Carolina QuotesIn the 20th century, egalitarianism has been used principally as the political formula or ideological rationalization by which one, emerging elite has sought to displace from political, economic, and culture power another elite, and in not only rationalizing but also disguising the dominance of the new elite… Egalitarianism played a central role in the progressivist ideological challenge, and the main form it assumed in the early 20th century was that of “environmentalism” – not in the contemporary sense of concern for ecology but in the sense that human beings are perceived as the products of their social and historical environment rather than of their innate mental and physical natures. Indeed, the ideological function of progressivism is de-legitimizing bourgeois society was accomplished by its identification of the society itself as the “environment” to be altered through social management.
Samuel T. Francis Connected to the Carolinas
Source
No citation is recorded for this quotation.
- work
- Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism (1994)
- year
- 1994
no citation recorded
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“In the 20th century, egalitarianism has been used principall…” Samuel T. Francis. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-364D44908E. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/364d44908e
More from Samuel T. Francis
It is largely irrelevant whether the propertied elite acquires managerial skills, takes an active part in managing corporate enterprise, or has assimilated non-propertied elite manager into its own class and interests. What Mills and his disciple, William G. Domhoff and their school do not sufficiently perceive or appreciate thoroughly is that the interest of the propertied elite have changed substantially with the revolution of mass and scale. The propertied elite or “grand bourgeosie” of the bourgeois order may not have changed significantly in family composition, and certainly it retain wealth and status. Its economic interests, however, have changed from being vested in the hard property of privately owned and operated entrepreneurial firms, usually comparatively small in scale, to being intertwined with and dependent upon the de-materialized property of publicly owned, state-integrated, managerially operated mass corporations.
Not only the media of mass communication, one of the most important instruments by which the managerial elite disciplines and control the mass population, but also all other mass organizations that disseminate, restrict, or invent information, ideas and values advertising, publishing, journalism, film and broadcasting, entertainment, religion, education, and institutions for research and development. Indeed, the mass organizations of culture and communication, which generally lack the coercive disciplines of the mass corporation and the mass state, are able to provide disciplines and control for the mass population primarily through their use of the devices and techniques of mass communication. All the mass cultural organizations, then, function as part of the media of mass communication, and they constitute a necessary element in the power base of the managerial elite.
If we could somehow take out the ideology, change the minds of those who control the state, and convert them into paleo-conservatives, the state apparatus itself would be neutral. What really animates its drive toward a totalitarian conquest and reconfiguration of society and the human mind itself comes from the ideology that the masters of the managerial state have adopted, a force that is entirely extraneous and largely accidental to the structure by which they exercise power.