Charles Derber is a popular sociology professor specializing in economics and social justice, and a political activist whose involvement in liberal causes dates as far back as the 1960s civil rights movement and as recently as his 2002 arrest for supporting the Service Employees International Union strike (see Sociology Speaks 2002-3). He's also one of the department's most prolific authors, with ten books published to date on subjects like the American Dream, the intersection of power and culture, the role of the United States in the world, and the question of how ordinary citizens can have more influence over political decision making. David Karp and I talked with him about his latest book, Hidden Power: What You Need to Know to Save Our Democracy (Berrett-Koehler Publishers 2005), and about the special challenges of applying sociological analysis to current events.
JL: Tell me about Hidden Power.
CD: There's a quote from Theodore Roosevelt: The difference between democracy and dictatorships is that in dictatorships, the power is visible. In democracies, the power is invisible. Which is to say that we know who runs a dictatorship, specifically the dictator. In a democracy, it's always more complex than that. So part of this book is an effort to analyze the hidden power behind the democratic process...My argument is that America and this grows out of my earlier book, Regime Change Begins at Home has been governed by a series of relatively hidden power systems that I call regimes. These can be structures of power that are governed largely by financial institutions and corporations, as I believe is the case today, where both political parties are largely in the service of those corporations. Or historically there have also been regimes which have been more representative of popular concerns as expressed through labor unions in the New Deal or through reformist groups in the Progressive era. So part of this book is an effort to trace the history of hidden power in the United States as well as describe the system of hidden power that's operating in the United States today.
But there's a second meaning of hidden power, which is the idea that there's a latent and relatively invisible power that still resides in the people to change the country and make the government and ruling institutions more responsive to their needs. But my argument here is that this tradition, which has allowed people to express this kind of latent power, has largely been repressed, abandoned, or forgotten. And it resides in forms of political traditions including populism and progressivism that are relatively enfeebled, unknown, and lost to popular consciousness. To the extent they're known, people remain cynical or skeptical because so many people feel powerless completely to effectuate anything that makes a difference. It's hard enough to make a difference in your own life, let alone the country and the world. So the title of Hidden Power carries a dual meaning. You do have the power to change the country, but if you want to do so, you have to understand how the country is being run now, you have to understand the dynamics of hidden power.JL: I'm wondering if this is part of a larger project, if your books have a kind of progression.
CD: Yes, I've been writing about corporate power and the power of ruling elites and of people to make change over my last four or five books, starting with Corporation Nation, which was a broad treatment of corporate power in the United States, and then People Before Profit which is an analysis of power in the world system, and I'm involved in something of a trilogy right now. Regime Change introduced the concept of regimes as systems of power in the United States. Hidden Power goes into a deeper analysis of the history of American regimes and how they've changed and gives a much more in depth analysis of the potential of a regime change that might move to the right in this country...
There's also an analysis in this book of the ways in which the current regime maintains its invisibility, and it does so by a very ironic and interesting process. The people who rule the country present themselves as populist insurgents against a presumed Establishment that is represented in activist courts or in east coast universities or Hollywood or other liberal bastions of presumed establishment authority. The interesting thing about the current ruling regime is that while exercising dominance over all three branches of government, it's managed to succeed in largely persuading people in the red states that in fact, they that is, the people running the country are rebels and challengers to an overwhelmingly powerful liberal establishment that is controlling America and will likely control America for a long time to come. This is a form of what I call pseudopopulism, or black magic, which legitimates a group of controlling elites in the name of insurgency against an alleged liberal power structure. It's a fascinating model of legitimation...
This book, while arguing that we're in a period of potential change in the basic structure and power of the country, argues that change could go either even further right, toward a really dangerous form of a proto-fascist kind of control, or toward a more progressive alternative, which doesn't look like it's in the wings immediately but has a long history itself in the U.S. It would not be the first time in American history if an overwhelmingly right wing political system were to be replaced by a popular upsurge from a progressive perspective. You can think of, for example, the movement from the 20s to the 30s. The 1920s was a very business dominated regime and the New Deal replaced it with a progressive governing system, just as the Progressive era at the turn of the 20th century replaced the Gilded Age and the business tycoons of the late 19th century. So the last part of the book is an effort to demonstrate that all is not lost, and that we have good historical models for change. And I think that remains a possibility today...If you look at substantive policy, the Bush administration's popularity has sunk to unprecedented low levels, on policies from Social Security to Medicare to the war in Iraq...Which is not to say that this is evidence that there is going to be a regime change toward the left, but that there's a possibility if progressive movements and the Democratic party can go through the kind of changes that are necessary. And a good part of Hidden Power is an effort to lay out how progressive forces can mobilize the economic agenda and the moral resonance to connect with a public who basically is afraid but can be receptive to a progressive populist agenda.
