Democratic societies can't force people. Therefore they have to control what they think.

The process of shaping opinion, attitudes, and perceptions was termed the 'engineering of consent' by one of the founders of the modern public relations industry, Edward Bernays.

In the primary debates for the 2016 election, every single Republican candidate was a climate change denier, with one exception, John Kasich - the "rational moderate" - who said it may be happening but we shouldn't do anything about it. For a long time, the media have downplayed the issue.

[Ronald] Reagan bitterly hated unions and wanted them destroyed. This began with the air controllers' strike and went on from there.

But, that’s the whole point of corporatization - to try to remove the public from making decisions over their own fate, to limit the public arena, to control opinion, to make sure that the fundamental decisions that determine how the world is going to be run - which includes production, commerce, distribution, thought, social policy, foreign policy, everything - are not in the hands of the public, but rather in the hands of highly concentrated private power. In effect, tyranny unaccountable to the public.

Bear in mind that capitalism is a tiny period of human society. You never really had capitalism, you always had one or another variant of state capitalism.

[Mikhail Bakunin] expectations were generally confirmed, including his prediction that some would seek to gain state power on the backs of popular revolution, then constructing a "Red bureaucracy" that would be one of the worst tyrannies in history, while others would recognize that power lies elsewhere and would serve as its apologists, becoming mystifies, "disablers," and managers while demanding the right to function in "technocratic isolation," in World Bank lingo.