Contrary to the established myth that capitalism fosters democracy, the moneyed class has always opposed the broadening of popular rights and has shown itself hostile to any kind of democratic activism and working-class resistance to plutocracy.
Do not think your rulers are not interested in what you think. That is all they are interested in about you. They usually are not terribly concerned about your health, literacy, or well-being. But they are keenly interested in what might be stirring in your mind. The pictures in your head are of real concern to them. They conjure false issues to distract or flatter or frighten the populace, or in some other way win over or confuse people. They do all they can to manipulate the flow of information and disinformation. But they are not always successful. Sometimes reality is too much for them to cloak with their mendacity.
There sometimes are limits to how well officialdom and the corporate press can finesse reality. In both the Vietnam and Iraqi wars, US officials, along with a complicit press, could not totally get past the awful actuality of the war itself, the reality principle that sets limits on propaganda. Despite every manipulation and repeated assurances of impending success, the two wars became increasingly unpopular and politically costly.
Yet, to a large extent, the dominant paradigm has prevailed. The debate around the Vietnam and Iraq wars was limited to those who said that US forces could win and those who said they could not. There have been those of us who urged a different position. For us, the debate should center on the horrors of war and the lies with which war was justified, wars of imperialism fought hypocritically in the name of democracy. For us, regardless of whether these wars were “successful” or not, regardless of whether they could be won (whatever that meant) or not, they were unjust and harmful. In both cases, the military invasion with its unwarranted slaughter of civilian populations was a crime against humanity. In expenditures of treasure and blood, each was a war that violated the interests of both the American people and the people in those other countries. But we were never afforded a platform in the mainstream media to explore those enormous truths.
As with wars, so with domestic issues: the reality principle sometimes sets a limit on propaganda. When Republican leaders said we have the finest medical system in the world, millions of Americans who have no access to that system or who have been victimized by it in one way or another found it hard to believe such claims.
In other words (faithful viewers of Fox News to one side), indoctrination does not operate with perfect effect. In the face of all monopolistic ideological manipulation, people still develop a skepticism toward the official ideology. Reality is a problem for the ruling class. Reality has to be constantly finessed and misrepresented because reality is radical. There is a limit to how many lies people will swallow. Along with institutional stability we have popular ferment and popular innovation. Along with ruling class coercion we have skepticism and sometimes even mass resistance. All social institutions of capitalist society have a dichotomous tension within them. They must sustain the few while appearing to serve the many. And sometimes the many, beset and distracted as they are by so much else, do catch wise and resist. The empire is only as secure as the lies it can sell.
By becoming aware of this, we have a better chance of moving against the tide and resisting the deadening hand of free market plutocracy, a better chance of exposing the dominant imperial paradigm for the suffocating dirty little box that it really is, a better chance to build a real and viable democracy amid a family of nations in a peaceful and sustainable world.