Overview
The Trilateral Commission is the body most often named when the claim is that elected government is a front for a private committee. In that literature it is the operational arm of a transatlantic establishment: a place where bankers, officials and academics from three regions agree what policy will be, after which elections decide only who announces it.
The Commission is real, it was founded for close to the reason its critics say, and the overlap between its membership and the United States government in the late 1970s is a matter of record that nobody involved denied. It is also one of the most thoroughly published organisations in this subject. Its membership appears on its own website with names, titles and photographs; its reports are sold; its origin is documented. The argument is about what that record means.
What the Commission actually is
The Commission was founded in 1973 by David Rockefeller to bring together senior figures from North America, Western Europe and Japan — the three centres of industrial democracy at the time — for discussion of shared problems. Zbigniew Brzezinski was its first director. Its structure remains three regional groups, now North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.
It publishes its membership. The current lists name 135 members in North America, 184 in Europe and 96 in Asia Pacific, each with a title and affiliation, and the lists are downloadable. Members are invited, serve in a personal capacity, and are drawn from government, business, media and universities. The Commission has no executive power, issues no instructions and runs no budget beyond its own.
What it produces is meetings and task force reports. Those reports are written by named authors, published commercially, and carry the standard disclaimer that the authors speak for themselves.
Origins
The usual account of the founding is not a denial of anything. An attempt in 1972 to bring Japanese participants into the Bilderberg Meeting did not succeed, and the Commission was created as a body that had a Japanese pillar built into it from the start. That is the ordinary institutional history, and it is also the version the critics tell, with a different emphasis: that when one private forum would not expand, a second was built.
The Carter administration
The episode that moved the Commission from obscurity into American political argument is simple and documented. Jimmy Carter, then governor of Georgia, was among its founding members in 1973. He was elected president in 1976. Walter Mondale, Cyrus Vance, Harold Brown and Brzezinski himself were all Commission members and all held senior office under him.
Contemporary counts of how many members of the administration came from the membership vary with the definition used: Rolling Stone reported sixteen in 1977; a congressional briefing paper in 1981 put it at at least eighteen top-level executives. One scholarly estimate has roughly two fifths of the American membership entering the administration.
This is the strongest fact the theory has, and it is strong. It is also the kind of fact that has an ordinary explanation competing with the extraordinary one: a body that recruits internationally minded senior figures and an administration recruiting internationally minded senior figures draw on the same few hundred people. Which reading someone finds persuasive usually turns on whether they think a shared recruiting pool is itself the mechanism.
The document that does the work
Most of the serious criticism of the Commission runs through one publication, and it is worth reading rather than paraphrasing.
The Crisis of Democracy, written for the Commission by Michel Crozier, Samuel Huntington and Joji Watanuki and taken up at its Kyoto meeting in May 1975, examines whether the democracies of the three regions had become difficult to govern. In the American section, Huntington argues that some of the problems of American governance of the period stemmed from what he calls "an excess of democracy", and that what was needed was "a greater degree of moderation in democracy". The joint conclusions put it more bluntly still: that governability and democracy are, in some measure, "warring concepts".
The credulous reading treats this as the plan being written down. The dismissive reading treats it as three academics writing in their own names, which the report itself says they are. Both are avoiding the same awkward thing. The report is a genuine argument, made to a private body of serving and future officials, that democratic participation had gone too far and that authority needed restoring — and it was published openly, discussed at a meeting whose attendees are known, and sold in bookshops.
What it is not is an instruction. No part of it tells a member to do anything, and no later action by a member has been traced to it in the way the theory requires. It is an argument of the kind academics make, delivered to an audience with unusual access to power.
How it entered the literature
The step from political criticism to standing conspiracy subject can be dated fairly closely, and it happened on the right rather than the left.
In 1979 Barry Goldwater published a memoir containing a passage on the Commission that is still being quoted: that it represented a skilful, coordinated effort to seize and consolidate the four centres of power — political, monetary, intellectual and ecclesiastical. A sitting senator and former presidential nominee had put the claim in its complete form, in a trade book, about a body whose membership list anyone could request.
By the 1980 primaries it was a campaign weapon aimed at a Republican. George Bush was the target: his opponents' supporters raised his membership, and a conservative publicist in Florida complained of fifteen Commission members inside the Bush campaign. The Christian Science Monitor, in an editorial that March, pointed out what the attack skipped over — that Republicans including Senator William Roth, Representatives Barber Conable and John Anderson and the party's own chairman had been members too, and that officials turn up in both places because both draw from the same pool. The editorial's conclusion was that voters could fairly weigh membership, but should not look for conspiracies "where none exist".
Both halves of that sentence have had a long life. The attack survived the primaries, outlived the Carter administration that gave it its evidence, and was inherited after the Cold War by writers who had no interest in either party.
What the record supports
The Commission is a private forum where several hundred senior people from three continents meet, talk, and commission papers, and whose members have frequently gone on to hold public office. That is influence of a recognisable sort: access, shared assumptions, a common vocabulary, and a network that makes an invitation to serve easier to extend and to accept.
It is also, by the standards of this subject, remarkably easy to check. A body that intended to govern in secret would be making an odd choice in publishing the names, titles and photographs of everyone involved.
What it cannot settle
Nothing here establishes that the Commission's meetings are inconsequential, and the published record would not show it if they were consequential in the way alleged. Meetings are not minuted for the public; the task force reports are the output that is meant to be seen.
The argument therefore sits where it has sat since 1977. One side reads an overlap of personnel plus a published argument for "moderation in democracy" as a mechanism in plain sight. The other reads the same material as a think tank with an unusually well-connected mailing list, of the kind the Council on Foreign Relations is accused of being on the same evidence. The documents that would settle it — records of a decision taken in one room and executed from another — have not appeared, and both sides have an account of why.