How politics impact your personal life

Such an impact would also be obvious to you if you were a woman living in the Taliban's Afghanistan. If you were driven from your job, denied the right to educate your daughter, shut into a house where the windows must be painted black so no man can accidentally see you, forced to cover yourself from head to foot so you're reduced to a lump of walking cloth, and in danger of being stoned to death for just talking to a man who is not your husband or other relative, you would be all too aware that national policies have a lot to do with day-to-day life.

You can also see these connections in the United States if you live in a poor inner-city, racially distinct ghetto and your food stamps have been cut off. But if you live in a suburban neighborhood, busy coming and going from your job, taking care of your children, trying to relax in front of your television at the end of a long day, what happens on the national level may seem to have little to do with you and your family. And even if you realize that both the good and bad things in your life have a lot to do with the kind of nation you live in, you may think there is little you can do to bring about more enlightened policies, laws, and cultural attitudes.

In reality, just about all the good things we take for granted--from eight-hour workdays, workplace safety regulations, and social security to legal access to contraception and public education--we owe to people who realized they could make a difference. Even the right to vote was at one time denied not only to women and African Americans but also to white men who didn't own land.

That all this was changed we owe to people like you and me who decided to stand up against traditions of domination--people like Frederick Douglass, the self-educated former slave who became a leader of the movement to enfranchise African Americans; Mary Jones, the fiery union organizer whose crusade for safer working conditions earned her the name Mother Jones; Margaret Sanger, the middle-class woman thrown in jail for the "crime" of opening the first U.S. clinic dispensing contraceptives after she saw women die from too-frequent pregnancies.

The thousands of people who worked to make the United States a more just and caring nation were of different races, classes, and ethnic backgrounds. But they all had one thing in common: they became aware that national policies, laws, and beliefs profoundly affect our day-to-day lives--and they decided to work for changes that hugely improved, and in some cases saved, our lives.

Today the United States stands at a crossroads. Take a moment to inventory the things that make you worry about the future and your children's future, things that make you feel victimized and maybe even afraid. You will see connections between your fears and worries and what happens on the national level. If popular culture continues to glorify physical and emotional violence, if hate and scapegoating continue to be justified as moral and right, if the gap between haves and have-nots continues to widen, if the protection of our natural environment and our civil liberties continues to be weakened, if our government continues to arm repressive regimes and would-be regimes--no matter how hard you work and save, much that you hold dear will remain threatened.

One reason more of us aren't aware of these connections is because we are led to believe our personal choices take place in a vacuum. Take the matter of food, for example. For a healthy diet we first have to become aware of what kinds of foods are good or bad for us. Then we have to change our eating habits and eat more vegetables and fruits instead of junk foods and other items high in fats and sugars. But, unfortunately, even making these sound choices isn't enough.

As the February 1999 issue of Consumer Reports points out, the spinach, green beans, fruit, and other foods we tell our children to eat so they will grow up healthy and strong often contain high concentrations of pesticides. So if we're to make sure the foods available on our grocery shelves don't contain toxic substances that will harm us, we have to change national policies, laws, and practices.

This is only one example out of many. The point is that, as essential as it is to change our personal habits, if we want to have better lives we also need to change the larger society around us because of its profound impact on almost every aspect of our lives.

Politics Through a New Lens

When you watch television or read a newspaper, you may get the impression that politics is like a football game or TV game show--that what counts is who outmaneuvers whom in a contest between winners and losers. Whose tactics are more effective? Who can best sway the undecided voter? Who can sling the most mud? Who can raise the most money? Which candidate's personality has the most popular appeal?

But when you look at politics through the analytical lens of the partnership/domination continuum, you see a deeper struggle: a struggle between those who hold the old view of power--the power to give orders, control, disempower others --and those who, in a spirit of partnership, want to use their positions of power to empower the rest of us. Indeed, this has been the underlying political struggle for a long time--even though this isn't what we learned in traditional history classes. Some believe that history doesn't matter because it's already happened. But, as the old saying goes, those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Reexamining history through the partnership and dominator lenses is eye-opening and essential if we are to move forward.

