I'm Not The Only One Thinking About C Wright Mills

I mentioned the influential sociologist C Wright Mills in yesterday's post, but later I discovered an op-ed in the Washington Post that discussed him in some depth on Monday. (For some reason, it's not behind their paywall, so anyone can read it.)

There are clear parallels between today’s populist right and the new left movement that exploded in the 1960s and 1970s.

C. Wright Mills, a sociologist at Columbia University, was that movement’s intellectual godfather. Consider a passage from his 1956 bestseller, “The Power Elite,” a polemical attack on the structure of America’s institutions that would inspire a generation of new left activists:

“[The power elite] are in command of the major hierarchies and organizations of modern society. They rule the big corporations. They run the machinery of the state and claim its prerogatives. They direct the military establishment. They occupy the strategic command posts of the social structure, in which are now centered the effective means of the power and the wealth and the celebrity which they enjoy.”

. . . Mills, who died in 1962, didn’t use the term “deep state,” but an unaccountable bureaucracy was a major concern of the new left philosopher. “It is in the executive chambers, and in the agencies and authorities and commissions and departments that stretch out beneath them” where much policy is made, he argued, “rather than in the open arena of politics.”

Those making decisions were not chosen by ordinary voters: “Once, most of the men who reached the political top got there because people elected them up the hierarchy of offices,” Mills observed. “But of late, in a more administrative age, men become big politically because small groups of men, themselves elected, appoint them.”

Thus we have Dr Fauci, William Barr, and Pete Strzok.

I dispute the characterization "new left"; Mills was apparently an old-left Trotskyite throughout his career, and most figures of the new left were actually red diaper babies from old-left families in any case. And Mills comes off as utterly despicable in his personal life; I make no case for him as anything but a perceptive observer of the world as it is. Nevertheless, here's an appreciation of American historical epochs from The Power Elite:

EXCEPT for the unsuccessful Civil War, changes in the power system of the United States have not involved important challenges to its basic legitimations. Even when they have been decisive enough to be called ‘revolutions,’ they have not involved the ‘resort to the guns of a cruiser, the dispersal of an elected assembly by bayonets, or the mechanisms of a police state.’ Nor have they involved, in any decisive way, any ideological struggle to control masses. Changes in the American structure of power have generally come about by institutional shifts in the relative positions of the political, the economic, and the military orders. From this point of view, and broadly speaking, the American power elite has gone through four epochs, and is now well into a fifth.

The first in his view was the colonial through the Federalist period; the second ran from Jefferson through Lincoln; the third ran from 1866 to the Great War:

Until the First World War (which gave us an advanced showing of certain features of our own period) this was an age of raids on the government by the economic elite, an age of simple corruption, when Senators and judges were simply bought up. Here, once upon a time, in the era of McKinley and Morgan, far removed from the undocumented complexities of our own time, many now believe, was the golden era of the American ruling class.

The military order of this period, as in the second, was subordinate to the political, which in turn was subordinate to the economic. The military was thus off to the side of the main driving forces of United States history. Political institutions in the United States have never formed a centralized and autonomous domain of power; they have been enlarged and centralized only reluctantly in slow response to the public consequence of the corporate economy.

In the post-Civil-War era, that economy was the dynamic; the ‘trusts’ — as policies and events make amply clear — could readily use the relatively weak governmental apparatus for their own ends. That both state and federal governments were decisively limited in their power to regulate, in fact meant that they were themselves regulatable by the larger moneyed interests. Their powers were scattered and unorganized; the powers of the industrial and financial corporations concentrated and interlocked. The Morgan interests alone held 341 directorships in 112 corporations with an aggregate capitalization of over $22 billion — over three times the assessed value of all real and personal property in New England. With revenues greater and employees more numerous than those of many states, corporations controlled parties, bought laws, and kept Congressmen of the ‘neutral’ state. And as private economic power overshadowed public political power, so the economic elite overshadowed the political.

Here, I think Mills and the populist Ferdinand Lundberg are in broad agreement; in Lundberg's view, as of The Rich and the Super-Rich (1968), he felt that the structure of US society was dominated by fortunes made during Mills's "golden era of the American ruling class". But Mills feels the New Deal began another epoch:

The earlier and middle Roosevelt administrations can best be understood as a desperate search for ways and means, within the existing capitalist system, of reducing the staggering and ominous xis army of the unemployed. In these years, the New Deal as a system of power was essentially a balance of pressure groups and interest blocs. The political top adjusted many conflicts, gave way to this demand, sidetracked that one, was the unilateral servant of none, and so evened it all out into such going policy line as prevailed from one minor crisis to another. Policies were the result of a political act of balance at the top. Of course, the balancing act that Roosevelt performed did not affect the fundamental institutions of capitalism as a type of economy. By his policies, he subsidized the defaults of the capitalist economy, which had simply broken down; and by his rhetoric, he balanced its political disgrace, putting ‘economic royalists’ in the political doghouse.