JL: You had said this was part of a trilogy.
CD: Oh, yes. So the first book, Regime Change, lays out the basic concept of regimes and a little bit of the history. The second book looks at how the regime could move either to the right toward a more authoritarian, even less democratic model or toward the left, and what people might do to move it in a more progressive direction. If there is to be a third volume of this, it's going to look more closely at the history of far right regimes, like the one in power today, and examine what keeps them in power and what has led to change in such systems over time, with a particular focus on drawing examples from the fascist period in Germany. Even though I don't think we're in a fascist period, there are a lot of interesting parallels and enormously instructive lessons.DK: You face difficulties that lots of people don't face because your work is so timely. You're kind of on the cusp of writing about things as they happen. I hear that the third volume you're talking about concerns historical things, but do you run the risk, you think, of writing stuff that history will show to be wrong?
CD: Yes. I wrote a book in the 80s about the nuclear arms race right as the Soviet Union fell apart. It came out a month after the Soviet Union imploded.
But these themes have slightly more universality. Hidden Power explores possibilities of a turn both to the right and to the left. So its relevance would sustain itself however the U.S. moves in the next election. And the book to come I believe that the issues that are raised about right wing power are quite independent of whether the Democrats or the Republicans are in power. Because there will be pressures toward and strategies for right wing power even under Democratic administrations, the threat of authoritarianism, proto-fascism, in response to terrorist attacks, in response to economic crisis, and the conservative backlash on moral values it's just simply going to be part of American politics for a long time to come
So yeah, my work of course is always vulnerable anybody who writes about current events can be upended by surprises but I think what I've learned after writing many such books is that because things come out so quickly on the Internet and people can get information so quickly, and things do change so rapidly, to write a book you have to be identifying themes that are likely to resonate in the culture politically for a long period to come. And that's the value of a book dealing with political issues these days if it's going to survive, it's got to have insights into longer term issues that are likely to be very much on people's plates quite independent of the results of a particular election.
JL: It does have kind of a prophetic quality, though, and I'm wondering whether this prophetic quality, this attempt to sort of change the world, is common to other sociological works.
CD: The prophetic tradition in sociology was identified with people like C. Wright Mills, Marx, and others whose goal in writing was not only to describe the world but to change it, who embraced a value oriented position, writing with an explicit commitment to values like social justice and so forth. So I certainly think of myself as part of that tradition in sociology. And I mean it's prophetic not in the sense that I think I can predict the future but in the sense that I try to write books that awaken people to alarming, dangerous developments in the modern world, and offer some hopefully useful mental tool kits for understanding how to think about these realities and respond to them...
Even if you're within the prophetic tradition, you have a responsibility - and your work is only going to be valuable - if you're identifying as clearly as possible forces and dynamics and systems in the world that people from any political perspective can find utility in...This is not work for the Democratic party, which I don't particularly identify with or any other party and it's not work simply to promote a specific political agenda, but rather it's prophetic in the sense that I think you meant it, Jean, that it's an effort to awaken people to fundamental crises of values and justice and to offer people historical insights and conceptual tools for understanding what is happening and thinking about how people can reasonably try to change these things.
DK: I'm wondering about this curious paradox of populism. I mean, when I pick up the newspaper everyday, I read about evolution in schools, I read about conservative people being appointed and going on to the Supreme Court, I read about the whole blurring of the religion and the state kind of thing...and everything that I see and hear, and maybe it's just the lens through which I look at the world, seems to belie the idea that there's this group of lefty people who are really in fact controlling things...And so what I'm wondering about is how black magic continues to work in the face of daily pieces of evidence that people on the right are making more and more incursions into the way this country is run and really wielding the power.