In school you were probably taught that modern democracy began with the "rights of man" movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But you weren't taught that what this movement challenged was a tradition of domination: the "divinely ordained" rule of kings over their "subjects." In the same way, you weren't taught that the "rights of women" or the feminist movement challenged another tradition of domination: the control of men over women and children in the "castles" of their homes. The nineteenth century abolitionist movement and pacifist movement challenged other entrenched traditions of domination: the enslavement of one race by another and the use of force as a means for one nation to control another.

As you look at history through the partnership and dominator lenses, you can see that other seemingly unconnected movements were also challenges to traditions of domination. The movement to humanize the treatment of the mentally ill challenged the practice of beating and chaining them to tame their "antisocial instincts." Educational reform movements challenged the use of corporal punishment to control children in schools. The environmental movement challenged the once-hallowed conquest of nature.

Over the last 300 years, these and other organized challenges to traditions of domination have brought many societal gains. Consider that child labor, unsafe and unsanitary workplaces, twelve-hour workdays, and other features of early "robber baron" capitalism would still be legal in the United States had it not been for the efforts of organized labor. Without the civil rights movement, racial discrimination would still be legal and we would still have segregated water fountains, buses, restaurants, hotels, and even hospitals. Without the feminist movement, women in the United States today would still be restricted from attending university, owning or managing property, running their own businesses, and voting.

A new and very important movement addresses domination and violence in intimate relationships. It challenges such crimes as rape, spousal abuse, child abuse, and incest--all of which, not so long ago, were unspoken and unprosecuted acts of violence often blamed on the victims. This recent movement against intimate violence is foundational to an integrated politics of partnership.

And yet the shift toward partnership has been fiercely resisted every step of the way. It has also periodically been set back by regressions to the domination model.

Even though on the surface they seem to have little in common, the most repressive regimes of modern times--from Hitler's Germany to the Taliban's Afghanistan--have been regressions to the core blueprint of the domination-control model. All have been a return to a brutally authoritarian structure. All have attempted to put women back into their "traditional" subservient roles. All have advocated and used violence to establish and maintain top-down ranking of control by men over women and men over men.

There have also been periodic dominator regressions in the United States, although in milder form. And one reason we urgently need a new politics of partnership is that we are in such a period today.

The Push Back

As you examine the news through the partnership and domination lenses, you will see that many of the things that disturb you, both in the United States and worldwide, are part of just such a regression. In the United States, demagogic leaders (often unfairly invoking religion) preach intolerance, which has led to increased violence against marginalized groups such as homosexuals. These leaders call for a return to the family values of more authoritarian times--male dominance and punitive childrearing. At the same time, violence has increased against women and children to beat them back into submission. Even the concept of separation of church and state--which the nation's founders enacted through the Constitution to prevent the religious control and violence that was once prevalent (and in some places still is)--is under attack.

A key part of this dominator regression is a massive reconcentration of economic power. Most of us are vaguely aware of the serious implications of these developments, even though they are rarely analyzed in depth by the mainstream media. Consider these economic statistics:

* During the much publicized economic growth period leading up to the 1990s, the income of the middle fifth of the U.S. population actually declined by 5.3 percent, while the income of the top 1 percent skyrocketed by 78 percent.

* While the widely publicized Census Bureau statistics from 1995 to 1996 indicate Americans' median income climbed 1.2 percent, analysis of those figures reveal that income for the richest 20 percent increased 2.2 percent while income for the poorest 20 percent actually fell 1.8 percent.

* Nine years into the longest economic expansion in U.S. history, labor's share of the national income remained 2 percent to 4 percent below the levels reached in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

* The combined net worth of the 1999 Forbes list of the 400 richest people in the United States was $1 trillion.

* Approximately 500 billionaires in a handful of countries-including the United States, France, Mexico, Thailand, and Saudi Arabia--have a combined wealth equal to that of 52 percent of the billions of people on this planet.

This reconcentration of wealth has enormous political significance, since with it comes the massive control moneyed interests wield over the politicians and the mass media which shape national policies. Many of the same enormously wealthy individuals and corporations which control most of the world's wealth also exercise enormous control over most of the world's governments. In some nations, this control is exercised through outright payments or bribes that are accepted as traditional practices. In the United States, this control is generally exercised through large campaign contributions and lobbyists who influence such key matters as who gets tax breaks, which government programs are funded by tax dollars, which laws and regulations are supported or opposed by elected officials, and, of course, who gets elected.

