Compare & Contrast: Both Huxley and Bernays Are Explaining the Same Thing

Edward Bernays, Freud's favorite nephew saw it clearly, already in the '20s, 30 years before Huxley. At that time, neither Bernays nor anyone else thought it was exceptional that the "best" minds would do all the thinking, and didn't regard it with anything other than calm pleasure:
"“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” 
It is interesting to consider these two leading thinkers' (Bernays and Huxley) explanations of essentially the same phenomenon: The "manufacture of the consent of the governed."

Sen. Yertle's Both Symptom and Source; LowBar's NEVER Been A "Promise."

How yer ol' perfesser Seezit: Sen Yertle's behavior as an active agent for the Corporatz' and Oiligarchs' agendae is approved--likely heartily endorsed--by his constituents, because it is so successfully camouflaged by/as racism, both his own and the culture's. He can and does frame his lickspittle fealty to the Corporatz' anti-worker. anti-democratic, anti-humane agendae in the guise of an attack on that "Damn NEGRO in the Whitehouse."

Framed like that, there's is NOTHING those "Saltine-Murkins" won't excuse.

This is consonant with my theory that those same constituents are willing, indeed delighted, to bear a small inconvenience or deprivation if by doing so they can assure the denial of ANY benefit to those whom they view and detest as inferiors.

Re: Prez Lowbar and his "promise?"

Woody'z sad to hafta tell ya, at this late date: "Obama" was NEVER a "promise."

He was ALWAYS a brand.

His campaign won an award that year for the 'best new brand."

He was NEVER what the rhetoric pretended he'd be.

The GOPhux threw the election to put this cypher in office, but he was NEVER gonna be anything but a political palate-cleanser, an interval between successive bouts of "sanitary" GOPhux fascismo.

How could anyone with the intellectual acuity of a sponge NOT have known that the Owners of the country would NOT turn the management of their operations over to ANYONE who posed the tiniest SCINTILLA of a chance of CHANGING anything?

Really!
What the fuck WERE they thinking?

Barry Brought Boxing Gloves to Bare-Knuckles Brawl

Yer ol' perfesser thinks Pres. Lowbar didn't understand the "all-out, no-holds-barred, bare-knuckles, tooth-and-nail, no-quarter, gouging-and-biting, hair-pulling, I'm-gonna-fuck-you-up" nature of the opposition arrayed against him, their ferocity and ruthlessness. And their glee!

Prez Lowbar unaccountably din't ever actually  seem to foresee and imagine that the GOPhux would so totally abrogate the underlying ethical/political principals which had mad 'democracy' work for the previous 200+ years. He was, somehow, naively, unprepared for it. For some reason, I think HE thought they'd play fair. Wrong-o!

Lowbar's misadventujres basically just illustrate how fragile had the system been. It had ALWAYS been "possible" for some faction to tyrannize the rest of the system; it had just never been "thinkable."  There had been intimations during the Newtster's furious attacks on "Clenis" Bill Clinton. That impeachment fiasco was nothing but a power play.

But with America's First Black President in the White house, suddenly, not only was it THINKABLE, but it was DOABLE. In his presidency, because of the simmering, barely repressed rage of disentitled White voters, and their barely suppressed fear and loathing of the growing, non-White demographic, the Righturds had an unprecedented opportunity to pursue their long-term (remember John Birch?), historical, anti-democratic, anti-popular, anti-social agenda under the cover of (acceptably) attacking the "illegitimate," dark-skinned "pretender." It was "the perfect storm."

Interestingly, it was never--as the mobsters inna Godfather mutter as they strangle the life out of a rival--"poysonal; jis binness, youse knows?"