Power Elite Then and Now a Half-Century Essay

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Power Elite

Then and Now

A half-century after it was written, C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite remains relevant to American society. Mills's analysis of the ways in which powerful people in different sectors of society share economic interests and so share concepts and access to power remains true of the United States now. We can see many of the same dynamics at work in this election year, for while some of the key particulars of American society have changed, the way in which power interests intersect and reinforce each other.

Mills wrote The Power Elite in the aftermath of World War II. By 1956, the year of publication, much of the country had moved on to what they believed would be generations of peace and prosperity. But Mills's view of society was that there were important holdovers from the war economy and the social priorities that had arisen during the war, holdovers that were growing in strength rather than dissipating or diminishing.

The demographics of power that had been solidified during the war had been profitable for all of the participants: Political leaders had been joined with corporate and military leaders to guide the nation through war while also benefiting themselves. Members of one of these three groups were often in fact members of the other groups, with very fluid divisions among the three groups of power holders.

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In the same way that government officials today become lobbyists and corporate officials and back and forth through numerous permutations, the members of these three elite groups that Mills wrote about slipped back and forth from one group to another.

Mills was not seeking to vilify these three types of elites, or at least not necessarily to vilify them. He wrote that the leaders of these three different sectors of society could act in honorable ways; however, he also noted that there were no structural ways in which to ensure that they acted honorably. Given the fact that power does indeed tend to corrupt (for in this Mills was in agreement with Orwell), there was a significant chance that leaders in these three segments of society would tend to act less and less honorably over time as they were more inclined to look after their own interests as time went by and would be less concerned about using their power for the good of the democracy.

Mills focused on these ideas in Chapters 12 and 15, arguing among other points that American society has lost many of the most important checks and balances….....

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