Many corporations trade political contributions for political favors, which include subsidies and other forms of corporate welfare, as well as government protection for unfair, monopolistic activities. Consider the Archer Daniels Midland Corporation (ADM), one of the most prominent recipients of corporate welfare in recent U.S. history. ADM and its chair, Dwayne Andreas, have given millions of dollars to both major political parties and, in return, have reaped billion-dollar windfalls from taxpayers and consumers in the form of federal protection of the domestic sugar industry, ethanol subsidies, subsidized grain exports, and various other programs.

Consider the enormous price hikes by such companies as Enron and Duke after California energy prices were deregulated. Duke raised its prices during early 2001 peak times to $3,880 per megawatt hour from the average of $76 in 2000. These high energy prices were then passed on to California consumers. Household and business utility bills doubled and tripled, with disastrous consequences for small businesses, poor families, and many elderly people living on pensions. But when President George W. Bush came to California in May 2001, he refused to change his energy policy, which was crafted by advisers with close ties to natural gas giants such as Enron, one of the largest contributors to Bush's 2000 presidential campaign (as well as earlier quests for public office).

These aren't isolated cases. The point is that in the United States we have a legal form of political corruption. We have a system in which the purchase of politicians and government policies is lawful. But even though these patterns are there for all to see, political commentators rarely make this connection. In fact, you rarely see analyses of patterns of domination--from intimate to corporate--in the mass media.

Media Control and Mass Mind

Who gets elected to political office is obviously affected by the information available to voters, not only about specific candidates but about issues: Here we face another threat to democracy and our day-to-day quality of life: the increasing concentration of media ownership in fewer and fewer hands.

In many nations--fundamentalist Iran, for example--newspapers that don't conform to official dictates are shut down. Any deviation from officially approved policies, beliefs, or religious dogmas is censored and severely punished. Thankfully, we don't have this kind of media control in the United States. But here too we're seeing a radical narrowing of sources of news and opinions.

More and more independent newspapers are shut down or swallowed by huge media conglomerates that control many publications. Even the Internet is becoming more centrally controlled, as both access and content are recentralized in the hands of ever fewer commercial entities like AOL/Time Warner and the Microsoft Network.

In the first edition of his renowned book, The Media Monopoly, published in 1983, Ben Bagdikian shocked the nation by reporting that fifty companies controlled most of the mass media in the United States--newspapers, magazines, books, films, radio, television, cable, and music. In the 1997 edition of the book, the number had shrunk to ten. By the 2000 edition, it was down, to only six: AOL/Time Warner (which also owns substantial print media including twenty-four magazines, among them Time, Fortune, and People); Disney (which owns twenty-two major subsidiaries, including its enormous theme parks, the Disney Channel, and ABC); Viacom-CBS-Paramount; Bertelsmann (which owns an international media empire that includes the giant U.S. publisher Random House and its many subsidiaries, as well as Bantam Books, Doubleday, and Dell); Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (which controls another international media empire, including HarperCollins, Twentieth Century Fox, the Fox Channel, 132 newspapers, and twenty-five magazines, including a percentage of TV Guide); and General Electric (which counts RCA and NBC among its holdings).

As you can see by just turning on the TV, these and other corporate giants are spreading destructive messages about what is normal and desirable in human relations. This doesn't mean that there are bad people in these organizations. Most are simply repeating, and all too often amplifying, the kinds of messages they have learned to accept. They are people who were raised and are now living by deeply ingrained dominator rules. Hence, they also often tend to filter, shut out, or deny information that contradicts their worldview.

I emphasize this because the information I'm outlining isn't intended to blame media people, the wealthy, or even the corporations that control the media. It is to alert you to a dangerous situation that will only change if enough individuals, including people within the mega-corporations that today wield so much power, become aware of what is happening and act.

