Just Because You're Paranoid Doesn't Mean They Aren't Out To Get You

Ever since I read The Rich and the Super Rich: A Study in the Power of Money (1968) in the 1970s, I keep wanting to discuss it in various forums and chat rooms, but I'm always dismissed as a paranoid nut. The problem is that Lundberg's thesis is played out in plain view in daily life. It's encapsulated in the quote in the background of the photo at right (click on the image for a larger copy).

His thesis is that America is dominated by a clique of 60 highly influential families -- let's stop right there. Critiques of his America's 60 Families (1937) complain that he never lists the 60 families he's talking about. This misunderstands Lundberg. He's a rhetorician, not a sociologist. His writing is brilliantly outrageous hyperbole -- the American people he characterizes as sansculottes and descamisados, which of course isn't literally true at all; many wear designer clothes, even the poor. He's speaking of their relative political power, which in recent days sounds like he may have a point.

So he says in the quote that 60 families have concentrated power, while another 90 of slightly lesser standing are influenced by them and coordinate with them. As of 1937, he meant the Rockefellers and Harrimans certainly at the top of a theoretical list. As of 1968, that could be revised to include the Kennedys somewhere in the 60 or 90, with the Harrimans perhaps sliding downward, but who's going to be a bean counter here? I think Lundberg would agree that heirs will die witthout issue, or their progeny will dissipate, and others -- Gates, Buffett, Jobs -- will rise to take their place.

Let's just look at what's happening in this disputed election cycle, which simply removes the pretense behind what's been going on for the past five years. Lundberg refers to a "de facto government, absolutist and plutocratic in its lineaments". While the Graham, Chandler, and other prominent families have left the print journalism business due to changes in economics, they've been replaced by new big tech moguls who are just as powerful and control, or attempt to control, the national dialogue just as firmly. The primary-source media outlets -- the corporate or mainstream media -- publish a received narrative, while the social media platforms suppress published opinions that contradict the corporate narrative as "misinformation" or "unverified".

But beyond that, although the Google/Alphabet/YouTube empire, the Zuckerberg/Facebook empire, and the Dorsey/Twitter empire are separate, owned and governed by different families (in whatever postmodern sense of the word this implies), they act with remarkable coordination. If one YouTube commentator becomes sufficiently irritating, YouTube will deplatform him, but Facebook and Twitter will often follow suit within hours or days.

How is this decided? We simply have no clear idea. How, for that matter, did a group of swing states apparently decide as a body simultaneously to stop counting votes early in the morning of this past November 4, apparently to use the pause to "find" additional Democat ballots? Short of some eventual mid-level whistleblower or guilty plea, we'll nver know. But it's hard to avoid the reasonable conclusion that some such coordination must take place.

This is separate from the idea of Illuminati, Bilderbergs, or lizard people with a single overarching agenda for running the planet. If a bunch of self-deluding rich guys get together in Davos, they're living out a fantasy, not making effective decisions. The actual decisions -- what the polls are supposed to say, who's supposed to be the nominee, who'll be the one to whisper in the senile regent's ear -- are made in some other way, by people we may or may not know.

The other side of the coin is that these people are not omnipotent. Sometimes they seem to develop wise policy, like the Cold War containment strategy that avoided nuclear confrontation. Otherr times, they bungle, and things happen that aren't supposed to. This is the Jason Bourne paradigm, or for that matter the Donald Trump phenomenon.

I don't know if Lundberg ever envisioned a practical plan for resolving the dilemma. At the time he wrote, the "60 families" were at a peak of power. Now, their equivalents are having to struggle more visibly, and we're in uncharted territory. Having to de-platform YouTubers or suspend Twitter accounts is messy and often counterproductive. It's a sign of slipping confidence.

"Jeffrey Hart, Conservative Stalwart Who Denounced Modern-Day GOP"

This was the title of Buckley associate Jeffrey Hart's obituary in the Washington Post in early 2019. Dartmouth classmates contacted me as soon as the news broke. I think it's fair to say that for the time he taught there, from the early 1960s to 1995, Hart in many ways was Dartmouth. By the time of his retirement, his lectures had to be held in the largest auditorium facilities available.

