American democracy, it’s blindingly evident, is in crisis. Terms that once characterized faraway repressive regimes—oligarchy, elite, plutocracy—are now invoked to describe the current political moment. And Americans are aware of the threat the country’s power imbalance poses: A 2024 Pew poll found that 74 percent of them—including 65 percent of Donald Trump supporters—feel that major corporations have “too much power.” Seventy-three percent believe the American economic system unfairly favors powerful interests.
It wasn’t always this way. Only 14 percent of respondents to a 1966 Gallup poll said that big business was the “biggest threat” to the country’s future. (Twenty-one percent answered big labor, and 48 percent said big government.) Yet a full decade before that Gallup poll—at the height of the postwar boom and anti-Communist fervor—C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite had signaled the dangers of increasing concentrations of wealth and power in the United States. Derided by both conservatives and liberals, it depicted a political reality distinctly at odds with the then-prevailing view of the U.S. as the world’s leading practitioner of political pluralism (government as a neutral umpire among contending interest groups) and protector of democracy.
America’s business, military, and political leaders had been united in common cause during World War II; The Power Elite decried the postwar persistence of that tripartite collaboration, as well as the shared belief that communism’s threat required a big military industry and an expensive arms race. “For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an ‘emergency’ without a foreseeable end,” Mills lamented. “Such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism they have constructed a paranoid reality of their own.”
Mills argued that those at the “command posts” of big corporations, the military, and the executive branch of government were undermining democracy. Driven primarily by greed and self-interest, Mills maintained, they determined the nation’s destiny, including war, peace, recession, and prosperity. “In so far as national events are decided,” he wrote, “the power elite are those who decide them.”
Those at the “command posts” today are less a well-organized ruling class and more a parade of Trump acolytes, opportunists, and those willing to look the other way.
The caustic critique of America’s power structures has particular resonance in this moment when Trump is trying to dismantle democracy, although those at the “command posts” today are less a well-organized ruling class and more a parade of Trump acolytes, opportunists, and those willing to look the other way.
The Power Elite unsettled academics and pundits, who viewed Mills as a dangerous leftist. (He addressed critics from across the political and philosophical spectrum in a lengthy response in Dissent in 1957.) Yet just five years later, in his 1961 farewell address warning of the “unwarranted influence” of the “military industrial complex,” President Dwight Eisenhower—no one’s idea of a leftist—gave voice, however inadvertently, to Mills’s concerns.
A sociologist who taught at Columbia University from 1946 until his death in 1962 at age 45, the Texas-born Mills didn’t shy away from controversy. “I try to be objective,” he once wrote. “I do not claim to be detached.” The Power Elite was the last of his three books addressing what he called “the main drift” of American public life. The first, The New Men of Power (1948), called out organized labor’s failure to challenge the Cold War, the arms race, and attacks on radical dissent. White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951) examined the growing number of “cheerful robots,” Americans in the middle-management and professional class in whom Mills perceived a conformity leading to widespread political apathy. The Power Elite focused its ire on the top executives (the “corporation chieftains”) who served on numerous blue-ribbon task forces and oversaw major lobby groups; the generals and admirals (“warlords”), many of whom, upon retirement, took jobs with major defense corporations and used their influence to argue for bigger military budgets, new weapons systems, and government contracts for their employers; and the “political directorate,” who included career bureaucrats and those temporarily on loan from corporations, law firms, and universities, who curried favor with both.
Mills distinguished between the most forward-looking of those executives (“business liberals” who were mostly moderates) and the “old guard” conservative majority still smarting from the New Deal, federal government regulations, higher taxes, and the rise of unions (which in 1956 represented one-third of the nonfarm labor force).
The most influential of the corporate leaders—those whom Mills dubbed the “inner circle”—were part of “an elaborate network of interlocking directorates.” They forged social ties through overlapping memberships on boards of corporations, universities, hospitals, foundations, nonprofits, and social clubs. They were part of think tanks and groups designed to iron out disagreements on policy prescriptions. These business liberals represented, Mills wrote, “the outlook and the interests of the newer propertied class as a whole.”
Both old-guard conservatives and business liberals embraced the Cold War, but the business liberals favored government action to promote postwar economic growth and encourage international trade. They garnered support for the Marshall Plan, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund to rebuild Europe and stabilize the global economy, and were willing to (reluctantly) live with higher taxes, make concessions to unions, and embrace a limited welfare state to ensure stability and prosperity. Mills argued that this group exercised a taming influence on the most reactionary elements of American business.
The Power Elite briefly referenced old-guard lobby groups like the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce but didn’t discuss the more influential and centrist policy organizations, including the Committee on Economic Development, or CED, and the Council on Foreign Relations, or CFR. Later, other social scientists, most prominently G. William Domhoff, explained how these organizations helped forge consensus and essentially served as revolving doors between the power elite and every presidential administration from Truman to Carter.
Mills’s work, with its provocative flourishes (“The higher immorality is a systematic feature of the American elite”) played an undeniable role in shaping how Americans gradually grew to regard those at the top of the pyramid, and resonated with the nation’s growing mood of discontent, especially on college campuses. The Power Elite spent little time on issues of poverty and race, and Mills died just as the Civil Rights Movement, the war on poverty, and the resistance to the Vietnam War began to grow. Even so, his influence can be seen in the Port Huron Statement, the 1962 Students for a Democratic Society manifesto, particularly in its analysis of power, its demand to end the U.S.-Soviet arms race, and its call for “participatory democracy” to combat widespread apathy and alienation.
Despite the upheavals of the 1960s, forward-looking businessmen managed to maintain enough clout and cohesion in the upper echelons of power to largely marginalize extremists in business, the military, and politics through the decade. The CED’s 1971 report, “Social Responsibilities of the Business Corporation,” embraced policies to expand health care; eliminate poverty; end discrimination on the basis of race, religion, or sex; and promote full employment, and urged a major expansion of federal support for transportation, housing, and improving the environment. Even erstwhile Cold Warrior President Richard Nixon proposed a negative income tax for the poor and a version of universal health care.
With support from the inner circle of the corporate elite, government spending—for highways, suburbs, housing, schools, universities, and the military—catalyzed three decades of unprecedented postwar prosperity. The growing influence of unions assured that the prosperity would be widely shared, and the incomes of the poor and the middle class grew faster than the incomes of the rich: Americans’ median family income tripled between 1946 and 1969. By the late 1970s, the top 1 percent had only 7.3 percent of the nation’s total income and the proportion of Americans living in poverty declined from almost one-third in 1947 to 12 percent in 1975.
With support from the inner circle of the corporate elite, government spending—for highways, suburbs, housing, schools, universities, and the military—catalyzed three decades of unprecedented postwar prosperity.
Yet slowly, catalyzed by the consumer, environmental, civil rights, labor, and feminist movements, public trust in big business started to erode. Consumer advocate Ralph Nader became a household name, and C-suite executives worried over the negative portrayal of business and businessmen in the media. Activists began winning major legislative victories—the Clean Air Act, the Environmental Protection Act, and the Occupational Safety and Health Act (all in 1970), the Consumer Product Safety Act (1972), the Safe Drinking Water Act (1974), the Toxic Substances Control Act (1976), and the Community Reinvestment Act (1977)—over business opposition.
Mills did not anticipate the rise of global markets, nor how they could destabilize the American corporate order. In the early 1970s, big corporations began to feel the pinch of international competition—notably in the form of consumer imports from Japan. OPEC’s 1973 oil embargo helped plunge the U.S. economy into recession, exposing the country’s dependence on oil imports.
The power elite, even the inner circle, had had enough.
In 1971—the same year as the CED report—Lewis Powell, a member of 11 corporate boards, and whom Nixon appointed to the Supreme Court later that year—wrote an influential memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In it, he exhorted business to go on the attack against growing anti-corporate sentiment that could threaten its ability to operate freely and generate adequate profits to survive.
Echoing this view in a 1974 interview with The New York Times, Nixon himself claimed that the trouble with the country was the weakness and division among “the leaders of industry, the bankers, the newspapers. The people as a whole can be led back to some kind of consensus if only the leaders can take hold of themselves.”
The corporate elite did try to take hold of themselves. Business leaders began the ultimate “sell job”—funding a network of organizations designed to shift public attitudes toward big business, such as the Business Roundtable, a lobbying group founded in 1972 and made up of the heads of the nation’s 200 largest corporations.
However, right-wing members of billionaire families like the Coors, Scaifes, and Kochs, who weren’t part of the inner circle, created their own organizations (including political action committees, legal advocacy groups, and think tanks) to promote their agendas, and eventually outmaneuvered their more moderate counterparts.
The lines between conservative economic policy and conservative social policy became increasingly blurred. In 1973, Paul Weyrich, a conservative political operative, started the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, as a forum for state legislators to share strategies to restore school prayer and end abortion. Within a few years, however, donations to ALEC from big corporations shifted its focus toward economic deregulation. Big business won a key victory in 1978 when it thwarted attempts by labor and its Democratic allies to revise to make it easier for workers to join unions: A reform bill had passed the House but failed to advance in the Senate. (Union membership has since declined precipitously; less than 10 percent of American workers now belong to one.)
And after Ronald Reagan’s election victory in 1980, deregulation went into overdrive. Big corporations and banks began an orgy of mergers: Between 1960 and 2005, the share of assets controlled by the 10 largest banks increased from 21 percent to 60 percent. Hedge funds and private equity firms flourished, and so did activist shareholder–led hostile takeovers of major companies. Knowing that the emphasis on short-term profits would increase their job jeopardy, CEOs sought much higher pay; as a result, the ratio of CEO compensation to that of typical workers increased from 21-to-1 in 1965 to 344-to-1 in 2022.
