Fellowship founder: "We are in the age of minority control."

madfloridian

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Thu Sep-03-09 12:27 AM
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Fellowship founder: "We are in the age of minority control."

On page 143 of Jeff Sharlet's The Family, there is portion of a pamphlet he sent to his followers. It was called A Better Way. To him that better way was for the majority to be controlled by the minority.

All the vital activities of industry, commerce, and govern-
ment are carried on by corporations and other formal organizations. Such bodies are continually growing in size, and hence the top leadership is continually growing in power and influence.

We have entered an era when the masses of the people are dependent upon a rapidly diminishing number of leaders for the determination of their pattern of life and the definition of their ultimate goals. It is the age of minority control."

I did not find anymore excerpts from the pamphlet, but I found this at a blog with quotes from the The Family.

Lest anyone mistake Abram’s meaning during wartime,
the pamphlet went on to point to the Axis powers as examples of what could
go wrong if “minority control” got into the wrong hands. The pam-
phlet had good things to say about Hitler’s “youth work,” but it had
no use for Hitler’s military adventurism, the crudest and ultimately
most ineffective form of evangelism ever invented. But just as a mi-
nority “can wreck a nation,” a “ righteous ‘remnant'" chosen by God
can redeem it. “Men whose success shows them to have the ability to
lead cannot evade the responsibility for delivering America from its
present curse of spiritual indifference and moral decadence. These
are the men whom others will follow.”

The Family

Sharlet in another interview continues this theme of the elite minority being in charge.

SP: Vereide was the original source of the anti-union ideas?

JS: He's given a vision. He's obsessed with Harry Bridges, the great union organizer. One night in 1935, after the great strike of 1934, Vereide says God gave him a vision that Christianity has spent 2,000 years looking in the wrong direction.

SP: Helping the poor, you mean?

JS: Yes. The down and out, the suffering, the weak, and the poor. God doesn't want to have soup kitchens or social welfare programs, God doesn't like what FDR is doing. What about the up-and-out? Don't they deserve love as well? Doesn't Henry Ford need somebody to love him?

SP: Tell me about how Doug Coe (the successor to Vereide and the current head of The Family) admires Hitler.

JS: Vereide did too. In 1948, The Family is feeling good about themselves; Taft-Hartley (the law which restricted union power) was passed in 1947, which was part of their original goal. And Abram publishes a pamphlet for congressmen, for private distribution, called "A Better Way." He writes, "We have entered an area where the masses of people are dependent on a rapidly diminishing number of leaders for the determination of their pattern of life and the definition of their ultimate goals. It is the age of minority control." "The age of minority control" is something they believe in deeply. They do talk about what could go wrong if minority control got into the wrong hands. As Doug Coe would (later) say, Hitler and Lenin and Mao and these strong men of history understood the New Testament better than any other leader of the 20th century; they applied it to evil ends, but they behaved as God wanted. God wants a strong man to exert leadership in this age of minority control.

The Prospect..Focusing on The Family

If you really think about it the centrist party leadership has in some ways followed this theme of "minority rule." The DLC for example was formed to make sure they did not need the traditional constituents of the party. They began to get their money from corporations, and they did not have to have views that made it hard to win.

That does follow the theme Vereide set forth...being in an age of minority rule.