Human Disaster Capitalism and Teach for America
During the eugenics glory days of the 1920s, American elites who deemed themselves the only citizens fit for democracy argued that, for the Republic to work, a new class of leadership was required to efficiently steer society in directions that the great unwashed herd was incapable of doing through real democratic governance. Walter Lippman was a chief spokesman for this new American variety of practical fascism under the guise of democracy, and he carried on an active debate in the press with John Dewey.
As conditions coalesced for the horrific rise of the Third Reich, Dewey persistently argued that the goal of democratic governance is not to prepare a super-corps of efficient administrators to run society but, rather, to educate the citizenry so that they can adequately judge the worth and implications of policies, knowledge claims, and actions.
Lippman was the first to argue for what he termed the "manufacture of consent," by which he meant the manipulation of public opinion along the lines of the technocratic elites' chosen policies. Now almost 100 years later, and with the help of social media manipulation, "knowledge" production by think tanks, and corporate philanthropists' paternalistic creations like TFA and KIPP, Lippman's democratic dystopia is coming to its propagandistic fruition.
The difference between then and now is that there is no widely-circulated public debate being waged about the desirability of societal leadership by a privileged corps of elite Adderall-addled converts whose humanity and empathy have been displaced by a bare-knuckled arrogant zealotry aimed at socioeconomic solutions that strengthen the inequality and steroidal hierarchies undergirding capitalism.
The debate so far about Teach for America, for instance, has been focused narrowly on how TFA harms public schools, children, and the teaching profession. Important for sure, but the focus has had little to do with TFA's primary thrust toward brainwashing a new generation of "leaders" who have drunk the TFA kool-Schools Matter: Human Disaster Capitalism and Teach for America: