The Art of the Possible has a reading list, none of which I’ve read. One of them was The Power Elite and the State by G. William Domhoff, a leftist sociologist (or do I repeat myself)? He has a website meant as an accompaniment for another book called Who Rules America? that has almost book length material itself explaining his theories on who has power in the United States. The concept of a “power elite” comes from the earlier sociologist C. Wright Mills, but Domhoff defines it slightly differently as summarized in this picture:
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/images/who_has_the_power/power_elite_diagram.gif
The government is run for the benefit of the top 5% of the top 1% of the wealthy: (historically Protestant) families of Who’s Who & Social Register types. Mencius Moldbug refers to that group as “Optimates”, an ever-declining caste. Domhoff uses Michael Mann’s Four Networks of Power theory, which includes ideological (usually churches), economic, military and political networks. In the United States there has never been an established church and the dominant Protestant faith has been fractured, there was no large standing military nor a need for one before World War 2, and there was not a strong, independent, centralized state for reasons dating back to the colonial period and founding (going back further, the relatively weak states of medieval europe were what permitted the economic networks to become strong in the first place). Given that wealth is thus power, where is the wealth? There has never been a landed feudal aristocracy (usually descended from a conquering military caste) here, so it is the capitalist class or corporations that have nearly unlimited dominance (even more true after the decline of the Southern landed rich). Things are different at the local level, where a landed growth-coalition lords it over neighborhoods and environmentalists as it tries to attract businesses and investment so it can extract rents. The aforementioned social upper class elite owns most of the stock and sits on the interconnected director boards of the corporations and spreads their values through the elite universities. CEOs themselves are generally from the upper-middle and occasionally even lower classes (MM’s Vaisyas) originally, but they are assimilated towards serving the upper class. They also form non-profit organizations in which policy experts (MM’s Brahmins) formulate the policies the government implements. Politicians implement those policies because they’ve already been selected by the power elite with campaign donations.
In MM’s view it is the Brahmins, even the low-level ones, that rule. Domhoff recognizes that many of these academic types (such as himself) oppose the policies he ascribes to the “power elite”, but that’s okay because it’s only the top layer of policy experts that are part of the elite. MM further claims that the W-Force keeps moving the Overton window left, or that those opposed to the “power elite” keep winning. “Who wins?” is indeed the third indicator of power that Domhoff uses, but he rejects the “strict positivism” that views his theory as disproved by those defeats of the power elite and says he hasn’t had the time or resources to effectively demonstrate the policy dominance of that elite. The other two indicators, which he claims are easier to use in an accurate way are “who benefits?” and “who governs?”. He’s already assumed the titans of industry/finance rather than le clercs rule, so he defines benefits in terms of wealth and well-being. For Mencius Moldbug, the elite desires the promulgation of the Cathedral‘s ideology (the ideology is the kernel, the Cathedral is the repeater, and it is part of a larger Polygon) and the destruction of any competitors to power. Domhoff also says “If a group or class is highly over-represented in relation to its proportion of the population, it can be inferred that the group is powerful”, which will bring to the minds of most a certain religious/ethnic group, but that’s discussed at a different Who Rules America site mentioned in the FAQ. People in the business community may feel powerless in the face of (often liberal) government bureaucrats, but that’s because they don’t have power individually but as a class. An economist would then say there will be a free-rider problem for exerting political influence, but if Domhoff knew economics he wouldn’t be a fan of rent-control.
Coming from an Oppenheimer-reading libertarian perspective, I tend to view the political State, which in the Weberian definition controls the military and police, as the holders of ultimate power (perhaps in accordance with state autonomy theory) and I’m not too worried about it being captured by the rich. I want to scorch the earth so it’s not worth capturing, and I’m not anymore concerned if the folks trying to capture it play polo. There are libertarians who developed a theory of class conflict before Marx did, and it was promoted by Bastiat and Rothbard, as well as non-libertarian Calhoun. The “rent seekers” featured as the enemy in that theory played a dominant role in Buchanan/Tullock public choice theory, which Domhoff briefly mentions (merely as relating to the competing “pluralist” theory) to dismiss as Chicago free-market economics. Traditional public choice was disputed in favor of a “people rule” theory by Chicago economist Donald Wittman, which was turned on its head by Bryan Caplan. Caplan rejects Calhoun’s class theory and somewhat jokingly presented a jock vs nerd one, like Ilya Somin I don’t believe in either. I don’t know if Domhoff is even aware of any of that stuff. Domhoff argues here why the Four Networks theory is superior to the alternatives: pluralist (closest to high-school civics textbooks), state autonomy, elite (intersecting with Four Networks and not stemming from Pareto, who is too right-wing) and Marxist.
There are some areas where Domhoff agrees with Mencius, the most notable one being the media where Domhoff argues contra leftists it is an asset to progressives. Since leftists all over (Chomsky being among the most notable) don’t deny the media is powerful (otherwise why bother going into journalism?) that poses problems for his power theory. Domhoff promotes the optimistic theory that the Bad Guys had power before but now Everything Has Changed due not to the internet (it’s busy growing the Long Tail and Crashing the Gates) but the shift of the South to the GOP. Even Greenwald doesn’t think kicking out blue dogs is helpful to progressives in and of itself but of holding policy above party loyalty (via Larison). Domhoff also thinks the Ford Foundation plays a big role, but to him they are “moderate conservatives”, as are most Democrats and establishment liberals, apparently to leftists. Replublicans represent the “ultra-conservative” wing of the elite, though sometimes an “ultra-conservative” acts like a leftist in opposing the elite in the guise of Big Government (I’m thinking Ron Paul, I don’t know if Domhoff is) by mistaking them for communists or pointy-headed intellectuals.