I was always more ambivalent. I went to graduate school in English at the University of Southern California, where partly under Hart's influence, I specialized in eighteenth century. But early in my time there, the professors who became my mentors took me aside. They'd been looking at my Dartmouth transcripts and had seen all the courses I'd taken from Hart. They explained to me in not quite the same words that Hart was a public dilettante, someone not to be taken seriously. Indeed, one of those who spoke to me was Donald Greene, acknowledged at the time to be Mr Samuel Johnson. Hart was celebrated in the Dartmouth farewells as a Samuel Johnson scholar -- I began to learn soon enough that Hart's Johnson expertise was nothing more than reading droll passages from Boswell to his packed lecture halls.

I think Hart's success, if he had it, was to convince a generation of students that Samuel Johnson was just another public dilettante, on a par with Burke, who was one, and Hart's model, Buckley. Greene, on the other hand, saw Johnson as something more like a pre-Freud Freudian, which Greene thought was perfectly OK. On a lifetime's reflection, I think Johnson was a deeply tormented figure, problematic intellectually on the same plane as David Hume, though for different reasons -- like Greene himself, Johnson was someone who had effectively left Christianity behind but was still low church.

I have no idea what Hart would do if I tried to submit a paper to him about this. But the Jeffrey Hart I knew in the 1960s was not the Jeffrey Hart in the photo above. The hair is shaggy and unkempt, and although the lower part of his face retains the tight-lipped deadpan, the eyes have a farawsy stare. The photo at left is from 1966, when he was teaching my sophomore survey. The photo above, which shows him reading from a newly-publisshed When the Going Was Good, must date from 1982.

Why the difference? Hart in 1966 is firm and clean-cut; Hart in 1982 is shaggy and haunted. The 1960s Hart converted to Catholicism from Episcopalianism in 1968, an example that at least partly inspired my own move much later. Yet the obituaries point out that he divorced his first wife in 1981, which may well explain his condition in the 1982 photo. He married his second wife in 1984, which brings us to a conundrum. The Post obituary says,

As a scholar of 18th-century English literature, Dr. Hart was guided by the orderly writing and minds of historian Edward Gibbon, essayist and lexicographer Samuel Johnson and political philosopher Edmund Burke. He admired the conservative values of tradition, cultural stability and social decorum.

Well, Johnson's writing and mind were anything but orderly, but leaving that aside, what about the disorder in Hart's personal life, probably reflected in his appearance as of 1982? Divorce and remarriage are not Catholic or orderly things at all. And the disorder in Hart's family continued. His son Ben, touted in histories of the Dartmouth Review as a founder while he was a Dartmouth student, went on not to become an important intellectual, but to build a career as a direct mail consultant, authoring such books as How To Write Blockbuster Sales Letters.

Worse, Ben's first wife, having divorced him, wrote a blog and became a syndicated columnist, author, and speaker as Betsy Hart, building her career writing of her ex-husband Ben Hart's betrayals and the dilemma this posed for her as a modern woman.

Hart himself in later writings insisted that the women students he'd taught at Dartmouth were fully entitled to have abortions there -- after all, they'd come to Dartmouth to build careers, not to raise kids. Tradition, cultural stabiliy, and social decorum indeed. Edmund Burke indeed.

In 2004, Hart endorsed John Kerry for president. In 2008, he endorsed Obama. Buckley kept him on at National Review as senior editor and even gave him writing projects there until Buckley died in 2008. His successors quickly fired Hart. I had some dealings with him, more or less indirectly, in the mid 2000s when I wrote for the Dartmouth Review during the alumni trustee controversies. His obituaries uniformly reported that he passed away from complications of dementia. I had the impression that the staff of the Dartmouth Review was covering for problems in that area even at that time.

I try to talk about all this when I now and then run into my schoolmates from the 1960s. But Jeffrey Hart to them is Dartmouth. To ask questions about Hart is to ask questions about Dartmouth. They won't have it.

Would William F Buckley Jr Be A Never Trumper?

