatcher adeptly translated Hayek and Friedman’s thinking into language everyone could grasp, presented in nifty sound bites. Common among them were catchphrases like ‘you cannot spend what you do not have’, a resounding truism that working-class people understood as the reality of their lived experience of managing tight domestic budgets to avoid falling into debt….’
https://arena.org.au/neoliberalism-the-deluge-and-the-logic-of-government-inaction/
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From The Atlantic:
The Architect of the Radical Right. How the Nobel Prize–winning economist James M. Buchanan shaped today’s anti-government politics
By Sam Tanenhaus
If you read the same newspapers and watch the same cable shows I do, you can be forgiven for not knowing that the most populous region in America, by far, is the South. Nearly four in 10 Americans live there, roughly 122 million people, by the latest official estimate. And the number is climbing. For that reason alone, the South deserves more attention than it seems to be getting in political discussion today.
But there is another reason: The South is the cradle of modern conservatism. This, too, may come as a surprise, so entrenched is the origin myth of the far-westerners Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan as leaders of a Sun Belt realignment and forerunners of today’s polarizing GOP. But each of those politicians had his own “southern strategy,” playing to white backlash against the civil-rights revolution—“hunting where the ducks are,” as Goldwater explained—though it was encrypted in the states’-rights ideology that has been vital to southern politics since the days of John C. Calhoun.
Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains is part of a new wave of historiography that has been examining the southern roots of modern conservatism. That lineage features episodes like the third-party presidential ticket headed by the Virginian T. Coleman Andrews in 1956, with its double-barreled attack on the Brown v. Board of Education decision and the federal income tax. Further back lies the breakaway Dixiecrat candidacy of the South Carolinian Strom Thurmond in 1948, after the Democratic Party added a civil-rights plank to its platform. Earlier still was the quixotic insurrection in 1936 led by Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge, the front man for something called the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution. A Dixie offshoot of the more visible Liberty League, it shared that group’s conviction that “an ever spreading governmental bureaucracy” spelled “the end of democracy.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/the-architect-of-the-radical-right/528672/
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