CD: That's partly why I call it black magic. It is fiction, and it is clear, I think, that political control in this country is incredibly concentrated in corporations and the conservative sector of the Republican party. And yet, the sense that a liberal establishment dominates the country is very widespread among people in the red states. Part of Hidden Power is an effort to explain how that's possible. It's possible partly because all right wing states have had in recent decades extraordinarily effective propaganda machinery, and the media play an enormous role in this. The educational apparatus and the intelligentsia all play an important role in this too in that they present a view of the world that is supportive of all kinds of things that are not consistent with reality. It's important to recognize that churches are one of the most sophisticated and important shapers of the way people think of the world and the right wing Christian movements have played an enormously important role in persuading people that a liberal establishment is dominating their lives.
It's also important to remember, though, that these are not completely fictions. In other words, right wing administrations and their view of the world are typically backlashes against periods of progressive change. Since the 1960s in the realm of culture, but even through a much longer period, genuine, dramatic change has occurred in everything from the role of women in society to the position of homosexuals to the separation of religion and the state and so forth. The period of the New Deal, which lasted over much of the 20th century, was in fact a liberal establishment, and it did change the country, and much of what we're seeing today is a backlash or reaction to much of that change. Right wing movements are very often a response to periods of progressive change that lead to a cycle of backlashes it was very much true in the 30s in Germany, because the period of the Weimar Republic during the 20s was a period of enormous sexual freedom, coming out of gays, experimentation in art and theater, and a challenge to the traditional conservative culture of Germany that the right and people like Hitler were able to exploit. It is part of where that fascist resonance came from...It's one of those endemic characteristics of right wing regimes. So I guess what I'm saying is that things that seem like total fiction or black magic have historically very often been portrayed as reality the notion that Jews ran the world was total fiction...JL: The section on black magic reminds me of Kenneth Burke's analysis of Mein Kampf. One of the things he says is that Hitler managed to take an economic problem and blame it on social causes, by making Jews the scapegoats. It seems to me that what you're describing is similar.
CD: Yes, it's very similar. I mean, the core of right wing politics is essentially a politics of culture, which persuades people that the problems they may be facing in their economic lives, or their social lives, are largely a function of culturally seductive traitors, people who are immoral and subverters of the most fundamental cultural traditions of the nation. The right wing converts politics into cultural nationalism instead of class or class struggle. That was the pattern of almost all right wing European regimes in the 20th century, and it's the pattern of right wing politics today, to persuade people that the master narrative of their lives is about culture and the subversion of values rather than about economic power and the undermining of people's means of having a reasonable economic security. And that's an astounding triumph, given the central economic viability of people's lives and how severe the economic threats to middle America have become. I think the fact that few liberals can really address these questions or understand them is a measure of how far we need to go in developing a resonant progressive analysis and have a chance to turn things around
DK: We've talked about this about a million times, but writing is such a humbling thing to do, when you're trying to participate in a conversation, and you walk into a book store and there are thousands of books, so how do you measure or think about the success of your work? Aside from the pleasure of just working through the ideas, the pleasure of writing and of discussion
CD: I see books and writing as simply one part of a multi-faceted effort to get one's ideas out into the world and one's actions more empowered...I see books as part of a corpus of works, activity, stuff that comes out on the web, personal conversation; it's all part of a conversation that you and a large number of other people are having with each other and with the general population. As I've done more books and gotten older, I've realized that the power of any one book to make a huge difference in the world is obviously very limited, with the exception of a tiny number of books, and therefore what you can hope for from most books is that they can be generative of an ongoing conversation, contribute to it, help move the conversation a little bit further, provide the author and the readers with an opportunity to move their thinking and their action further a step or so...
I think there's a lot of individualistic mythology in academia about books. Books are collective productions in many ways. I get my ideas from talking with colleagues like David Karp and John Williamson, and they're a product of constant interaction and conversation with the larger world. And so they're really collective products. They're reflections of a given era, and products of a given era, and they're reflections of certain communities of thinkers and thought. Why then would one write a book, recognizing that it's just like a drop of a river or an ocean that is going to move whether your particular part of the stream is considered or not? You have to be deeply engaged in a way that makes it both a pleasurable and an inevitable thing to do because it's just an expression of who you are and you can't really imagine not doing it. And it's also consistent with the idea that the river flows and gets strong when enough people experience that inevitability.