Children today grow up in homes where televisions are turned on for an average of seven hours per day--more time than most children spend in school or with their parents. The average child is likely to have watched 8,000 screen murders and more than 100,000 acts of violence by the end of elementary school. So by the time she or he is an adult, violence seems natural, and uncaring and abusive relations seem acceptable, even entertaining. George Gerbner, the former dean of the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School of Communication, believes that all this "cultivates an exaggerated sense of insecurity, mistrust, and anxiety about the mean world seen on television.... Media violence demonstrates power and paves the way for repression."

Simply put, media violence and the normalization of insensitivity support dominator politics. When we condone, support, and export violent media, we are helping to create mindsets receptive to "strongman" leaders who can get things "back under control" with punitive rather than caring policies.

The ratio of men to women on U.S. television further supports dominator beliefs, habits, and policies. According to studies, it's a shocking two to one. What does this massive imbalance subliminally communicate to children and adults? Isn't it that men are more important than women? Furthermore, what is communicated by the fact that women are disproportionately cast as the victims of crimes and violence? Doesn't this too reinforce the message that men are active, women are passive, and that violence against women is natural?

And doesn't the low ratio of poor people on television and the casting of people of color disproportionately as criminals or victims of crimes also invalidate the actual experiences, dreams, and needs of people of color? The huge toll of energy and. the heroic fortitude it takes to live day in and day out with the grinding stress of racism and the poverty that often accompany them is virtually invisible on TV.

In contrast, white males are frequently cast in heroic roles, including roles in which they have a great deal of power. Also, these male characters often acquire and use power through violence, further reinforcing dominator stereotypes of masculinity and once again communicating that violence is normal, even desirable, in human relations.

I didn't always think of the media as political. I certainly didn't think the media spread a regressive political agenda, having often heard corporate and political figures complain that the media is "too liberal." It wasn't until I began to analyze the content of mass media systematically that it became evident--despite all the talk about democracy, freedom, and equality--that the media often support the opposite.

Not only do the media tend to make relations based on domination, and even violence, seem the inevitable order of things, but, with few exceptions, the mass media have also steadily "dumbed down" their content. This is true not only of television but the print media as well, which is affected by the massive consolidation of ownership in book, newspaper, and magazine publishing.

While this dumbing down is sometimes justified on commercial grounds (the idea being that this is what a mass audience wants), it is actually a way to dumb down the mass audience, making us more easily manipulated both commercially and politically. As was often evident in the debates between George W. Bush and Al Gore during the 2000 presidential campaign, the media force political candidates to dumb down their speeches and other messages and instead fool around like comedians on late-night shows. This effectively substitutes superficial soundbites for serious coverage of important ideas and issues.

Consider that during the same period that Aid to Families with Dependent Children was massively cut, the U.S. government gave away millions of dollars to huge corporations to help them advertise their products overseas: for example, $16 million to Gallo, $9 million to Pillsbury, $4 million to M&M candies, $1 million to McDonald's, $1.5 million to Campbell's Soup, and $2 million to Fruit of the Loom. But the mainstream press didn't point out that this corporate welfare was the direct outcome of political contributions made by corporate interests, which quite literally are writing their own laws.

Political contributions from communications and electronic industry sources to federal candidates in the 1995-1996 election cycle totaled over $53 million. However, barely mentioned in the news was the obvious fact that these contributions had something to do with the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which legalized the largest concentration of media control in U.S. history.

Another thing you won't find making front-page news is the despotic nature of some of the regimes and would-be regimes our government has been arming and training. Even after the September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, only the alternative media pointed out that during the 1980s the Reagan administration supported--indeed, helped organize--fundamentalist Muslims to push the Soviets out of Afghanistan. And only alternative news outlets noted the fact that many of Osama bin Laden's cohorts, the Taliban, and possibly bin Laden himself--the people the U.S. government hold responsible for the September 11 massacre--received military and financial support from the CIA and U.S.-supported fundamentalist Pakistanis.

The narrowing of the information available to us goes beyond the subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, internal censorship of the media that has been thoroughly documented by Ben Bagdikian, Robert McChesney, Dean Alger, and others. As Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber document in Trust Us, We're Experts, almost half of our news is now generated by public relations firms in the service of major corporate interests.

