The Power Elite

The highly concentrated military contractor base that was deeply embedded in the federal government became the core of what came to be referred in the time as the “Power Elite”.  This was recognized as far back as the mid 1940’s and addressed by numerous writers and commentators including James Burnham who co-founded National Review. He foresaw in his book the Managerial Revolution published at the beginning of WWII a global shift where private ownership and capitalism as it had existed would be replaced by collectivism and central planning.  He observed that managerial elites had taken control of corporations, government bureaucracies, and the military and would ultimately take over society (1 p. 25).  He argued that this was fundamentally what had occurred in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany and was happening in America in the developing corporate liberalism. He also saw the world being divided into a limited number of “super states” after the war, reasoning that this was inevitable in order for the modern economy to function. Burnham’s book was a big seller and a major influence on George Orwell when he wrote 1984. Burnham was correct in many respects but over-emphasized forms of organization as opposed to who controlled them which extends beyond the managerial class to the sponsors.(1 p. 25)

Historically the most definitive work was The Power Elite published in 1956 and written by C. Wright Mills. Mills describes the power elite as consisting of the top executives of the largest corporations, military leaders, and the executive branch of the federal government which would include the federal agencies that would become largely out of the control of both the elected chief executive and the electorate.  Mill book starts with the ominous observation:

“But not all men are in this sense ordinary. As the means of information and of power are centralized, some men come to occupy positions in American society from which they can look down upon, so to speak, and by their decisions mightily affect, the everyday worlds of ordinary men and women. They are not made by their jobs; they set up and break down jobs for thousands of others; they are not confined by simple family responsibilities; they can escape. They may live in many hotels and houses, but they are bound by no one community. They need not merely ‘meet the demands of the day and hour’; in some part, they create these demands, and cause others to meet them. Whether or not they profess their power, their technical and political experience of it far transcends that of the underlying population. What Jacob Burckhardt said of ‘great men,’ most Americans might well say of their elite: ‘They are all that we are not.(2 p. 303)’”  C. Wright Mills (3 p. 3)

These entities would create a “permanent war economy and a private corporation economy” (3 p. 275).  Mills observed that “the economy has become dominated by two to three hundred giant corporations, administratively and politically integrated, which together hold the keys to economic decisions” and that the perception of American history as “a peaceful continuum of peace interrupted by war” (3 p. 184) as being permanently eclipsed.  Mills described the social structure of the Power Elite saying:

They form a more or less compact social and psychological entity; they have become self-conscious members of a social class. People are either accepted into this class or they are not, and there is a qualitative split, rather than merely a numerical scale, separating them from those who are not elite. They are more or less aware of themselves as a social class and they behave toward one another differently from the way they do toward members of other classes. They accept one another, understand one another, marry one another, tend to work and to think if not together at least alike. (3 p. 11)

The Power Elite don’t compromise a conspiracy in the sense the word is commonly understood.  As Mills points out, “although men sometimes shape institutions, institutions always select and form men”. The few that would be promoted from the institutional infrastructure under the Power Elite would learn to fit in and conform and, most importantly, become useful for those above them which doesn’t necessarily simply correlate to performing their jobs well. They don’t all have the same views but they have the same self interests that are generally advanced by the same policies or actions making the herding behavior largely self organizing. Electoral politics are of little concern because the parties and elected officials are no longer making the larger strategic decisions. Elected officials are part of a middle layer that Mills goes on to describe:

“The power elite are not solitary rulers. Advisers and consultants, spokesmen and opinion-makers are often the captains of their higher thought and decision. Immediately below the elite are the professional politicians of the middle levels of power, in the Congress and in the pressure groups, as well as among the new and old upper classes of town and city and region. Mingling with them, in curious ways which we shall explore, are those professional celebrities who live by being continually displayed but are never, so long as they remain celebrities, displayed enough. If such celebrities are not at the head of any dominating hierarchy, they do often have the power to distract the attention of the public or afford sensations to the masses, or, more directly, to gain the ear of those who do occupy positions of direct power. More or less unattached, as critics of morality and technicians of power, as spokesmen of God and creators of mass sensibility, such celebrities and consultants are part of the immediate scene in which the drama of the elite is enacted. But that drama itself is centered in the command posts of the major institutional hierarchies.(3 p. 4)

The Power Elite were to become ingrained in the structure of not just the economy but society in a broader sense.  The institutions would disperse themselves geographically and the towns and cities they would populate would become dependent on them creating broad political support.  Specifically in the case of military contracting this is done by having plants in multiple states and further spreading the subcontractor base.  Although the model of the Power Elite was built around the military industrial complex it would rapidly expand to any industry that was or could be made dependent on the government, the more prominent examples of which include the medical and pharmaceutical industry, education, and media.

Mill’s book followed Burnham’s work nearly 15 years and he had more of a chance to see the post war structure develop but it was remarkably accurate in its assessment and prophetic in terms of foreseeing what was to follow.  Michael Swanson summarized the importance of the classic and largely forgotten work saying:

Have you ever heard of it? If you haven’t, then you need to know about it, and if you already have, then you need to make sure you have a good grasp of its arguments in order to get a better understanding of how the real big decisions are truly made in this country when it comes to war, Wall Street bailouts, national security issues, and even the interest-rate policies that impacts your day-to-day life when it comes to things such as the price of oil, housing prices, and even the unemployment rate. These types of issues are not voted upon by Congress, hardly debated about in elections, and even more rarely decided upon by voters. The final decisions are made by a power elite, whose activities are barely understood by most but whose workings will be fully comprehended by you as you read this book. (1 pp. 27-8)

Bibliography

1. Swanson, Michael. The War State: The Cold War Origins of the Military Industrial Complex and the Power Elite. South Carolina : Create Space, 2011.

2. Burckhardt, James. Force and Freedom. New York : Pantheon Books, 1943.

3. Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. New York : Oxford University Press, 1956.