Buckley died in early 2008, before the Obama phenomenon, but my fast answer is "yes".The more considered answer will take this post, one tomorrow, and possibly more. With his contemporary Hugh Hefner, he developed a new kind of persona in the 1950s, the publisher as public dilettante. His depictions in media rotuinely show him vamping and mugging for the camera to a remarkable degree, but it's always a question of tone and style, not substance. He espoused Catholicism, but he never did it with any particular rigor, and it's difficult to know if the Buckleys were Catholic in any readily distinguishable way from, say, the Kennedys.

By the same token, the intellectul figures the National Review embraced included Edmund Burke, whom I've always tended to regard as another public dilettante. While his political writings are best known, he also wrote on the sublime (an essay that I think is better and more important than the other stuff). But he had no center, which is why the early Obama administration could claim to be "Burkean", and well-known conservatives like David Brooks would buy it. Would Buckley have as well? There's reason to believe it, which I'll go into.

But probably more important is that Buckley was an Ivy Leaguer with connectons in the CIA. According to Wikipedia,

Buckley attended the National Autonomous University of Mexico (or UNAM) in 1943. The following year, upon his graduation from the US Army Officer Candidate School (OCS), he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Army. In his book Miles Gone By, he briefly recounts being a member of Franklin Roosevelt's honor guard upon Roosevelt's death. He served stateside throughout the war at Fort Benning, Georgia; Fort Gordon, Georgia; and Fort Sam Houston, Texas.

. . . In 1951, along with many other Ivy League alumni, Buckley was recruited into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); he served for two years, including one year in Mexico City working on political action for E. Howard Hunt, who was later jailed for his part in the Watergate affair. The two officers remained lifelong friends.

This indicates that Buckley's family had considerable social standing, although it should be noted that another Buckley contemporary, Paul Moore Jr, though of equivalent social standing and another Yalie, served at Guadalcanal and was decorated for heroism. This was not Buckley.

It should also be pointed out that between the late 1930s and the late 1940s, the Ivies loosened their Jewish quotas (Princeton also began to admit African-Americans) and adopted greater rigor in selecting student applicants. Prior to the late 1940s, attendance at an Ivy was determined heavily by social standing, and even now, quotas of various sorts continue, and it is understood that some number of any entering class has slots reserved for legacies, the children of major donors, and other influential figures.

David Brooks (isn't it interesting that he keeps reappearing here?) wrote in his 2000 book Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There that the adoption of College Board tests in the late 1940s made the Ivies and equivalent elite universities true meritocracies. This, of course, neglects that if anything, since that time, they've adopted increasingly secretive and intricate quota systems that in fact discrininate against merit.

Although Buckley criticized Yale in his first book, God and Man at Yale, his disagreement was essentially with how the faculty viewed its mission. He doesn't seem ever to have questioned the position of Yale and other Ivies as bastions of the right sort of people -- indeed, the sort of people who are entitled to run things behind the scenes. David Brooks, an upwardly mobile post-SAT product of the University of Chicago, would see himslf only very slightly differently as a member of that sane class.

Brooks, of coursee, sees Obama, his advisers, and presumably other leftists as worthy members of that class, too. The problem, it seems to me, is with the basic assumption, that there's a class of people entitled to run things. I'm not at all sure that Brooks and Buckley disagree here, and they would disagree only mildly on who those people are. And both must certanly agree that the CIA, a locus of the Deep State, is fully entitled to run things. Buckley's spy-novel hero, Blackford Oakes, is not Jason Bourne.

These are 20th century assumptions that drove much of national policy in administrations of both political parties, with only a few exceptions (Nixon was one. As Alger Hiss sneered at him, “I attended Harvard Law School. I believe yours was Whittier.") Oddly, Buckley's tone was often not far from Hiss's.

Tomorrow I'll look at a close Buckley associate, Jeffrey Hart, who outlived Buckley long enough to becme an Obamacon but, suffering from dementia in his last years, probably had no opinion on Trump.

