Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

The Challenge Ahead
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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this end, as in the past. In the Democratic Party, early 70s reforms in
fact transferred power “to a new, and affluent, elite,” while the
Republicans became a true class party, the party of business and
wealthy professionals, to an unprecedented extent. Furthermore, “during
the 1970s, the political wing of the nation’s corporate sector staged one
of the most remarkable campaigns in the pursuit of political power in
recent history,” establishing a network of over 150,000 professionals in
Washington who are engaged not only in securing defeat or passage of
bills that concern them but also “in a much more complex process, the
shaping of the precise language of legislation and of the committee
reports that accompany legislation.” Business also established an
elaborate system of private institutions engaged in research, scholarship
and ideological pronouncements, dwarfing in scale anything that had
existed before, with the goal of “altering the terms of the policy debate”
by sheer mass to a new “conservative” consensus. 8
The concept of “conservatism” in its contemporary Orwellian usage is
illuminated in a position paper of one of the most influential of these
new institutions, the Heritage Foundation, presented to Ronald Reagan
in November 1980 as “a blueprint for conservative government.” The
study advised Reagan to recognize “the reality of subversion and [to put]
emphasis on the un-American nature of much so-called dissidence,”
adding that “It is axiomatic that individual liberties are secondary to the
requirement of national security and internal civil order.” 9 Fascists and
Stalinists everywhere would applaud these sentiments. Not only in its
doctrines, but more crucially in its behavior, modern “conservatism”
reveals itself to be a form of advocacy of state power and state violence
committed to securing the privileged position of business elites; what
Bertram Gross has called “friendly fascism.” 10