A study by the Columbia Journalism Review found that in a typical issue of the Wall Street Journal more than half the news stories were based solely on press releases from public relations firms. Not only that, video news releases--entire news stories written, filmed, and produced by public relations firms--are transmitted by satellite feed or the Internet to thousands of TV stations around the world. These public relations firms are hired specifically to put a positive "spin" on corporate activities and images. So it shouldn't surprise us that our news is heavily filtered even before it gets into the hands of the people who decide what's fit to broadcast or print.

The seriousness of our environmental problems is another topic treated gingerly by the mass media. Scientists keep warning us about global warming, holes in the ozone layer, the loss of biodiversity, and other threats to ecological balance--and hence to the health of every one of us and even to our survival as a species. But these warnings are rarely on our front pages.

For example, in 1993, 1,700 scientists, including the majority of Nobel laureates from the sciences, issued "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity," which spelled out why, "if not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future ... and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life." But this dire warning wasn't even reported by most newspapers and TV newscasts. And when it was, it was tucked away as a short item with no details or editorial comment. On the day of its release, the New York Times instead found front-page space for a story about the origins of rock and roll, and the Globe and Mail's front page made room for a large photo of cars arranged in the shape of Mickey Mouse.

The mainstream media are owned by giant corporations, and their advertising customers are giant corporations. So the media constantly push consumption of ever more goods--and rarely mention the environmental depletion and pollution caused by overconsumption. They also rarely mention that many of the products they advertise damage our health. For example, as long as cigarette ads were a major source of revenue, the media rarely reported on the link between cigarettes and cancer. In the same way, we rarely see reports that dairy products are actually harmful to many people because of allergies, or that there are data linking prostate cancer to high consumption of dairy products.

When I first became aware of these trends, I became angry and alarmed. Angry, because we depend on the media for reliable information, and alarmed because filtered and dumbed-down information makes it difficult for any of us--including government and business policymakers--to make adaptive choices, much less to effectively participate in elections and other democratic processes.

Getting Down to Fundamentals

How did we let all this happen in a nation that prides itself on its credo of freedom, equality, and democracy? How did our elections become a mass-marketing circus in which outcomes can be controlled by big donors? How did the free flow of information become so strangled by those who have economic, and therefore political, control? Why do we increasingly find ourselves in a nation where rankings of "superiors" over "inferiors" are protected by government policies, regardless of the costs to our health and environment?

One reason is, of course, the mass media itself, which constantly distract us by focusing our attention on a lurid murder trial, a sex scandal, sports, or fashion, while offering only the most superficial and all too often slanted coverage of the things that matter in our lives. Another reason is that we're busy just making ends meet. Americans today work more hours than workers in any other industrialized nation, including Japan. When we come home tired and just want to spend some time with our families, or simply relax, it's hard to make the effort to find out what's really going on in the world.

But the problem goes far deeper. A major aspect of the contemporary dominator regression is a concerted push back to the kinds of parent-child and gender relations that promote acceptance of top-down rankings across the board. Indeed, one of the most dangerous aspects of the current dominator regression is the worldwide push to strengthen the kinds of family and gender relations that are the foundation upon which the entire dominator pyramid rests.

You may think that politics have nothing to do with what happens in intimate relationships, and vice versa. But if that's the case, why do you think political regressions--be they rightist or leftist, religious or secular--have focused so much on pushing us back to domination and submission in the relations between parents and children and between men and women? It is because through intimate relations we learn to accept either domination and control as normal, inevitable, and right, or partnership ways of life. This is why many of the most repressive modern regimes--from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union to Khomeini's Iran and the Taliban's Afghanistan--have sprung up where family and gender relations based on domination and submission are firmly in place. It is also why, once in power, these regimes have vigorously pushed policies that have as their goal the reinstatement of a punitive father in complete control of his family.

So how will future generations see our time? Will they look back at it as a period when the United States was retreating from the vision that inspired its founders? Will they be living in a nation of glaring contrasts of poverty and wealth, homelessness, hopelessness, and heartlessness? Will they see in the mass media and in much of reality a culture that is violent, polarized, and cynical? Will their families and education conform to traditions of domination rather than support real democracy? Or will they see a renewed flowering of the American vision of equality, democracy, respect, and freedom for all?

