What are your views of ‘government’ and where do these come from? How much should any government regulate industry, if at all? With the fossil fuel giant Shell reporting almost $40bn in profits, their highest in 115 years, calls have intensified, in the UK at least, for a bigger windfall tax on energy companies. Yet the government resists and, judging by opinion polls, there is still considerable support for their stance. Why is that?
When we observe how big business behaves today, wielding power autocratically, the question must surely arise, is this is really how we want things to be? Isn’t it time we held the monopolies and conglomerates to account? And why did we let them become so powerful in the first place?
This is the theme of a new book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M Conway. In The Big Myth: How American Business Taught us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, they reveal how the ‘free-market’ belief system has come to dominate American ideology (and thus most of the world) – often in the face of evidence that plainly demonstrates its failures.
The meticulous and thorough research that was the hallmark of their bestselling book on the origins of climate denial, Merchants of Doubt, is again on display as the authors evaluate “the history of the construction of a myth”.Their forensic unravelling of the dominant pro-business ideology is aimed principally at an American audience, but the underlying moral has lessons for us all, as do the authors’ ideas about where solutions to the multiplying threats of the 21st century will come from.
The book conducts a studious deconstruction of the ways in which we came to think of government and business in particular ways and asks who has benefitted from this conditioning.
The authors demonstrate that ‘big business vs big government’ is a false dichotomy. “Our choices”, they write, “are not confined to oppressive communism or heartless capitalism. To suggest that they are is a dangerous failure of vision”.
Understanding insidious messaging and omnipresent propaganda that has existed, whether for the tobacco industry, the fossil fuel industry, or business interests can help with ‘pre-bunking’ the ‘big myth’ that only one viewpoint can hold sway. And seeing through the myth is important, because, as Oreskes and Conway conclude, “Our futures depend on rejecting it”.
How did so many Americans come to have so much faith in markets and so little faith in government?
The book opens by identifying the starting place for ‘market fundamentalism’ in the late nineteenth century, as a burgeoning USA was beginning to assert its identity – and defining the term as “a quasi-religious belief that the best way to address our needs – whether economic or otherwise – is to let markets do their thing, and not rely on government”.
‘The market’ became a nebulous entity that existed outside regulation, where ‘economic freedom’ could rule and any regulation of the marketplace “would be the first step on a slippery slope to socialism, communism or worse”. This was wrong-headed from the start: “‘The Market’ doesn’t exist outside of society, but is part of society and, like society’s other parts, must be subject to law and regulation.”
Any type of freedom is a balance of competing rights. The authors scrutinise the impact of amendments to the US constitution and how its protection of citizens could be balanced with capitalist growth. They emphasise the importance of the opening of the constitution, “We the People of the United States”, highlighting the omission of any capitalist focus, which begs the question: where, when and why did the market narrative take hold?
They find that “Americans in the early twentieth century were largely suspicious of ‘Big Business’ and saw the government as their ally. Yet by the later decades of the century, this had flipped”.One explanation is that governments tend not to spend money on promoting their own narratives and ideology, whereas businesses ringfence large amounts of their budgets for the promotion of a free-market economy.
It is also true to stress the importance of the ‘Tripod of Freedom’, which emerged as a claim that free enterprise was an inseparable part of American identity.
“The myth of the Tripod of Freedom, the claim that America was founded on three basic, interdependent principles: representative democracy, political freedom and free enterprise. Free enterprise appears in neither the Declaration of Independence nor the constitution.”
Experts for hire
The market narrative developed further in the opening decades of the twentieth century, to the point that the electrical industry, and more particularly the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), could insist “that the federal government should stay out of its way and not regulate the workplace”. The ability of industry to purchase advertising campaigns and favourable editorials, alongside industry-backed ‘studies’ that demonstrated whatever was required, meant free-market ideas could reach millions of consumers.
One campaign, by the National Electric Light Association, “foreshadowed later efforts by the tobacco industry to fight the facts about their products and influence scientific researchers and educators to promote their point of view”. The parallel with present-day climate denial is obvious.
