activity—very delicate judgments are made about just what it’s OK
to say with regard to minuscule questions of gender, race, color,
etc. Is that left or right? I don’t know.
Part of what the propaganda system does is deprive terms of
meaning. It probably starts at some relatively conscious level and
then just gets into your bones. Sometimes it’s done quite
deliberately.
One dramatic case in recent years is the disappearance of the
w ord profits. Profits don’t exist anymore—just jobs. So when
Clinton came back from Indonesia with a $40-billion contract for
Exxon, the media all talked about jobs for Amer - icans. But profits
for Exxon? Perish the thought. (Exxon’s stock shot up, but that’s
just because investors were so delighted about the new jobs.)
That’s conscious evacuation of meaning, and even the left falls
into it, talking about how Congressmen vote for the Pentagon
because they want jobs for their district. Are jobs what
Congressmen are worried about, not profits and public subsidies for
firms?
In a lead story, the New York Times Week in Review made an
amazing discovery: the new kind of “populism”—as practiced by
Steve Forbes, Pat Buchanan and the like—is different from the old
kind of populism. The old kind opposes big corporations and
plutocrats; the new kind is big corporations and plutocrats. That you
can have a character like Steve Forbes on the national scene
without people cracking up with laughter shows how intense the
propaganda is.
The narcissism of small differences
In his book The Twilight of Common Dreams, Todd Gitlin says the
left is polarized by identity politics, which he calls the “narcissism
of small differences.” He writes, “The right has been building...but
the left has been...cultivating difference rather than commonality.”
The left does tend to get caught up in sectarianism, but I think
he’s describing something that’s happening in the country in general,
not just in what might be called realistically “the left.” The activism