The ‘welfare state,’ created to sustain the balance and to carry out the subsidy, differed from the ‘laissez-faire’ state: ‘If the state was believed neutral in the days of T.R. because its leaders claimed to sanction favors for no one,’ Richard Hofstadter has remarked, ‘the state under F.D.R. could be called neutral only in the sense that it offered favors to everyone.’ The new state of the corporate commissars differs from the old welfare state. In fact, the later Roosevelt years — beginning with the entrance of the United States into overt acts of war and preparations for World War II cannot be understood entirely in terms of an adroit equipoise of political power.

I'm less impressed by his essentially Marxist analysis of the Great Depression as a crisis of corporate capitalism; more recent neoliberal analysis argues that it was a misapplication of government policies that were newly enabled by the exigencies of the Great War and its aftermath. Nevertheless, I think his view of the Cold War epoch -- his fifth -- is productive:

The long-time tendency of business and government to become more intricately and deeply involved with each either has, in the fifth epoch, reached a new point of explicitness. The two cannot now be seen clearly as two distinct worlds. It is in terms of the executive agencies of the state that the rapprochement has proceeded most decisively. The growth of the executive branch of the government, with its agencies that patrol the complex economy, does not mean merely the ‘enlargement of government’ as some sort of autonomous bureaucracy: it has meant the ascendancy of the corporation’s man as a political eminence.

. . . In so far as the structural clue to the power elite today lies in the enlarged and military state, that clue becomes evident in the military ascendancy. The warlords have gained decisive Political relevance, and the military structure of America is now in considerable part a political structure. The seemingly permanent military threat places a premium on the military and upon their control of men, materiel, money, and power; virtually all political and economic actions are now judged in terms of military definitions of reality: the higher warlords have ascended to a firm position within the power elite of the fifth epoch.

In part at least this has resulted from one simple historical fact, pivotal for the years since 1939: the focus of elite attention has been shifted from domestic problems, centered in the ‘thirties around slump, to international problems, centered in the ‘forties and ‘fifties around war. Since the governing apparatus of the United States has by long historic usage been adapted to and shaped by domestic clash and balance, it has not, from any angle, had suitable agencies and traditions for the handling of international problems. Such formal democratic mechanics as had arisen in the century and a half of national development prior to 1941, had not been extended to the American handling of international affairs. It is, in considerable part, in this vacuum that the power elite has grown.

Mills died in 1962, just before the Viet Nam War became a central political issue, but it's worth noting that the period from Mills's death to the present has in fact been dominated by wars, proxy wars, or near-wars and their international implications in Viet Nam, the Holy Land, Iraq, Iran, Central America, Somalia, Libya, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and now Ukraine, along with the background threats of Islamic terrorism in many other places. And in response, as Mills predicted, we've seen the enormous growth of a completely new military-intelligence power elite.

The grand old man of this group is Henry Kissinger, but it's worth noting that his advancement was under the aegis of the Rockefellers, one of the great fortunes of Mills's third epoch:

From 1956 to 1958, Kissinger worked for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund as director of its Special Studies Project. He served as the director of the Harvard Defense Studies Program between 1958 and 1971. In 1958, he also co-founded the Center for International Affairs with Robert R. Bowie where he served as its associate director. Outside of academia, he served as a consultant to several government agencies and think tanks, including the Operations Research Office, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Department of State, and the RAND Corporation.

Keen to have a greater influence on U.S. foreign policy, Kissinger became foreign policy advisor to the presidential campaigns of Nelson Rockefeller, supporting his bids for the Republican nomination in 1960, 1964, and 1968.

Beyond that, his second wife, Nancy Maginnes, was a close aide to Nelson Rockefeller as well. The point to be made here is that if you scratch the surface of actual policy and actual decisions, you keep finding close coordination among corporate interests and unelected but powerful government officials, in other words a "deep state" that continues independent of elections.

For good or ill, this is the threat Donald Trump has represented to the established state of affairs. I'll have more to say about this.