The Cult of the RNC
CREEPy.
"Up close, what Bush is assembling on the local level looks less like a political campaign than what is known in business as a multilevel marketing scheme. In an MLM, like Mary Kay Cosmetics or Tupperware, each independent entrepreneur who joins the sales force -- a Betty Kitchen, say -- also becomes a recruiter who is responsible for bringing in several new entrepreneurs underneath her. The result is a pyramid-like sales structure that broadens to include more and more recruits with each descending level.
"The notion of translating the MLM concept into politics is visionary -- and also a little disquieting. Pyramid-based companies have proved amazingly successful at raising up armies of enterprising Americans; Amway, the world's most successful MLM, has more than 3.6 million distributors. But some MLM's thrive by imposing their own strange and insular cultures on their recruits, and while they offer the illusion of self-employment, those at the top of the pyramid often demand a rigid kind of uniformity and loyalty. Amway has often been compared to a cult -- so often, in fact, that on its own Web site the company feels the need to answer such frequently asked questions as 'I've heard rumors that Amway is a cult; is this true?' and 'Why do Amway meetings appear to some people like a cult?' When I met with Ken Mehlman, Bush's campaign manager, in suburban Washington, and suggested that the Bush campaign could fairly be compared to Amway in its approach, he agreed without hesitation. 'Amway, no question,' he said."
Then there's the Republican "frontier," wealthy exurbs of big SUVs and much bigger houses; Potemkin villages for the affluent:
"The clusters of new rental town houses going up in Franklin and Delaware counties, still fresh with the scent of painted lumber, have created for Republicans what the colonel, drawing on his military career, likes to call 'a target-rich environment.' Our first stop was a development called Times Square Apartments. As we approached the first set of doors, I mentioned to Ashenhurst that I was heartened to see quaint little stores thriving near the entrance, like Old Stuff Antiques and the Casual Gourmet.
"'Oh, those stores aren't real,' he said with a smile, and when I looked closer, I saw that he was right. They were merely decorative store windows, a few feet deep at most, designed to create for residents the warm aura of a bustling town center. Later, when we drove across the road to 'the Farms,' where Ashenhurst lives, I was surprised to find that the horses peering out over white picket fences were in fact not horses at all, but rusted re-creations. There was an inescapable political undertone to this new town-house culture. The developers had designed communities of white nostalgia -- theme parks for the conservative middle class."
"Up close, what Bush is assembling on the local level looks less like a political campaign than what is known in business as a multilevel marketing scheme. In an MLM, like Mary Kay Cosmetics or Tupperware, each independent entrepreneur who joins the sales force -- a Betty Kitchen, say -- also becomes a recruiter who is responsible for bringing in several new entrepreneurs underneath her. The result is a pyramid-like sales structure that broadens to include more and more recruits with each descending level.
"The notion of translating the MLM concept into politics is visionary -- and also a little disquieting. Pyramid-based companies have proved amazingly successful at raising up armies of enterprising Americans; Amway, the world's most successful MLM, has more than 3.6 million distributors. But some MLM's thrive by imposing their own strange and insular cultures on their recruits, and while they offer the illusion of self-employment, those at the top of the pyramid often demand a rigid kind of uniformity and loyalty. Amway has often been compared to a cult -- so often, in fact, that on its own Web site the company feels the need to answer such frequently asked questions as 'I've heard rumors that Amway is a cult; is this true?' and 'Why do Amway meetings appear to some people like a cult?' When I met with Ken Mehlman, Bush's campaign manager, in suburban Washington, and suggested that the Bush campaign could fairly be compared to Amway in its approach, he agreed without hesitation. 'Amway, no question,' he said."
Then there's the Republican "frontier," wealthy exurbs of big SUVs and much bigger houses; Potemkin villages for the affluent:
"The clusters of new rental town houses going up in Franklin and Delaware counties, still fresh with the scent of painted lumber, have created for Republicans what the colonel, drawing on his military career, likes to call 'a target-rich environment.' Our first stop was a development called Times Square Apartments. As we approached the first set of doors, I mentioned to Ashenhurst that I was heartened to see quaint little stores thriving near the entrance, like Old Stuff Antiques and the Casual Gourmet.
"'Oh, those stores aren't real,' he said with a smile, and when I looked closer, I saw that he was right. They were merely decorative store windows, a few feet deep at most, designed to create for residents the warm aura of a bustling town center. Later, when we drove across the road to 'the Farms,' where Ashenhurst lives, I was surprised to find that the horses peering out over white picket fences were in fact not horses at all, but rusted re-creations. There was an inescapable political undertone to this new town-house culture. The developers had designed communities of white nostalgia -- theme parks for the conservative middle class."
posted by John at 11:27 AM
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