The CIA In Modern Memory

The proximate cause of my starting this blog was when, last Sunday night, A&E ran the Jason Bourne trilogy of films based on the Robert Ludlum novels. I never took any interest in Ludlum as a writer, and it wasn't until a few years ago when I saw The Bourne Ultimatum for the first time and recognized that, at least, with all the fights and explosions and car chases and stuff, it wasn't bad entertainmnet. But that was before Crossfire Hurricane and the peeing Russian hookers reached the national consciousness.

We decided to record the whole trilogy when A&E ran it and watched all three over the next nights. What struck me was the image portrayed of the CIA throughout the three films, The original Ludlum novels appeared between 1980 and 1990, while the film trilogy we watched appeared between 2002 and 2007, long before Donald Trump was anything but a playboy billionaire and reality TV star. Yet the image of the CIA and its fictional director, Martin Marshall, is the one we have now, the one with the actual CIA director John Brennan, who in the public mind is fully capable of Martin Marshall's misdeeds and fully eligible for Marshall's implied fate, federal indictment for serious whatever.

Did Martn Marshall go to Yale? You betcha.

But then I looked back at how the CIA had previoiusly been portrayed in Hollywood, in particular two of Hitchcock's greatest films, North by Northwest (1959) and Topaz (1969). Hitchcock was a creaative genius, a poet in the broad sense, whose imaginative presence in the public consciousness was close to Charles Dickens a century before. Espionage was one of his favorite themes. As a succesful artist, he played off public' expectations. The intelligence agencies were our protectors from Hitler and then the Communist menace (which of course was real, but the agencies' actual record was, shall we say, mixed.)

In North by Northwest, the mama's-boy ad executive Roger Thornhill bumbles into a communist plot to assassinate a non-existent CIA operative, George Kaplan. Kaplan is a great-granduncle of the Russian hookers of 2016, a fiction created in Langley for its own purposes. The communist spies mistake the real Thornhill for the fake Kaplan, and glorious cinema ensues, the Twentieth Century Limited, the corn field, the auction scene, Mount Rushmore. Much of the action is manipulated by a senior CIA operative known only as The Professor, played by Leo G Carroll.

Did The Professor go to Yale? You betcha. Heck, he probably teaches there and recruits Bonesmen. That's why he's The Professor.

We may assume The Professor is also an Allen Dulles protégé. His purposes are obscure, but they're nevertheless benevolent. Despite the inconvenience to Roger Thornhill's privileged life, his descent into the underworld of espionage forces him to grow up and become an unwilling hero, as many of Hitchcock's leading men do in his spy-genre films. Eve Kendall, the female CIA agent who is effectively a prostitute, is also redeemed, and at the end of the film, she and Kendall marry.

The Yalies are in charge, they order things rightly for our good, and it all comes out right, indeed beyond our expectations.

Hitchcoxck's 1969 Topaz, in my view highly underrated and one of his greatest, pursues a similar theme. In the film, the CIA plays a pivotal behind-the-scenes role in revealing the Soviet buildup of nuclear rockets in Cuba in 1962. The CIA agent Mike Nordstrom (John Forsythe) learns of the scheme from a Russian defector, whom he capably extricates and flies to the US from Denmark. The CIA's competence is reinforced by the blustering complaints of the defector, who comically insists the KGB would have done a mucb more professional job.

Nordstrom, eminently competent, works through a French agent, André Devereaux, to bribe a high-ranking Cuban, as well as to use an existing anti-Castro network in Cuba that Deveraux controls via his adulterous relationship with Juanita de Cordoba, widow of a revolutionary hero. Deveraux's actions -- not directly Nordstrom's reponsibility but effectively controlled by him -- keep the dirty work at arm's length from the Yalies in Langley.

Nordstrom, in fact, plays the same role as The Professor. Deveraux's continued efforts threaten his marriage, but his wife's liaison with another Frenchman helps expose a network of Soviet moles in the French government. We must recognize that these moles are at the top of the French elite, graduates of the École nationale d'administration, but corruptible, unlike, say, Nordstrom himself. Or, gee, the Ivy Leaguers back in Langley.

