The View From 1776

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In Congress’s upcoming committee investigations of the Katrina disaster in New Orleans, it will be a considerable surprise if a balanced and fair assessment is delivered.  The reason is simple:  the “mainstream” media have already imprinted the public “mind” with the superficial opinion that FEMA bears sole responsibility for stranded flood victims, as well as for the looting and murders that ensued from Hurricane Katrina. 

Freedom of the press is all but worshipped as a protector of our Constitutional liberties, as indeed it was in 1776, when there were many thousands of local newspapers, and no national media of any kind.  In those days, while newspapers might have great influence on public opinion in their local areas, there was no way for the press to combine for the purpose of impressing, nationwide, an official party line upon public opinion.

But, when roughly 70 percent of the media’s reporters, editors, TV commentators, along with Hollywood screenwriters, actors, directors, and producers, are self-identified liberal-socialists, the highly consolidated mass media become little more than a unified propaganda organ for the promotion of socialism.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s description in “Democracy in America” of conditions in the early 1830s illustrates the great transformation in the nature of our media.  He wrote, in Chapter 11, Liberty Of The Press In The United States:

“It has been demonstrated by observation, and discovered by the sure instinct even of the pettiest despots, that the influence of a power is increased in proportion as its direction is centralized. In France the press combines a twofold centralization; almost all its power is centered in the same spot and, so to speak, in the same hands, for its organs are far from numerous. The influence upon a skeptical nation of a public press thus constituted must be almost unbounded. It is an enemy with whom a government may sign an occasional truce, but which it is difficult to resist for any length of time.

“Neither of these kinds of centralization exists in America. The United States has no metropolis; the intelligence and the power of the people are disseminated through all the parts of this vast country, and instead of radiating from a common point they cross each other in every direction; the Americans have nowhere established any central direction of opinion, any more than of the conduct of affairs. This difference arises from local circumstances and not from human power; but it is owing to the laws of the Union that there are no licenses to be granted to printers, no securities demanded from editors, as in France, and no stamp duty, as in France and England. The consequence is that nothing is easier than to set up a newspaper, as a small number of subscribers suffices to defray the expenses.

“Hence the number of periodical and semi-periodical publications in the United States is almost incredibly large. The most enlightened Americans attribute the little influence of the press to this excessive dissemination of its power; and it is an axiom of political science in that country that the only way to neutralize the effect of the public journals is to multiply their number. I cannot see how a truth which is so self-evident should not already have been more generally admitted in Europe.

“I can see why the persons who hope to bring about revolutions by means of the press should be desirous of confining it to a few powerful organs, but it is inconceivable that the official partisans of the existing state of things and the natural supporters of the laws should attempt to diminish the influence of the press by concentrating its power. The governments of Europe seem to treat the press with the courtesy which the knights of old showed to their opponents; having found from their own experience that centralization is a powerful weapon, they have furnished their enemies with it in order doubtless to have more glory for overcoming them.

“In America there is scarcely a hamlet that has not its newspaper. It may readily be imagined that neither discipline nor unity of action can be established among so many combatants, and each one consequently fights under his own standard. All the political journals of the United States are, indeed, arrayed on the side of the administration or against it; but they attack and defend it in a thousand different ways. They cannot form those great currents of opinion which sweep away the strongest dikes.....

“The personal opinions of the editors have no weight in the eyes of the public. What they seek in a newspaper is a knowledge of facts, and it is only by altering or distorting those facts that a journalist can contribute to the support of his own views.”

As we have witnessed in a continuing rash of disclosures, from the New York Times to Dan Rather, “...it is only by altering or distorting those facts that a journalist can contribute to the support of his own views.”

Understanding “those great currents of opinion which sweep away the strongest dikes” requires us to look briefly at the French Revolution itself, a unique event in world history.  It was the first political movement created entirely by propaganda for the purpose of destroying the existing foundation of political and social order.  It was, in addition, the first political revolution incited by the intellectuals.

Twenty years after the appearance of “Democracy in America,” Tocqueville in 1856 published “The Old Regime and the French Revolution.” Part 3, Chapter One, of that work is subtitled, “How towards the middle of the eighteenth century men of letters took the lead in politics and the consequences of this new development.”

He wrote: “[The French intellectuals] were keenly interested in all that concerned the government of nations; this, one might almost say, was an obsession with them.  Questions such as the origin of human society, its earliest forms, the original rights of citizens and of authority, the “natural” and the “artificial” relations between men, of the legitimacy of custom, and even the conception of law – all these bulked large in the literature of the day.  As a result of this incessant probing into the bases of the society in which lived, they were led to to examine its structure in detail and to criticize its general plan....This kind of abstract, literary politics found its way, in varying proportions, into all the writings of the day....this was the belief that what was wanted was to replace the complex of traditional customs governing the social order of the day by simple, elementary rules derived from the exercise of human reason and natural law....it seemed as if the choice lay between meekly accepting everything or destroying the whole system.”

Parenthetically, we may note that this is precisely the nature of anti-American education and of the “mainstream” media today.  Present-day liberals share the 18th century French intellectuals’ belief that our Judeo-Christian heritage is the source of society’s ills and are firmly convinced that only an atheistic, secular, and materialistic socialist society can create true freedom.  That conception of freedom is, to an important degree, not 1776’s freedom from arbitrary power of the political state, but hedonistic license to ignore 8,000 years of moral tradition against sexual promiscuity, marital infidelity, abortion, and abusive use of drugs and alcohol.

Parenthetically, it is also to be noted that in present-day liberal-socialism “governing the social order of the day by simple, elementary rules derived from the exercise of human reason and natural law” removes, not only all the constraints of morality, but along with them, the basis of the traditional rights of Englishmen upon which American colonists relied in the Declaration of Independence.

Tocqueville continued: “In England writers on the theory of government and those who actually governed co-operated with each other, the former setting forth their new theories, the later amending or circumscribing these in the light of practical experience.  In France, however, ......one group shaped the course of public affairs, the other of public opinion.... there was gradually built up in men’s minds an imaginary ideal society in which all was simple, uniform, coherent, equitable, and rational in the full sense of the term.”

Parenthetically, yet again, shaping public opinion is the role of Hollywood, the TV networks, PBS, NPR, and reporters and editorialists of the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and other bastions of liberal-socialism.  Public opinion to be created is the idea that for every identifiable lack of perfection in human daily life there must exist a solution in the form of new Federal regulations or new Federal spending programs.  It is the conception that anyone who questions the socialistic proposition that only government can improve people’s lives is ipso facto an enemy of humanity.

Thus, as we approach the Congressional hearings on disaster relief in the aftermath of Katrina, the public “mind” already is conditioned to assume that there is a simple answer to the problems and that it must lie in eradicating the pitiful, vestigial, 1787 principles of Constitutional sharing of powers among the state, local, and Federal governments.

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