Of course, CEO pay is just one manifestation of the growing chasm between the wealthy and the merely well-off. The statistics are staggering: The number of the world’s billionaires soared from 140 in 1987 to 470 in 2000 to 2,781 in 2024. The 902 American billionaires are today worth $6.8 trillion—more than the combined wealth of the bottom half of U.S. households. As of this writing, 17 of the world’s 25 richest billionaires, including the six wealthiest, are Americans. With the exception of a few entertainment and sports celebrities,
today’s billionaires are tied to corporations. About one-quarter
(including heirs to the Walton, Mars, Koch, Kaiser, Mellon, and Trump fortunes)
inherited their family businesses. Many others made their fortunes in technology firms, a sector that has grown tremendously since The Power Elite.
And of course, their tax rates don’t hurt. In 1956, the marginal tax bracket of the highest earners was an astounding 91 percent. According to a 2021 White House report, America’s 400 wealthiest families paid an average federal individual tax rate of 8.2 percent.
Apart from the growth in CEO pay, one of the most conspicuous differences in corporate culture since Mills’s time has been the increased diversity of corporate boards. For one thing, in 1956 there were no women CEOs of Fortune 500 corporations; in 2023, there were 52. The same year, women also held more than 30 percent of the seats on those 500 corporate boards; Black Americans, 11.9 percent; Hispanics, 4.7 percent; and Asians, 5.4 percent. The networks at the top of the corporate food chain have also grown more tenuous. In 2016, researchers Johan Chu and Gerald Davis published an article tracing the precipitous decline of the corporate interlocks described in The Power Elite. In 1974, more than 90 people served on five or more boards of the largest 500 corporations; by 1994, the number had fallen to 75; by 2012, only one person was so connected. The inner circle that Mills described can no longer knit the corporate world together.
Indeed, despite the Business Roundtable’s rhetoric in a 2019 statement about “corporate social responsibility,” Nike, Walmart, Disney, The Gap, Amazon, Starbucks, and others still fight unions, resist environment regulations, and make most of their consumer products in overseas sweatshops. Many big corporations rhetorically embraced Black Lives Matter and other progressive causes while continuing to direct campaign donations to right-wing Republicans who support voter suppression, cuts to social programs, and dismantling of diversity programs.
The Supreme Court dealt a serious blow to what remained of the corporate inner circle with its 2010 Citizens United decision, which spawned the growth of super PACs and dark-money interest groups. Post–Citizens United, the voices of right-wing billionaires and CEOs have been drowning out those of business liberals on matters of public opinion and public policy.
It’s their money—ever-increasing amounts of it—that’s really doing the talking. In 2024, 16 of the top 25 political donors gave almost exclusively to Republicans, according to an Open Secrets analysis. Topping the list, of course, is Elon Musk, whose SpaceX has been the beneficiary of government largesse since 2006 and whose fortune has enabled him to somehow assume the mantle of virtual co-president.
Right-wing donors and billionaires have found their most forceful ally in President Donald Trump, who epitomizes the increasingly cutthroat and transactional culture of America’s superrich, while—and Mills no doubt would have appreciated the irony—employing “the elites” as a rhetorical punching bag. The ferocity of his administration’s efforts to dismantle democracy, the economy, and “elite” institutions—is truly stunning, though perhaps not for anyone familiar with Project 2025, which is like the Powell memo on steroids.
Right-wing donors and billionaires have found their most forceful ally in President Donald Trump, who epitomizes the increasingly cutthroat and transactional culture of America’s superrich.
Many big business leaders recognize that Trump’s tariffs, trade wars, and deportation plans are economically incoherent (at best), bad for society, and even harmful to their own businesses, but the “inner circle” that used to checkmate such extremism collapsed long ago. Indeed, with some exceptions, they are either on board with Trump’s no-holds-barred crusade to repress unions and stifle consumer and environmental regulations or have been intimidated into submission, whether they be media owners, university trustees, corporate law firms, or the chiefs of big companies and banks.
Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase’s $39 million-a-year CEO and former chair of the Business Roundtable—and also a former Democrat and Trump skeptic—recently told his corporate pals at the World Economic Forum meeting that Trump’s tariffs may be “a little inflationary” but “good for national security,” so “get over it.”
The Power Elite, of course, got its name in part from those who, Mills believed, chose to invoke national security concerns to justify their own agenda. He would likely be impressed by the increasing resistance to Trump among grassroots activists and a growing number of university administrators and faculty members, journalists, and law firms, but Mills was no political strategist—The Power Elite is not a prescriptive work—and questions remain about the most effective way to challenge the Trump administration’s trifecta of reaction, corruption, and naked greed. The Democracy Alliance—a network of megadonors formed in 2005 to coordinate political donations to liberal Democrats—never gained momentum, in part because it focused on short-term election cycles. Perhaps now is the time to forge an ongoing partnership between progressive activist groups, unions, and wealthy liberals who, appalled by Trumpism, recognize the need for both winning electoral battles and building an ongoing majoritarian movement for basic fairness, shared prosperity, and democracy.
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