Late last year I began working on a piece marking 25 years since the publication of what I believed to be the most prescient work of the age.
The book had been published in Britain in the spring of 1995 but as February and then March 2020 came and went, we were all rather distracted. For a few months the pandemic was so overwhelming that even normal politics died down — only for it to inflame again, more incendiary and toxic than ever, at the beginning of June.
Here was a revolution backed by almost all billion-dollar businesses and public institutions bar the US presidency, and whose leaders had almost nothing to say about poverty or unemployment.
Their demands were for more diversity and racial equality, already sacred ideas among the cognitive elite, all of it accompanied by bizarre, quasi-religious public declarations of faith.
Christopher Lasch never lived to see his great work published, but since his death from cancer in February 1994, it has developed a cult following among unorthodox sections of Right and Left. The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy warned of a growing cultural and social divide caused by a rapacious free market and the radical politics of the Sixties, one that would lead to extremism and division.
Yet what Lasch saw in 1994, but which has only now reached its apogee in 2020, was how social revolution would be pushed forward by the radical rich and resisted by the rest. “It is not just that the masses have lost interest in revolution,” he wrote: “their political instincts are demonstrably more conservative than those of their self-appointed spokesmen and would-be liberators.”
If this continued, then the top strata of society would become increasingly alienated by their society and country, and turn against it, something that has come to pass with the first corporate-backed revolutionary movement in history.
Tragically, by the time that Lasch came to write his great work, he was dying of leukaemia, and the book was completed only with the help of his daughter Elizabeth. The title was a play on Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses, written in the inter-war period when it seemed reasonable to worry that liberal values might not survive democracy and the rise of the workers. Yet by the end of the century Lasch observed that it was the rich who threatened democracy.
Revolt of the Elites comprises 13 essays on America’s “democratic malaise” — he liked that word — divided into three parts, the “intensification of social divisions” in America, the decline of public discourse and finally the spiritual core of the country’s crisis, headlined “The Dark Night of the Soul”.
Throughout the book runs Lasch’s moral core, his support for the average man, something which inspired his hostility to the dominant ideologies of Left and Right. He strongly opposed economic inequality because it was corrupting; highly unequal societies tend to bring with them graft, extremism, violence and outside interference, eliminating Republican virtue.
Lasch lamented that in America, the top tenth owned more than half the country’s wealth, a warning that now seems as quaint as newspapers in the placid 1950s worried about Teddy Boys. The decline of pensions and savings, and the rise of what we now call zero-contract hours, would lead to the collapse of the middle class and with it the decline of the nation.
Lasch also saw that the eroding of a common culture, values and standards, which was the major legacy of 60s cultural radicalism, ended up creating a gulf between social classes. If there were no common values to hold people together, what was to stop the rich and powerful trampling over the rest of society, cloaking their self-interest in furious self-righteousness?
And so it has come to pass, with the rise of woke capital, an amoral business model in which CEOs make thousands of times more than their lowest earners, all the while distracting attention with support for therapeutic but increasingly extreme politics.
It was Lasch who saw more clearly than anyone that the New Left had a symbiotic relationship with the culture of modern corporate capitalism — emphasising choice, therapy, self-actualisation, narcissism and the rejection of limits, not just physical but financial and moral.
Lasch also saw meritocracy as a sham, or at least “a parody of democracy”, because neither social nor geographic mobility were adequate substitutes for real social justice. “Social mobility does not undermine the influence of elites,” he wrote: “if anything, it helps to solidify their influence by supporting the illusion that it rests solely on merit.
“It merely strengthens the likelihood that elites will exercise power irresponsibly, precisely because they recognise so few obligations to their predecessors or to the communities they profess to lead.
“The new elites are in revolt against ‘Middle America,’ as they imagine it; a nation technologically backward, politically reactionary, repressive in its sexual morality, middle-brow in its tastes, smug and complacent, dull and dowdy. Those who covet membership in the new aristocracy of brains tend to congregate on the coasts, turning their back on the heartland and cultivating the international market in fast-moving money, glamour, fashion, and popular culture.”
Some of the world’s most distinguished doctors and public health scientists have called on governments to stop the lockdowns which have had such a devastating impact on Australia.
A public statement, known as The Great Barrington Declaration after the town in Massachusetts where it was drawn up, was authored by Dr. Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard University, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, professor at Oxford University and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor at Stanford University Medical School.
At the time of writing the Declaration has been signed by more than 150,000 people:
Medical & Public Health Scientists 5 047
Medical Practitioners 9 741
General public 133 980
Aus 2 518
Canada 6 851
Germany 3 111
NZ 363
UK 69 653
USA 45 632
The move has received significant press coverage globally, including from the BBC and The Guardian.
Signatories include mover and shaker within the Australian medical profession Dr Guy Campbell, who has been urging the Australian Medical Association to fulfill its responsibilities and take a public stand against lockdowns.
Australia’s own Professor Ramesh Thakur of the ANU’s Crawford School of Public Policy, also a signatory, has had a profound impact on the debate in Australia, fulfilling his role as a public intellectual by backgrounding journalists across the political spectrum.