As you have seen, many gains already made are in jeopardy today. It's easy to get discouraged or, like the proverbial child with its finger in the dike, try to plug the rising waters of dominator regression one hole at a time, always from a defensive position. But this piecemeal approach doesn't help us build anything substantial for the future or prevent more waves of dominator regressions.

It is precisely during such periods of regression that we need to be proactive. In the first stage of the modern partnership movement, the emphasis was primarily on the top of the dominator pyramid--on economic and political relations in the so-called public sphere. Very little emphasis was placed on the so-called private sphere of relations, which were seen as secondary. As a result, we still lack the solid foundations upon which to base a truly democratic and equitable society. The integrated partnership political agenda focuses on four cornerstones: partnership childhood relations; partnership gender relations; partnership economics; and cultural beliefs, myths, and stories which support partnership.

There are key strategic building blocks to put each of these cornerstones into place--and each of us can help with their construction. First, we must reclaim emotionally laden words--such as tradition, morality, family, and values--which are being misused to regress society. When told we need to strengthen families, we can ask what kinds of families. We can point out that the phrase family values has been used to regress us to male-controlled families in which women can manipulate but not assert themselves and children are taught early that love is conditional on absolute obedience to orders, no matter how unjust or painful they may be. When told we must be more moral, we can ask whether it is moral to dominate others and even to kill people of different beliefs or lifestyles. When directed to go back to "traditional" values, we can enlighten others to what those older traditions really are: traditions of partnership, rather than domination, that date back thousands of years (archaeological indications being that cultural domination didn't appear in human history until around 7,000 BCE).

The chart above illustrates partnership alternatives to these emotionally loaded phrases.

A major goal of the partnership political agenda is ending the intimate violence that has traditionally been used to maintain --and provide a basic model for--relations of domination and submission. With the kinds of resources that have been put into such campaigns as the wars on drugs and terrorism, a national as well as international campaign to stop intimate violence could have enormous impact. It could help the millions who are beaten, raped, and at risk of being killed. It could help unite people from all segments of the political spectrum --conservative and liberal, religious and secular--to help both victims and perpetrators regain their essential human dignity.

Encouraging organizations to unite behind such an anti-violence campaign can be as easy as requesting them to do so in personal letters accompanying our donation dollars to their cause. We can invite community leaders to publicly state that intimate violence is immoral, intolerable, and must be stopped. We can begin by approaching religious leaders. Some religious organizations are already joining human rights groups in condemning family violence.

Imagine the progress that could be achieved if cardinals and bishops, as well as rabbis, pastors, priests, mullahs, and other leaders, regularly preached from their pulpits that beating spouses and children is a sin. Or if anti-violence messages from celebrities like Clint Eastwood and Mel Gibson and sports figures like Junior Seau and Tiger Woods disentangled perceived masculinity from violence? Or if Oprah Winfrey gave top priority to a campaign to end family violence? Our world might change dramatically overnight.

Ultimately, we need to work together. We need both more focus and more determination. We have to be in this for the long run. None of us can do everything, but collectively we can achieve anything.

Making the changes needed for a partnership culture won't be easy. Each step will be fiercely resisted. But by working together for an integrated partnership agenda, we can help realize the American dream--our personal dream--of freedom and equality for all.

Riane Eisler is a cultural historian internationally renowned for her bestsellers, The Chalice and the Blade, Sacred Pleasure, Tomorrow's Children, and the newly released Power of Partnership, from which this article is adapted. Dr. Eisler is president of the Center for Partnership Studies (www.partnershipway.org), has taught at the University of California at Los Angeles, and keynotes conferences worldwide.

The Political Vocabulary of
Domination and Partnership

Dominator/Control

Family values
Pro-life
Educational
 accountability
Capitalist economics
Free market
Compassionate
 conservative
Traditional values
Globalization
Traditional morality
Women's work

Politically correct

Partnership/Respect

Valuing families
Pro-living
Educational
 responsibility
Economics of caring
Fair market
Politics of caring
Humane traditions
Global responsibility
Moral sensitivity
Caring work
Personally caring

COPYRIGHT 2002 American Humanist Association
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group