At the same time, language was being used manipulatively in a way that is now all too familiar. To some, for example, ‘liberal’ came to mean ‘anti-American’, or was synonymous with the dread label ‘socialist’.
All in all, this self-serving narrative “helped to construct a key plank in the platform of American market fundamentalism and a key factor in the big myth of the Free Market”.
The crash of 1929 briefly laid bare the false claims of the market, but its advance was only halted temporarily.
Business regroups
The New Deal (1933–1939) offered US citizens newfound security, but business interests regrouped and spent the subsequent decade creating “the proposition that any compromise to economic freedom would inevitably lead to despotism – and that political and economic freedom were therefore inseparable”. As Oreskes and Conway conclude, this framing “would become one of the fundamental tenets of market fundamentalism’s big myths … freedom would be defined above all as economic freedom”.
There was a persuasive resonance between ‘inseparable’ and ‘indivisible’, which in turn licensed business to attack any government intervention in the marketplace as a “threat to freedom, a threat to the American way of life”.As radio became a key means of communication, reaching over 80% of American families by the end of the 1930s, a new platform for propaganda could be used continuously and invisibly. “Capitalism was about freedom, NAM would insist, and the survival of American democracy was at stake.”
Modes of communication
Oreskes and Conway evaluate the impact of Christian-libertarian binary rhetoric – ‘government or God’, ‘You’re either with us, or against us.’ This promoted absolutes which made it difficult for Americans to have conversations about identity, or understand how they had been led astray.
Influential films and writing, from Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life to Wilder’s Little House books, both countered and promoted the interests of business, but overall, business was winning the argument. “During the 1940s and ‘50s, libertarian moviemakers and their allies in business deployed censorship, intimidation, and overt propaganda to change the tone of America’s screens and disseminate the myth of the free market.”
‘The era of Big Government is over.’
As the turn of the century approached, the myth found its ultimate mouthpiece in Ronald Reagan.Oreskes and Conway put it thus:“In the 1920s, Americans had hated ‘Big Business’; Reagan would persuade us to hate ‘Big Government’.”‘The magic of the marketplace’ – an empty, clichéd phrase – became Reagan’s catchphrase.
A message repeated daily, with the backing of industry, can prove very effective at convincing people not to look beyond the words – even when those words impact them negatively. Many accepted Reagan’s contention that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem”, even as the practical implications harmed their lives.
In 1996, when Bill Clinton declared “the era of Big Government is over”, business must have rejoiced. In reality, many of Clinton’s policies were centre-left, but the prevailing myth prevented him from saying so.
Concluding The Big Myth, Oreskes and Conway draw attention to the continued failure of the market to regulate itself. They highlight the Enron implosion and explore the lack of business support for climate action, which, perversely, hinders business progress:
“The fossil fuel industry’s economic interests in preventing climate action have always been obvious; less understood is how it camouflaged those interests. No one ever said ‘I am denying climate change to protect corporate profits.’ They said that they were protecting jobs, protecting the economy, and protecting free markets from government ‘encroachment’. They said they were fighting for capitalism and freedom.”
On market failure during the pandemic, the authors comment that, “The Covid-19 pandemic has shown us how expensive overreliance on the ‘free’ market can be”. They conclude that “the Covid-19 crisis has made crystal clear why some problems demand substantive governmental solutions, and why many of them can’t just be temporary”.
The era of ‘Big Business’ is over?
The authors caution that a century of programming and conditioning “is not easily undone”.They warn that“The Big Myth has a tenacious hold. Polls show that in many domains Americans trust the private sector more that they trust ‘The Government’”.This leaves the door open to claims that no government can be trusted, even in the face of existential threats like climate change, where the true costs of the ‘free’ market are painfully visible.
Oreskes and Conway paint a disturbing picture of the present moment. They focus on America, but the litany of crises is familiar everywhere, from opioids (half a million dead), to Covid-19 (over a million dead), massive inequality, rampant anxiety and unhappiness, and the threat presented by climate change. All, to a greater or lesser extent, stem from the ‘free’ market. Against such a background, it’s hard not to sympathise with their conclusion:
“Government is not the solution to all our problems, but it is the solution to many of our biggest ones.”
