THE NEW POWER ELITE by Heather Gautney (2023)
Heather Gautney, a sociology professor and policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders, has undertaken to update and improve upon C. Wright Mills' classic 1956 work, The Power Elite.
In some ways, she succeeded; in others, not.
Mills analyzed three power elites - corporate, military and governmental. He showed how they were largely independent of public accountability and public control, and were unrepresentative of the public at large.
Gautney contends that there is actually only one elite, an oligarchy of wealth, to which other elites are subordinate.
The secret of this elite, she writes, is that it has persuaded the rest of us to accept neoliberal ideology. Neoliberalism is the principle that the interests of lenders and investors must be protected no matter what the costs.
She also says that while Mills described the origins, nature and sources of elite power, he failed to show how elites influenced policy and what they specifically did that was against the public interest.
Her book is just the opposite. It is light on big-picture systemic analysis, but provides a vast mosaic of elite corruption, scandal, failure, exploitation and manipulation.
I found the cumulative effect of her examples coming one right after the other - bam! bam! bam! - to be powerful, even though I already knew about almost all of them. I can only imagine the impact on those to whom all this is new.
But she failed to notice certain important things - notably the emergence of a new power center based on secret police and covert intelligence agencies, influencing elections, journalism and social media.
Also, her book is overly Trump-centric. Trump is rich, powerful and destructive, but he is not at the center of the American elites. Members of the real power elite regard him as a nuisance and a disrupter who has to be gotten rid of.
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The New Power Elite opens with brief accounts of the U.S.-backed coup in Chile in 1973 and the New York City bankruptcy in 1975. Both were examples of the suspension of democracy (the Pinochet dictatorship, a banker-run receivership) to protect business interests, which is the core of neoliberalism.
Chapters 1-3 are about The State. They tell of the misdeeds and failures of presidential administrations from the late 1970s to the present. For me, reading them was a trip down memory lane - supply-side economics, the air traffic controllers' strike, "grand bargains" on Social Security, NAFTA, Workfare, the Patriot Act, Abu Ghraib, Enron, No Child Left Behind, the Katrina disaster, "too big to fail" bailouts, Obamacare, tax cuts for the rich, COVID-19 failures, Build Back Better…all milestones on a downward path.
Gautney sees Donald Trump as a culmination of leadership failure. His election was made possible by the failures of Bill Clinton, G.W. Bush and Barack Obama. But, as she notes, Trump was not on the side of the people who voted for him.
He immediately broke his promises to protect Social Security and raise taxes on the rich. He appointed ridiculously unqualified people to head departments, defunded vital government functions and kept the country in a constant uproar over irrelevant issues.
He has driven the U.S. political, financial, journalistic and academic establishments crazy. Since 2016, American politics has been about their fight to bring down Trump. They are using all possible means except dealing with the unaddressed problems that enabled him to be elected in the first place.
The long chain of failed impeachments, indictments and legal actions against Trump remind me of the Russian aristocracy's attempt to kill Rasputin. The repeated bungling and failure would be comical if so much wasn't at stake.
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