THE APPARAT
George W. Bush's back-door political machine
It's anti-democratic, anti-Constitutional, and is working to create a one-party America
18 March 2004, Jerry M. Landay, Mediatransparency.org

Excerpt:

The architectural shape of the right-wing counter-establishment resembles the apparatus that ran the Soviet Union. The Russians called it the "apparat" -- a vast bureaucratic web of power that housed the organs, official and unofficial, of the ruling Communist Party.

It included the administrative departments that fictively ran the Soviet government. In fact, the party ran it all. Its ruling Politburo and Central Committee were paramount. The Soviet apparat was headed by a privileged ruling class, the nomenklatura, manned by a faceless army of bureaucrats, the apparatchiki.

The structure of the apparat was triangular, comprised of the party, the organs of state security, and the military establishment. The leadership elite in the Kremlin presided over all of it.

The organs of propaganda and media were also housed within the apparat, together with the Comintern, which oversaw the Communist parties of other countries. It included scores of activist front operations. They carried out agitprop-- incitement and manipulation of opinion among the masses. These popular-front operations appeared independent, but were linked covertly to the apparat in Moscow.

The American apparat of the far right can be viewed as a variant of the Soviet model-- amorphous in overlapping functions at the top but monolithic in its aims. It is an external government that guides the federal government. In a stunning sense, it is counter-revolutionary and anti-Constitutional.

The American apparat has learned from the failures of the Iran-Contra and Watergate operations, which functioned within the government, and were thus subject to governmental oversight and correction. Not so the apparat. With its operations spread over a spectrum external to government, it attracts neither official nor media attention. It operates invisibly-- in the open.

The NCRP writes, "There is considerable organic alignment and cohesion on the right." Conservative funders and non-profits are all on the same page, dedicated to the broader goals of radical politics.

The American apparat functions as a broad strategic, policy-formulating, and coordinating machine. Like the Soviet apparat, it is triangular in structure. The main leg can be viewed as the nomenklatura-- the central command of the cohort. Subordinate to it is the second leg-- the major units of government, including the White House and the Congressional majority. The President governs as the creature of the apparat, along with his cabinet.

Vice-President Cheney bridges the two as a senior member of the nomenklatura. So does Karl Rove, the White House political operator, along with the leaders of the Republican Congressional wing-- Senate and House majority leaders Bill Frist and Tom DeLay.

The third leg can be viewed as the Republican political wing. In the party realignment of 1992, the national Republican apparatus was taken over by the apparat, and reduced to an appendage. The national party is now principally a tool for the disbursement of campaign largesse; and it supervises the machinery of elections and coordinates state party functions.

Edwin Feulner, Jr., president of the Heritage Foundation, the fountainhead of the cohort and the single largest recipient of right-wing philanthropy money ($44 million between 1985 and 2002), is a senior member of the apparat. The Heritage Foundation laid down the primary policy blueprint for the incoming Reagan Administration in 1980. It was called Mandate for Leadership: Turning Ideas Into Action. Eighty percent of its recommendations were deemed accomplished by the end of the Reagan era. Heritage has produced similar action blueprints for succeeding Republican presidents, including the administration of George W. Bush.

After Bush II's selection by the Supreme Court, the Heritage Foundation also served as personnel clearing house and hiring hall for senior government positions. Elaine Chao, the former Heritage Foundation fellow who supervised the hiring, is now Secretary of Labor.

Social and religious conservatives exert profound bottom-up influence on the apparat and White House. They spring from the bedrock, where the voters are. Only elections can overturn the apparat's hold on political power.

The American apparat must be responsive to its popular base, especially the mandates of such populist organizations as the National Rifle Association, American Family Institute, and Family Research Council, with their roots in the grass roots. We have witnessed the President's sensitivity to the base, especially on such issues as gun ownership, opposition to immigration and abortion, resistance to gay marriage, and so-called "activist judges."

Like its Soviet counterpart, the American apparat is also a closed society, largely unelected and unaccountable to the body politic, and casts its penumbra upon the White House. As in the former USSR, there is little discussion or debate. Loyalty is absolute -- "you are either with us or you are with our enemies." Under Bush and Cheney, brisk exchanges of view, the engine of policy formation in prior administrations, are discouraged. Cabinet meetings are scripted for a president unprepared for spontaneous exchanges (as revealed in documents posted by Ron Suskind, that were used to research his best-selling The Price of Loyalty).

The endgame for the apparat is a one-party state in which elections project only a vestigial appearance of democratic process. It is run, in effect, by the ruling oligarchy, whose members are beholden only to the apparat.



COMPLETE ARTICLE: THE APPARAT


Jerry Landay has written extensively on the activities of movement conservatism. He is a former news correspondent for ABC and CBS, and is associate professor emeritus at the University of Illinois.