The worst part is that we know for a fact that all of our institutions have been subverted, and that McCarthy was correct, but it isnt acknowledged. A commission was put together to find out why the Great Depression happened and they found this instead. One of the people on committee was so shocked at the findings they killed themselves. I’m super shocked yt hasn’t censored this yet!
I had never actually heard of this guy (Norman Dodd) before now.
I can't really watch videos on the device I'm on now but I did check out his most famous work* and I can definitely see how he was influential among libertarians. One thing I did like about it was the assertion that a purely "empirical", scientific and/or technocratic approach to politics can have unforeseen (and potentially disastrous) results. Some of it hasn't aged well, though...one of the very few specific works cited is
"An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy" by Gunnar Myrdal, which according to Dodd resulted in "statements which were most critical of our Constitution". I think that most people would hopefully agree that the Constitution in the early 1950s, or at least the way it was enforced, could've used some critical statements when it came to the issue of race.
Also, there's some other weird stuff, like how he states that a lot of these Foundations/NGOs/what-have-you are funded by wealthy private interests (Rockefeller, Carnegie etc.), and that capital has a tendency to concentrate (and the resulting political power resulting from that presents a potential threat to democratic government, the Constitution etc.)...but he seems to stop the economic critique there and locates the source of the ills with social scientists, weirdly enough...? Also, the motivations of these individuals is never really fleshed out, with statements in the document such as one suggesting that grants had been made that "sometimes denied the principles of the American way of life"...without saying what those principles were exactly, or how they were denied.
It's just weird that there are all these inferences to all the schemes that the eggheads and academics have cooked up to control the masses, yet there's never really any mention of what they believe exactly, or the specific ways they attempt to put those beliefs into practice. There seems to be multiple themes in the work, including education, the Foundations, the state/federal government, etc, but it's just not tied together especially well IMO. For a critique of the way public education systems aid either capital or the state, I'd recommend John Taylor Gatto instead...I recognize the phenomena mentioned in criticisms of the public education system, the regimentation and subsumption of the individual to a collective system, etc, but I still feel it's better than the parochial schools which existed prior...so I don't necessarily share Dodd's fear of "decreasing the dependency of education on the resources in the local community and freeing it from many of the natural safeguards inherent in this American tradition."
*
https://archive.org/details/DoddReportToTheReeceCommitteeOnFoundations-1954-RobberBaron/