Unfortunately federal and state governments have ignored not just Thakur but many of the world’s leading epidemiologists, all of whom warn that lockdowns don’t work.
Instead Australian governments continue to shamelessly sow panic and confusion in the population for their own electoral advantage.
The Great Barrington Declaration in full
As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection.
Coming from both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted our careers to protecting people.
Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.
The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice.
Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.
Fortunately, our understanding of the virus is growing.
We know that vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young. Indeed, for children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than many other harms, including influenza.
As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls. We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity – i.e. the point at which the rate of new infections is stable – and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine. Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.
The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk.
THE GREAT BARRINGTON DECLARATION
Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19. By way of example, nursing homes should use staff with acquired immunity and perform frequent PCR testing of other staff and all visitors. Staff rotation should be minimized. Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home. When possible, they should meet family members outside rather than inside.
A comprehensive and detailed list of measures, including approaches to multi-generational households, can be implemented, and is well within the scope and capability of public health professionals.
Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal.
Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching.
Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open.
Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.
Scott Morrison has perfected the art of media manipulation by briefing a select club of Canberra correspondents at once, rather than leaking to individual media outlets. Callum Foote and Michael West report on the marketing genius of the Prime Minister and the increasingly meek mainstream media.
“On Thursday, March 26, Morrison summoned a handful of senior journalists, one from each mainstream outlet, to meet him in the cabinet room where he would speak frankly about the state of play. He would do this on a handful of occasions during the coming weeks. John Curtin, Labor prime minister from 1941 to 1945, did the same thing during World War II.”
Last week, this select group of journalists – from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, the Liberal Party stalwart Peter Costello-chaired Nine Entertainment, Guardian Australia and the ABC – “splashed” with a front-page story extolling the government’s Gas Plan.
As one, they “broke the news” that the government intended to spend taxpayer money to build a gas-fired power plant and gas pipelines and open up new fields for gas fracking.
“Prime Minister Scott Morrison will on Tuesday promise a “gas-led recovery” from the coronavirus recession by making sure Australian manufacturers can gain access to the energy they need to compete with overseas rivals,” wrote David Crowe, chief political correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. He cited a policy document.
Similar stories appeared in the Australian Financial Review, The Australian and other mainstream media. But there was no public announcement, no policy disclosure; only a cosy briefing to a tight crew of chosen Canberra-based journalists.
Morning TV, Radio and Press Club follow up the newspaper “drops”
Energy Minister Angus Taylor had already been booked for Fran Kelly’s ABC Breakfast radio program. Morning TV and radio took their cue from the blanket coverage in the mainstream media and praised the gas plan too. The agenda had been set.
It was all staged, planned and choreographed to manipulate public opinion en masse.
Fossil fuel executive Andrew Liveris drove home Scott Morrison’s gas gospel at the National Press Club. Liveris is also chairman of the National Covid-19 Commission, the body the Prime Minister set up to advise the government on Australia’s recovery.
And Labor was as silent as a mouse. They are similarly captured by big gas via tight-knit lobbying connections and years of donations.
Yet by the afternoon, the plan was already being discredited. Energy generation and retailing juggernaut AGL said the new gas plant was not needed. So, too, did energy markets operator AEMO. A former BP president even dubbed it an “industry rescue package”.
Journalists provide an essential role in the integrity of democracy and when their work is compromised, we all suffer. Independent Australia.
Much of the media promptly backflipped, with the notable exception of fossil fuel cheerleaders in Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian. Yet the damage was done. The corporate media and a gun-shy ABC had run the press campaign for the government, deceiving millions of Australians.
It was just the latest blatant example of media capture, what the notorious Queensland premier of yore, Joh Bjelke-Petersen used to describe as “feeding the chooks”.
The “Drops” Game
Cabinet ministers have always leaked to the media in return for favourable coverage. During the tenure of Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd, the joke around newsrooms was that senior Fairfax correspondent Peter Hartcher was so close to Rudd that senior ministers would wake up in the morning to see policy announced in the Sydney Morning Herald before Rudd had told his most senior ministers.
The difference now, under the shrewd media management of Scott Morrison, is that the office of Prime Minister and Cabinet no longer “drops” its press releases to a single journalist or outlet. “The drop” is made to a group of senior journalists from a group of outlets.https://www.youtube.com/embed/xihRUBm_3i4?start=1&feature=oembed
Where previously journalists from rival media would bring a critical eye when following up a story they had missed, now all major media outlets run the same story at the same time.
It is how the Government ensures favourable press coverage. If a journalist refuses to play ball, they face being excluded from special briefings and future drops. How would these journalists explain to their editors why they missed the story?
As veteran and respected ABC journalist Quentin Dempster notes:
“In one sense I understand what has happened if the confidential briefing of selected journalists in Canberra is going on. But mindful editors can implement counter measures … by assigning other journalists to follow leads and, where necessary, kick the government in the accountability shins.
“Rupert Murdoch, of course, rejects all this ethics crap. The record shows the Murdoch culture cuts straight to the chase by effectively blackmailing or intimidating governments and their spin doctors: ‘give us the first drop on government news or a stream of bad headlines can be expected to follow.’ It’s worked a treat for News Corp in Australia for years.”