Nordstrom was most likely a protégé of The Professor. But is he a Yalie? Probably not. A little too country-clubby on one hand, a little too much the man of action on the other. Let's give him Dartmouth.. John Forsythe's son Eric was a classmate of mine there. Whatever he is, he's squeaky-clean.

Notice the portrait of JFK behind Forsythe's shoulder in the photo. But let's also recognize we're looking back on 1962 in this film from 1969, a very different time, after race tiots, Viet Nam, the 1968 election, and the arrival of Nixon, with a public character less worthy than that of a used car salesman. Hitchcock is deliberately creating a rosy, nostalgic reference to an idealized past, in which the CIA plays a prominent role that, of course, it never actually had.

The populist Truman strontgly resisted creating the CIA. He despised the OSS director William Donovan, and it was remarked that OSS stood for "oh-so-social". On balance, I think Truman's instincts were correct. Before The Professor, before Mike Nordstrom, the CIA gave us the surprise of Chinese intervention in Korea, its bungling of the Cambridge spy network, its bungling of Southeast Asia, and the Bay of Pigs. I asume both The Professor and Mike Nordstrom played key roles in all of this. Don't you?

But the real question here is why Robert Ludlum, only a decade after Topaz, was able to sell the public on the idea of CIA leadership much closer to what we've now come to know in John Brennan. Martin Marshall is more credible in modern media than The Professor.

“There Is A Providence That Protects Idiots, Drunkards, Children, And The United States Of America”

Whatever becomes of Donald Trump -- he's been declared done any number of times since 2015, remember -- it's worthwhile to keep in mind the remark attributed to Bismarck in this post's title.

There's nothiing unique about Trump as a Republican. Abraham Lincon was regarded as an uncouth, insurgent, and divisive figure throughout his political career. The insurgent Republican tradition continues through Coolidge, Nixon, Goldwater, Reagan, and Newt Gingrich. In that context, there's nothing really new about Trump. I've tried to explain this to my Ivy League schoolmates to no avail. They won't even listen when I try to tell them how similar he is to Harry Truman.

As Bp Robert Barron puts it, we've been here before,

My friends want to maintain a picture of Trump independently whipping the population up into a frenzy of xenophobia and racism, ignoring the fact that legal immigrants and minorities support him in unprecedented numbers. The reality is that Trump is exploiting -- opportunistically if you want to say so -- decades-long trends in US society. These will continue, and others will pick them up, regardless of Trump's fate, and notwithstanding attempts to suppress them. These include:

• Creeping obsolescence of corporate media, including books, magazines, newspapers, film, television, polls, and professional sports
• Decline in value of college educaton and renewed status of blue-collar work
• Terminal decline of main line Protestantism and resurgence of Evangelical churches -- these are by no means new
• Declining trust in elite institutions, including the Ivy League and the CIA
• Overall reddening of the country's political spectrum
• Long-standing tensions within the Republican Party
• The changing nature of the US conservative movement.

I had a blog with this current title in the header for several years before 2011, where I was making much more tentative attempts to grapple with these themes. I've resurrected the title, with almost the same url, because I think I'm returning to many of the same issues.

Before the pre-2011 blog, I was involved in the Dartmouth alumni trustee movement, and in fact during its final agonies, I was approached to become a candidate for the next trustee election. (I had far too much partying in my time there and far too few donations to the alumni fund to take this seriously, and I turned them down.)

During that period, I was one of very few non-students to contribute regularly to The Dartmouth Review, an insurgent publication patterned after Buckley's Nat\onal Review. I learned a lot, but when the alumni trustee movement went permanently south, I suppressed my memories. It looks like I need to bring them back and talk about them, among many other things. (As far as I can tell, my articles there are no longer in the archives.)

As Bp Barron suggests, I've been here before, too. It looks like this effort won't be new, it'll be a resumption, or maybe a resuscitation, after a roughly ten-year detour and re-educaton in Anglicanism, Catholicism, Aristotelianism, post-Reformaton history, and quite a bit else. (I deleted the first Mt Hollywood blog from Blogger in 2011. Apparently some or all of it can be found on archive apps. However, my views then were to some degree inchoate.)

Hang on.