March of the Banana Republicans
By John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, AlterNet
April 28, 2004
Editor's Note: This is an excerpt from 'Banana Republicans: How the Right Wing Is Turning America into a One-Party State' (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin) by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber.
In a democracy, Alexander Hamilton believed: "The differences of opinion, and the jarrings of parties . . . often promote deliberation and circumspection; and serve to check the excesses of the majority." Although these jarrings and clashings sometimes seem messy, contentious and wasteful, in fact they are one of the great strengths of democracy in both peacetime and wartime.
If, however, a single viewpoint or party is able to drown out or suppress the views of others, a different dynamic sets in. One-party dominated states and hierarchical, command-driven social systems are notorious for their tendency to make disastrous decisions, in the areas of both domestic and foreign policy. China's cultural revolution and the Soviet Union's failed economic development plans are among the most extreme but not the only cases in point. In the field of foreign affairs, Napoleon and Hitler both disdained dissenting advice and found doom attacking Russia. Saddam Hussein met a similar fate when, after fighting a debilitating war with Iran, he invaded Kuwait and triggered the wrath of other nations. As we detailed in our previous book, Weapons of Mass Deception, the Bush administration seems to have made the same mistake when it believed its own propaganda promoting war with Iraq.
The U.S. military has a term for this type of information system: "incestuous amplification," which Jane's Defense Weekly defines as "a condition in warfare where one only listens to those who are already in lock-step agreement, reinforcing set beliefs and creating a situation ripe for miscalculation." Psychologists have a similar term: "group polarization," which describes the tendency for like-minded people, talking only with one another, to end up believing a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk.
The Republican Party's philosophy and political organizing strategies have been remarkably successful at helping the party achieve and consolidate power in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Simultaneously, however, they have created conditions that make incestuous amplification and group polarization more likely in disparate areas of America's political arena.
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