MAY 12, 2025
Jeffery Zavadil received his PhD from Arizona State University and his MA from Penn State, both in political theory, earning multiple academic awards and fellowships. He currently blogs as tribune 2.0 at www.starsthroughthestorm.blogspot.com and is writing a novel of green political fiction. In addition to teaching college-level political theory, he taught English in South Korea and served as a youth mentor with Big Brothers/Big Sisters. He currently works for the US State Department and been an intelligence analyst since 1998, first with the US Army Reserve and then the Defense Intelligence Agency.
The first basic power technique addressed in this handbook was force; the second was economic control. The third basic technique is mental control or ideology. These are general categories and we can fit most, if not all, of the rest of the power techniques that we'll discuss under them: elites control people by coercing them with force, compelling them with economic incentives, and/or conning them to conform. Continue Reading...
American political culture currently contains a strong bias in favor of political and social stability over other values -- implicitly, stability is promoted even more than the political values that we trumpet to the world, such as freedom, democracy, and justice. Social stability has its proper place, to be sure: no one wants social chaos; excessive change, dynamism, and tumult make for uncertain and miserable living; and a foundation of Continue Reading...
This essay is an entry in the Handbook for Democracy, a catalog of power techniques used by elites to exercise control and undermine the democratic self-government of the people. The next basic power technique is economic deprivation: if you can deprive an individual or group of the material resources needed for survival, for comfort, or to achieve important goals, then you can exert a great deal of control over them. Economic deprivation is Continue Reading...
This essay is an entry in the Handbook for Democracy, a catalog of power techniques used by elites to exercise control and undermine the democratic self-government of the people. The most obvious and fundamental technique to exercise power is, of course, naked, physical force. Force - the direct use of violence, or the threat to do so - is the most basic way of controlling people, and many other power techniques use it or are backed up by it, Continue Reading...
The first lesson that must be learned to have a healthy democracy is this: there are those in society who, intentionally or not, are enemies of democracy. There is always an elite that believes itself better able to rule than everyone else, that holds self-government by the people in contempt, and that tries to acquire predominance of control through force, fraud, ideology, money, and other forms of power. Maintaining a vibrant democracy that Continue Reading...
I keep hearing the media call the faction that has caused the government shutdown"nihilists." But that's a misdiagnosis. They're zealots, not nihilists: nihilists don't believe in anything, but these guys are fanatics, true believers in the dogma of unregulated markets, minimal government, no social programs, and all the other unbalanced ideas of modern conservatism. Continue Reading...
I’ve had an idea kicking around my head for a needful project: a collection of political theory essays and entries that describes the multitude of ways that elites and oligarchs use power to undermine democracy. The idea is to lay out threats to democracy in clear language to help people be more aware of them, and to suggest solutions to combat them. Continue Reading...
The Zimmerman acquittal is about preserving a pernicious, but deeply embedded, cultural image in America that young black men are, almost by nature, criminals. It isn't true, of course; high crime in inner city neighborhoods where many black people have no choice but to live is due to poverty and other factors, not race. Yet this stereotype exists and must be knocked down. Continue Reading...
Our dominant cultural image of barbarians is of filthy, illiterate, bloodthirsty brutes: imagine a fur-clad, lice-infested savage ferociously raiding a village, axe in one hand and torch in the other, who then heartily celebrates with a flagon of ale and a giant roasted leg of some animal or another. Barbarians are noted for their contempt for and domination of the weak, yet barbarians are also admired for their brawn and tenacity: think of Continue Reading...
I'm a liberal, a progressive, some would even call me a socialist. And I don't stay awake at night thinking of ways to take your freedom. I don't stay awake planning a war on Christmas. Or Easter, either. I don't stay awake thinking of ways to give your money to lazy people. I don't stay awake plotting how to ruin families. I don't stay awake thinking of how to drive the Continue Reading...
While most of what I write focuses on topics of political and philosophical interest to me in an effort to help change how people think and thus, in the long run, change the world, the personal ethics of the writer, philosopher, and activist are a necessary topic to explore too. If one finds oneself living in unjust times, how should one conduct oneself? That question may seem like it has an easy response: "As best as one Continue Reading...
I have observed America’s political system for 25 years now waiting for some progressive legislation to help deal with our many social, economic, and environmental problems. The last real liberal program was enacted in the 1960s with the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. A few times since then watered-down laws have been passed, such as the Americans With Disabilities Act (of 1990!) or Continue Reading...
Much has been made since last year's election of demographic shifts in America and their effects on our politics. Pollsters, pundits, and politicians have all pointed out that the racial, ethnic, and gender makeup of America is evolving. Soon whites will be just one of a number of minority groups, bringing an end to the politics of fear and resentment on issues of race, sex, gender, and secularism, which has been used so Continue Reading...
I would now like to discuss reductionism, which I think is one of our society’s conceptual blockages to moral and social progress. Reductionism is a form of analysis based on taking things apart and examining the small pieces to determine their properties, in order to create a description of how larger things function in terms of their smaller components. It is also sometimes called the resolutive-compositive method: as when one Continue Reading...
Humanity needs a consensus on a new outlook, a new ethic, to deal with the challenges that we have created for ourselves. The pioneering environmentalist Aldo Leopold 70 years ago called for a "land ethic" to expand our sense of moral community to include mother nature, and we are lagging far behind in doing so. Leopold, like nearly all environmentalists, clearly saw how human beings are connected to and dependent on other Continue Reading...