One Canberra correspondent who declined to be identified told Michael West Media the financial distress in mainstream media had flow-on effects in newsrooms – fewer journalists and lower pay – which meant less time spent on stories and less experienced journalists writing about government.
It is a sentiment echoed by veteran investigative journalist Wendy Bacon, who said the lack of resourcing and expertise had led to a deterioration in culture.
“Younger journalists have not been brought up in a culture where you stand up for your story. They are scared for their jobs. If you think you might be out the door, you take fewer risks. If you don’t like the story angle (put forward by a government source or a newspaper editor), are you willing to put your job on the line?”
Senior independent journalists such as Crikey’s Bernard Keane and Michael Pascoe at The New Daily have been increasingly scathing of the mainstream media’s sheep like coverage.
Says Pascoe: “Along with ‘gossip’, ‘family matters’, ‘Canberra bubble’, ‘I just reject the premise of your question’, ‘I’ve dealt with that’ and ‘that’s your view’, we now have ‘I think we’re going to stay with the health of Victorians today’ as a means of running away from a scandal.”
“There is a world of difference between Xi Jinping’s media ‘management’ and Scott Morrison’s, but they stem from the same desire: to impose the government’s view on mass communications, to dominate the news cycle and to avoid embarrassing issues.”
Notable drops
Key parts of announcements are handed out the day before, giving the government two bites of the cherry. It gains positive headlines in the morning newspapers, TV and radio – and then gets another run in the evening news after a speech or a policy announcement as further details emerge.
The Government has handpicked senior journalists and editors to publish Morrison’s drops. The usual process is that they all publish the contents of his media releases, or briefings, at 10.30pm or thereabouts, well before details are publicly announced.
For example, Morrison announced the gas-fired recovery on Tuesday September 15. Yet the night before, from around about 10.30pm, The Guardian, The SMH, The Australian, The AFR and The Conversation all ran the announcement, ready to be picked up by the morning breakfast and news programs.
Then there was the fantastic vaccine deal that turned out to be just a letter of intent. The same media groups all ran the good word at 10:30pm on August 19, before realising the “deal” was not what it was cracked up to be the next morning. Pharma company Astra-Zeneca clarified there was no deal, only a letter, and assorted scientists cautioned about the perils of claiming there was a vaccine when there was not yet a vaccine.
As for Morrison’s push for tougher cyber laws and a side-eye at China, this was loyally run the night before by The Conversation, the AFR, SMH and The New Daily.
The servility of the mainstream media has coincided with the rise in government payments to non-government organisations such as The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI, which echoes the government’s rhetoric on China) and business lobbies such as AI Group, which receive financial benefits from the government and espouses its economic agendas in the press.
Another mainstream media plant was the new Closing the Gap initiative. The Australian, The Conversation, the Financial Review, the ABC and The New Daily ran the Government’s line about the failure of the scheme while failing to mention Tony Abbott had cut $500 million from Kevin Rudd’s original scheme.
The list of drops is extensive, weekly, often daily, too extensive to record in this space. From coronavirus policy to JobKeeper, Defence and economic narratives, it has been an incredibly successful strategy for the man dubbed #scottyfrommarketing on social media. And the loyalty of the chosen outlets seems assured.
Closing the Gap: how a captive media failed to question Scott Morrison on defunding
In return, the government has put pressure on ACCC competition tsar Rod Sims to compel Google and Facebook to pay the mainstream media for its content, in effect propping up their foundering business models.
Conspicuously missing in action
Toeing the government’s line on media agendas does not just involve being handed the press release one day early, it also involves self-censorship, avoiding stories which are problematic for government, or at least underplaying them.
There are myriad examples. Two recent instances involve stories published here and in John Menadue’s independent policy journal Pearls & Irritations.
Coalition’s Banana Republic move: protecting lazy locals in battle with Google, Facebook
Michael West Media recently published details from Freedom of Information requests gathered by Senator Rex Patrick which showed that the water at the heart of Angus Taylor’s Watergate scandal was valued by Colliers International at $40 million rather than the $80 million that Barnaby Joyce, as water envoy and on behalf of taxpayers, paid by Taylor’s former company EAA.
Not only did this story fail to appear in the mainstream media, it was first offered by the investigative reporter to the SMH, Guardian Australia and the ABC, which all declined to run it. The revelation a few days later that similar water licences to those valued at $40 million were valued at $0 just a few years earlier was seemingly again not newsworthy.
That the Attorney-General, the highest law maker in the land, broke the law over a three–year period should also feature as prominent news, but Christian Porter’s failure to table in parliament secretive National Security Information orders only appeared in Pearls & Irritations and Michael West Media.
Feature Image by Alex Anstey.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Callum Foote
Callum Foote is the Revolving Doors editor for Australia’s leading investigative news site Michael West Media, exposing the links between the highest level of business and government. These links provide well-resourced private interests with significant influence over Australia’s policy making process. Callum has studied the impact of corporate influence over policy decisions and the impact this has for popular interests. He believes that the more awareness this phenomenon receives the more accountable our representatives will be.
