There's (multi) levels (marketing) to this shit
From the rise of the DeVos family to the crypto craze, MLM is everywhere in conservative politics
By Margaret Bourke-White - The American Way of Life, located online in many places, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17241767
Last night, my fiancé Hannah showed me a video that captures our present moment in the rare way that great art can — think Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock, or that TV game show “Hole in the Wall” where players need to get through a hole in a wall.
In the video, a YouTuber goes on a somewhat hard-to-follow rant about how Uber Eats and Amazon support communism, before touching briefly on the evils of the “plan-demic” and finally bragging about making money while she sleeps. Given the headline of this post, you can probably see the punchline coming. “I can literally spend any amount of money I want and I don’t have to think about it, and I want you to have that too,” she says from the backseat of her car. “I did not know that MLM was an option.”
Why single out this video, when there are probably millions like it? Well, for one thing, it does feel like it captures a particular rise and grind ethos that’s ubiquitous in the age of the gig economy. And for as much as the video is peculiar, it’s not novel at all. The arguments are copy-paste rightwing talking points: big tech is evil, the scarcity created by capitalism is actually communism, success can be yours if you free yourself from your liberal-welfare mindset. And so on.
What makes the video interesting, though, is not the relative paucity of evidence provided — enormous, donut-shaped dog toy notwithstanding. What’s so interesting about it is that, probably unbeknownst to the Loman-esque figure herself, she’s participating in a longstanding conservative tradition: scamming people through MLM scams! Not only that, but she’s using the language of democracy and rightwing populism in the process.
The historian and author Kim Phillips-Fein writes about this history in Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal. (See also her recent interview about the book, published in 2009, at The Dig.) Phillips-Fein tells the story of the founding of AmWay — a contraction of American Way — in 1959, which today remains one of the world’s largest direct sellers. The founders, Jay Van Andel and Richard DeVos (yes, of that DeVos family), were committed to the “inspirational ideal of entrepreneurship,” and were “devoted with missionary zeal to the very idea of free enterprise.” The company would hold enormous rallies, swelling to 30,000 large by 1975, that “doubled as celebrations of free enterprise and capitalism.”
The late 1950s marked a crucial evolutionary point in US conservatism. The New Deal had ushered in an era of relative collectivism by US standards, which the right saw as a clear path to outright communism. The end of WWII marked the start of the Cold War, though not the beginning of anti-communist sentiment in the US, which predated even the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917. To conservatives, the New Deal’s durability and the seeming consensus it created was a threat to the very concept of freedom itself. This fear was most acutely articulated by Friedrich Hayek in 1944’s The Road to Serfdom. To Hayek, the very idea of government regulation for the public good was tantamount to “central planning” — code for Stalinist totalitarianism — and ran contrary to the kind of liberty that could only be created and unleashed by the so-called free market.
As a brief aside, the conservative distrust of “elites” and the academy traces back at least to this period. Anti-communism held that the market — that is, the world — was too complicated for any person or set of persons to understand, let alone control. Any attempt to impose restrictions on the market was not only doomed to failure, but was a sign of hubris and potentially despotic impulses. Liberal eggheads who opposed laissez faire economics were little different than Bolshevik bureaucrats, and the coastal institutions that produced said eggheads were the United States’ version of worker-run soviets. If that sounds familiar, it’s because anti-communism continues to animate conservative discourse in the United States.
In the face of New Deal hegemony, conservatives continued to face a problem they’d faced since the philosophy emerged after the French Revolution, namely that conservatism isn’t a good deal for the vast majority of the population. Sure, if you were a titan of industry, or the head of the Chamber of Commerce (as AmWay founder Van Andel would later become), conservatism was a no-brainer. Conservatives had traditionally drawn their power from the church, the military, and landlords and large business owners. How would the movement expand in the United States?
AmWay offered one solution, synthesizing populist sentiment with Hayekian notions of freedom: everyone could become a titan of industry, if only the government would get off your neck. The only thing stopping the suburban mom or pop from realizing their full potential were unions — which duped people into thinking of themselves as members of the working class rather than individual small business owners — and government bureaucrats, those power-hungry elites who would turn the United States into the USSR if given the chance. Well, AmWay was going to fight back, and you could be on the front line of spreading freedom and democracy, and maybe even get rich in the process. Perhaps not coincidentally, as Phillips-Fein writes, the company’s founders “had ample cause to resent regulations: AmWay was under investigation in the late 1970s by the Federal Trade Commission, which was trying to ascertain whether the company was in fact a pyramid scheme.”
The resiliency of this dynamic, both philosophically and materially, is astounding. Spend any time at CPAC, as I unfortunately have, and you’ll hear versions of this rhetoric in every speech and panel. Go to any conservative website, and you’ll find various MLM scams pushing vitamins, gold, prepper gear, and anything else a charismatic host can scare a retiree into buying.
The crypto craze of the last several years also follows this pattern. No less a rightwing folk hero than Steve Bannon recently announced his involvement in a new crypto coin, which is already raising some concern among experts. Bannon, in a remarkable coincidence, was previously indicted for raising money for a “build the wall” scam, only to be pardoned later by Trump. In addition to any financial incentives, non-government issued currency fits in nicely with Bannon’s greater aims of destroying what he calls the “administrative state” in furtherance of capitalism: “the harder-nosed the capitalism, the better.”
Without weighing in on the specifics of Bannon’s new coin, in general, there is considerable evidence to suggest the digital coin market more broadly is functioning as an MLM-style pyramid scheme. One of the reasons that Bitcoin and the rest engender such cult-like evangelism is that they depend on the “greater fool” theory. These assets have value as long as there’s another person to buy them for more than you paid, but eventually the number of fools runs out and someone is left holding the hot potato. The more these currencies become entwined with traditional currencies and markets, the greater the systemic risk is to the rest of us should the whole trend eventually collapse under its own contradictions. Certainly, the cryptocoin phenomenon extends far beyond conservatives, but they pair together well already and the relationship between the movements will likely only deepen.
So when your neighbor is trying to sell you something from Mary Kay, or the guy at Buffalo Wild Wings won’t shut up about Elon Musk and Dogecoin, know that they aren’t just trying to get a few bucks out of your pocket hoping that you’re a greater fool than they are. They’re participating in the grand tradition of using faux-populist rhetoric to decimate the last remaining vestiges of the New Deal by converting the working class into atomized entrepreneurs. But if anyone needs make-up, vitamins, or fractions of a digital coin, hit me up. I know a guy.