The One Percent Count On Us Fighting Each Other
Ruling classes around the world have successfully used the divide and conquer strategy to retain national political and economic power down through history. By manipulating peoples’ fears, pride, insecurities, aspirations and identity they manage to pit groups against each other based upon their different class, race, gender, sexual identity, age, ethnicity, religion and nationality. The instigation of conflict between groups keeps the focus of the angry participants off of their manipulators by misdirection. The peoples’ righteous grievances, often grounded in economic insecurity, are blamed on a proxy group or groups through this strategy, rather than on the real cause of their grief, the capitalist drive for profit and power through the ruthless exploitation of people and the environment.
Clever false narratives aimed at planting the seeds of blame and prejudice are widely promoted via cooperative media and entertainment outlets and become a pervasive, though artificial, part of the culture. Once established they tend to become self-perpetuating, generation after generation and are extremely difficult to root out by those who see through the lies and deception. Since the 1% owns the media here in the US, voices critical of them are given very little exposure.
There is another realm, that is rarely discussed, in which the divide and conquer scheme is played out in that context. It is within the increasing polarization between the major American political parties, the Democrats and Republicans. This arena is a relative newcomer to the arsenal of the rulers. Some brief background. Used to be there was much greater civility between the Parties and their followers. But then in 1987 the FCC discarded the “Fairness Doctrine” which—required the holders of broadcast licenses both to present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was — in the Commission's view — honest, equitable, and balanced. (Wikipedia)
The abandonment of the Fairness Doctrine permitted radio and television news to disregard “controversial issues of public importance” and they wasted no time doing so. They did this by diluting news and issues coverage by downsizing and shuttering newsrooms; placing subsidized independent network News Divisions under the network’s profit seeking Entertainment Divisions and by forsaking Investigative journalism.
Since broadcasters no longer needed to be “honest, equitable, and balanced”, a multitude of right wing AM radio stations sprung up overnight and cable networks used this regulatory freedom to create partisan channels such as Fox News and MSNBC. None of these could have existed while the Fairness Doctrine was in force. Now, listeners and viewers were exposed 24/7 to highly partisan outrage talk, the themes of which varied only slightly, giving the message a healthy dose of emotion and memory setting repetition.
For various reasons not pertinent to this discussion right wing talk radio has had little competition from the left, and so has enjoyed a relatively clear field to promulgate right wing ideology and propaganda essentially unchallenged by countering material from the political left.
The net effect of decades of unregulated, unmoderated, basically one-sided political outrage speech has been to inflame differences between Democrats and Republicans at all levels. Good bye Mr. Nice Guy! The gloves were off. Any actual or pretense of understanding, cooperation and collaboration across the aisle was gone. The election of Barack Obama in 2008 exacerbated the divide by adding the element of racism to the mix.
Meanwhile, in the wings the one percenters cheer the widening partisan gap. It serves them well in Congress because the Republicans were emboldened to obstruct Democratic initiatives across the board, benefitting the bottom line of corporations and the wealthy. Moreover, a public now seriously divided along partisan lines hands the rulers yet another split that they could exploit to keep the attention off of themselves.
Divide and conquer is not a secret strategy, yet too few Americans recognize that they play into it every day. Among the many tasks of progressive activists is to point out to people that we all have far more in common than we realize. And that we should bond around our common struggles and work together to remove those that would keep us down.
