In the Maryland State House there is a sign. It stands against a wall of cool, expensive marble, and it says, quite politely, No Lobbyists Beyond This Point.
I like this sign. I like it the way one likes a child's drawing of a house with a sun in the corner. It believes in something. It believes that power is a man in a suit who can be stopped at a doorway, that money walks on legs, that a line on a floor can hold back a river. It is so sincere. It is so small. And behind it, the marble corridors of the world go on and on, unsigned, unguarded, and very, very busy.
A photograph of that sign sits at the top of an essay by Jason Stanley, a philosopher then at Yale and the author of How Propaganda Works. He wrote it for Aeon in 2016, in the middle of an American election, which is to say in the middle of a very loud argument about freedom conducted by people who did not seem very interested in it.
Stanley's argument is simple, and like most simple things it is unbearable once you have seen it. Americans adore the vocabulary of democracy. Freedom. Liberty. The People. They say these words the way other nations say the names of their gods. And yet a study by the political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page found that ordinary citizens have little or no independent influence over the policies that govern their lives. In Michigan, the elected officials of several cities were set aside, and in their place the governor installed Emergency Managers. Not Emergency Citizens. Managers. In the presidential race, one candidate offered the people her expertise and the other offered them his deals. Nobody offered them a say.
So why is nobody screaming? The easy answer is power: the rich own the microphones, the courts, the police. Stanley does not think that is enough. Power explains why the powerful behave as they do. It does not explain why millions of people walk, cheerfully, in the sunshine, to vote for their own disappearance. For that you need something else. You need the words to have been turned inside out and handed back, still warm, still beautiful, quietly saying the opposite of what they say.
Consider Law and Order. Two lovely words, sturdy as furniture.
Black Americans are about thirteen per cent of the country and, when Stanley wrote, close to forty per cent of its prisoners. Following Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, he walks us down the long road to that number: Nixon's campaign against drugs, then the Reagan years and their War on Drugs, a war whose prisoners were, overwhelmingly, young Black men. Law and Order was the flag. Under it, the cages were built.
Then heroin moved. It left the places where it had always been allowed to rot and arrived, uninvited, in white suburbs and small white towns. Suddenly there was a New Face of Heroin, and it was a face that deserved our sorrow. Suddenly there was talk of economic distress, of despair, of healing. Law and Order was folded neatly and put away in a drawer, to be taken out again for the people it was always meant for.
What Stanley sees here is sharper than hypocrisy. The ideal of law and order, taken seriously, cannot be applied unequally; that is the whole point of it. The propaganda of law and order can be applied any way you like. And an old, ugly idea about who is dangerous and who is merely unfortunate made sure that nobody noticed the difference.
Now do the same with Freedom.
In America, Freedom has an enemy, and its name is Big Government. Big Government is always about to come for your guns, your money, your doctor, your soul. Sometimes, to be fair, it does come; Stanley mentions the Patriot Act. But while everyone stands at the front door with a shotgun, watching for the government, something else has let itself in through the back and is sitting at the kitchen table, eating.
It is the corporation. It is the corporation that fights the right of workers to bargain together, and that uses trade agreements to carry a factory to wherever labor is cheapest and people are most desperate. It is the corporation that, thanks to Citizens United, may now spend without limit to help elect the politicians who are supposed to regulate it, which is a little like letting the fox fund the farmer's campaign. It is the corporation that can often fire you for what you said on a Sunday, and make you sign a paper that keeps your mouth shut long after you have left.
If freedom means anything, it means the freedom to speak and the freedom to choose. Who takes those away from an ordinary American, on an ordinary Tuesday? Not, usually, a senator.
Stanley gives the trick a name: free market ideology. It is the belief that the market is freedom's natural home, its mother, and that every other freedom is merely a child of the market's generosity. Once you believe this, the corporation cannot be a jailer. It is only protecting its interests. The gag order is only the cost of doing business. And so people who love freedom more than almost anything vote, again and again, in freedom's name, to starve the one institution meant to protect it.
A weak government is not a free country. It is a government on sale.
The rest follows smoothly. A company is not a democracy. Nobody votes for the chief executive; he rules, Stanley says, rather like a feudal lord. But if the market is where freedom lives, then the lord is freedom's priest, and when he runs for office his fortune is not a warning. It is a halo. He made his money in the market, the market is free, so his money is a kind of freedom too, folded and stacked.
The same logic is why people surrender their right to hold anyone accountable to experts who promise Efficiency. Efficiency is the god of business, business is the engine of the market, and the market, we have been told since the cradle, is freedom. So a city loses its council, gains a Manager, and calls it good sense.
Even the children are not spared. For Rousseau, Du Bois and Dewey, education was where a person learned to be a citizen, to stand up and say: no, not like this. Today schools are asked, mostly, to be efficient. To produce workers. Reliable, punctual, quiet. Civic courage has become an elective, and it is not on the timetable.
The market's defenders have real answers. A worker can quit a job, they will say, but a citizen cannot quit a country, and that matters. Ideology, they will add, is a convenient ghost, blamed for every vote the professor did not like. These are fair points, and voters are not fools. But the freedom to quit means less in a town with one employer, and the argument is easier to win from a comfortable chair than from the end of a shift.
What stays with you is how economical the whole thing is. Propaganda, in Stanley's telling, does not need to invent new gods. It takes the ones we already kneel to and quietly changes their address. Freedom is still on the flag. It still makes the crowd weep at the ballgame. It has simply moved house. It lives now in the boardroom, and anything standing between the boardroom and the rest of us is called, with a straight face, tyranny.
Stanley ended with a small, stubborn hope. Voters, he thought, had begun to smell it. They were turning on the party elites with the one tool democracy actually hands them, the vote. Will anyone listen? he asked. It was a good question in 2016. A decade on, it is a better one.
The sign in Annapolis is still there, I imagine, guarding its little patch of marble with great dignity. No Lobbyists Beyond This Point. What it cannot tell you is where the point is. Or whether, while we were all looking at the sign, the corridor quietly became the whole building.