Domhoff also promotes one of MM’s favored books, Dark Side of the Left, in his indictment of the turn from non-violence in the SDS. Of course, he disagrees with Tom Wolfe on poverty programs encouraging violence. His view on local politics seems a lot like Steve Sailer’s though.
I think I originally planned on having a concluding paragraph, but I wound up not doing so.
Entitled to an Opinion 
August 6, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Looking back at old comments on UR, I find I mentioned Domhoff in one under his heading “The Democrats: Party of Lies” (May 29, 2007).
There is a curiously dated feeling to Domhoff’s description of the moneyed elite, as if one were reading some sort of strange sociological hybrid of Ferdinand Lundberg and Lucius Beebe. He places way too much emphasis on residues of the WASP plutocracy of the Gilded Age as indicators of elite states, such as attendance at boarding schools of the St. Grottlesex variety, membership in private city clubs, Social Register listings, involvement in lineage societies, debutante balls, etc.
Northeastern prep schools were, before World War II, indeed the principal feed stock for matriculations at the Ivy League universities. This began to change after the war, as the administrators of those universities, e.g., Conant at Harvard, sought to attract bright students from other parts of the country and less exclusive social backgrounds, relying on the newly-introduced college board examinations as a qualification. Today a prep-school background without excellent college boards and grade-point average is probably a negative rather than a positive factor for an applicant to the Ivies.
If Domhoff had any idea how private clubs really fare these days he would know that outside New York, Washington, and Boston, and perhaps San Francsico (with its famous Bohemian Club, about which he has written), he’d realize how many of them have folded in the past thirty years. The nouveau riche (who are often amongst the richest of the rich) have no interest in such things today. The same may be said of lineage societies and debutante cotillions. Such pursuits imply a certain degree of wealth and leisure on the part of their participants, but are far from being the favored activities of anything like a majority of the elite.
The Social Register is hardly an American equivalent of Debrett, in the sense that the latter is a comprehensive listing of a formally-defined elite. Here again what is striking is how often the famously wealthy and influential are not to be found in it. Silicon Valley is conspicuous by its absence. I looked this morning in the 2008 edition – though there was one Ellison, it was not Larry, and in half a column of Gateses, not one was Bill. Media/entertainment celebrities are similarly sparsely represented.
To summarize, Domhoff has characterized a handful of old elite institutions that are mostly in decline as significant identifiers of membership in an elite that has largely passed them by. I do not know whether he has done so mistakenly or deliberately.
MM’s analysis seems to me to be much more perceptive of current reality. At the very least, the American elite is divided between two factions, which we might call Brahmins and Optimates as he does, or we might call foxes and lions, as Pareto does. Peregrine Worsthorne, in his book “In Defence of Aristocracy” (2004) makes the point that the American aristocracy was ‘divided against itself’ even when the old WASP ascendancy of Domhoff’s prep schools, clubs, and ‘society’ functions was still firmly entrenched. That division has only become more pronounced as the composition of the elite has become less northeastern, white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant.
July 8, 2013 at 2:37 am
“To summarize, Domhoff has characterized a handful of old elite institutions that are mostly in decline as significant identifiers of membership in an elite that has largely passed them by. I do not know whether he has done so mistakenly or deliberately.”
Brilliant!!
August 6, 2008 at 4:43 pm
The thread and comment you are referring to is this one.
in his book “In Defence of Aristocracy” (2004) makes the point that the American aristocracy was ‘divided against itself’ even when the old WASP ascendancy of Domhoff’s prep schools, clubs, and ’society’ functions was still firmly entrenched
Could you elaborate?
August 7, 2008 at 10:37 am
Best to let Worsthorne speak for himself:
“As for an aristocracy, in post-war Washington there was one operating at full throttle, to the immense benefit, I would say, of the whole world.
“It was, however – as I should have remembered from my prewar experience of it in Maine – an aristocracy divided against itself. Shortly after my arrival in Washington in 1951, for example, Joe Alsop had invited me to dinner, only to ring up a day later to apologize – something he seldom did – for having failed to warn me that amongst the other guests would be the ‘notorious’ – his adjective – Republican Senate Leader, Robert Taft, son of President Taft. Under these circumstances, ‘naturally’, he would understand if I wanted to cancel. If it had been a London hostess of the same period telephoning to say that she would understand if I did not wish to sit down at the same table as Sir Oswald Mosley, or a French hostess to say she would understand if I did not wish to dine with a well-kown collaborator, that would have been natural. But Senator Taft was not a traitor or collaborator; he was a member of one of America’s most prestigious families and the eminently respectable Wasp leader of America’s ‘loyal’ Opposition. As such, he was someone whom a visiting journalist would naturally have been most particularly anxious to meet.
“Just how vulnerable the bitter division rendered the Wasp aristocracy soon became clear when Joe McCarthy, an Irish Senator from the Wisconsin sticks, accused the ‘silver spoon in mouth’ Liberal-New Deal patrician wing of the Democratic Party of being ‘soft on Communism’. But whereas the English Establishment of the period faced by the identical charge – with rather more justification – closed ranks, the American one fell apart. Driven to desperate tactics by having been kept out of power since 1932, the corporate East Coast-Wall Stree wing of the Republican Parry, including Robert Taft, tacitly backed the Irisih Senator – whom none of them would ever have thought of receiving in their own mansions – thereby throwing their very considerable weight onto the side of the masses against the classes. Electorally it paid off. The Repuvlicans under Eisenhower swept back into power in 1952, and, with that purpose achieved, swiftly and almost effortlessly put an end to McCarthyism – something that could have been done years earlier had not the two wings of the Wasp establishment been at each other’s throats.” (pp. 137-9).
There is much more to his argument than this; the whole of chapter 4 of his book is devoted to the American aristocracy, and is well worth reading.