I had seen many references to The Power Elite over the years but, as time passed, supposed the book had gradually become dated. David Talbot's continuing admiration for C. Wright Mills, expressed in his powerful book, The Devil's Chessboard, convinced me that I should read The Power Elite, if only as an important document of American political reality in the early 1950's. When Alan Wolfe wrote his “new Afterward” for this book in 2000 it seems to have been regarded as an important updating of Mills' analysis. Now, seventeen years later, I disagree.
One of Mills' cautionary emphases was that the Power Elite's alliance of military, industrial, and political leaders would inevitably lead to the United States sustaining highly profitable perpetual warfare. In his Afterward, Wolfe was convinced that the chastening experience of the Vietnam War would assure that this country would be unwilling and/or unable to sustain perpetual war for the sake of corporate profits. Regrettably, as we have since seen in Afghanistan and in the Middle East, that is exactly what the Deep State has wrought, with the complicity of the corporate media and the ready acquiescence of the easily-duped voting public.
Tangentially, Wolfe repudiated Wright's prediction that the military would increasingly come to dominate both the American economy and political system. Here, again, Wolfe was wrong. Any meaningful accounting of the military's grasp of our economy must extend far beyond the nominal Defense budget, to the “dark matter,” off-budget and kept from public scrutiny, devoted to our military adventures, the seventeen-plus agencies of the Security State, and the U.S. Military's domination of research funding throughout American universities. As for influence of our political process, it should be enough to note how many military generals are now key members of the Trump Administration.
Wolfe was just as fundamentally mistaken in his view that Mills underestimated the importance of the politicians who have a role in The Power Elite. Mills observed over a half century ago that, despite the huge attention and money directed to their campaigns and careers, most members of Congress are not major players in the making of the key decisions about which the Deep State really cares. And even the handful of key congressional players are more the Deep State's tools than actually calling the shots.
Finally, Wolfe thought that Mills was unduly pessimistic about the likelihood that the American public would ever become cognizant of the Power Elite/Deep State and muster the collective will to oppose it. Take a good look at the functioning of our economy, political process, and foreign policy and it's clear that C. Wright Mills' analysis had no need of Wolfe's second-guessing.
The first half of The Power Elite remains a remarkably prescient consideration of how the world really works. The editors of the next edition of this invaluable work would do well to drop Wolfe's Afterward.
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