Gloria Steinem and State Narratives: A Case Study in Why the CIA is the Best at Propaganda and Manipulation

When the establishment press rolls out its machinery of canonization, it reveals more about the mechanics of imperial power than it does about the individual being praised. Following the death of Gloria Steinem at the age of ninety-two, the Western political and media establishment erupted into a unified chorus of adulation. Presidents, senators, and corporate media mouthpieces rushed to crown her as an unblemished pioneer, an icon, and the ultimate matriarch of modern American feminism.

Yet, this uncritical hagiography serves a distinct ideological function. It sanitizes a political trajectory that was, from its inception, deeply intertwined with the apparatus of the United States empire. To understand why Gloria Steinem was immortalized so seamlessly as a liberal icon, one must examine the triumph of the institution that helped launch her public life: the Central Intelligence Agency. Steinem’s career stands as a masterclass in state-managed narrative control, proving why the CIA remains the preeminent force in shaping public opinion, neutralizing genuine radicalism, and manufacturing consent for imperialist violence.

The CIA, the Cold War, and the Invention of the "Compatible Left"

To evaluate Steinem’s political history honestly is to confront documented facts that mainstream obituaries deliberately sand down. As detailed in historical accounts like Karen Paget's Patriotic Betrayal, Steinem’s entry into public life after graduating from Smith College and a fellowship in India began with her role as the paid director of the Independent Research Service (originally the Independent Service for Information on the Vienna Youth Festival).

This organization was not an independent grassroots endeavor. It was a CIA front created to counter Soviet-sponsored youth festivals and corral international student movements. Funded through agency conduits designed to cultivate the "non-Communist left," Steinem worked wittingly within an intelligence operation aimed at subverting anti-imperialist youth movements across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. As Ben Norton underscores in analysis from the Geopolitical Economy Report, the explicit objective of these intelligence frameworks was to establish a "compatible left"—a controlled, sanitized political opposition that would posture as progressive while remaining fundamentally subservient to US capitalism and imperial hegemony.

When these operations were blown wide open by Ramparts magazine in 1967, exposing the deep financial tentacles of the CIA into student and cultural organizations, Steinem did not express betrayal or shock. Instead, she openly defended the agency. In interviews with mainstream publications at the time, she praised the intelligence operatives as enlightened liberals who understood the necessity of projecting diverse ideas against communism.

This defense was delivered at a time when the CIA was actively engineering bloody overthrows, assassinations, and mass atrocities across the globe—from Iran and Guatemala to Indonesia and Vietnam. Steinem’s unwavering defense of the agency was not a momentary lapse in judgment; it was an ideological alignment that she maintained throughout her life. As noted in reporting by the World Socialist Web Site, Steinem never broke with the foundational premises of the Cold War state apparatus, seamlessly transitioning from intelligence asset to the chief architect of a corporate-friendly, establishment-approved feminism.

Weaponizing Feminism for the Empire

The primary utility of the "compatible left" is its ability to redirect genuine social grievances into safe, institutional channels that leave the architecture of imperialism and class rule entirely untouched. Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, as the capitalist order faced severe domestic crises fueled by anti-war resistance and labor militancy, the Democratic Party and its institutional appendages set about co-opting social movements.

Steinem’s work—crystallized through the founding of Ms. magazine and organizations like the National Women's Political Caucus—served to channel women's liberation away from revolutionary anticapitalism and into the dead-end theater of electoral party politics. By framing oppression strictly through the narrow lens of representation within existing power structures, this brand of liberal feminism taught people to celebrate female CEOs, generals, and politicians as milestones of liberation, regardless of the blood on their hands.

This contradiction was laid bare in Steinem's political associations. She spent decades rubbing shoulders with architects of mass death like Henry Kissinger, while campaigning aggressively for imperialist war hawks like Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright—the latter of whom infamously declared that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children under economic sanctions were "worth the price." Furthermore, as highlighted in a piercing critique by Michael Leonardi in the Palestine Chronicle, Steinem's universalism notoriously stopped at the borders of US empire and Zionism. From her early condemnations of anti-colonial resolutions at the United Nations to her silence regarding the systematic violations faced by Palestinian women under military occupation and genocide, Steinem’s feminism consistently aligned with the strategic imperatives of Western hegemony.

The Permanent Asset

The core tragedy of bourgeois cultural dominance is its ability to rebrand state managers as revolutionaries. The effusive grief expressed by former heads of state, warmongers, and corporate politicians upon Steinem's passing is the ultimate indictment of her political legacy. Real revolutionaries, anti-imperialists, and socialists are hunted, vilified, or erased by the state; they are rarely awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama.

Gloria Steinem never stopped being an asset to the ruling class because her entire political project served to neutralize the revolutionary energy of the working class and the global south. The seamless transition from covert intelligence operations in Vienna to elite parlors on the Upper East Side illustrates how effectively the American empire co-opts dissent. For socialists, anti-imperialists, and anti-Zionists striving to dismantle the machinery of war and capital, the lesson is clear. We must reject the watered-down, imperialist co-optation of human liberation, recognizing that true emancipation cannot be won by climbing into the boardrooms of the empire, but by tearing them down.