C Wright Mills, America's Elite, and the Wisdom of Third Parties

I finished reading C. Wright Mills's Power Elite over the past couple of weeks.  Published in 1956, the book offers more insight into current events than most contemporary commentary.  Mills says that there are three levels of power--lower, middle, and upper--and that the pluralism upon which most political science focuses is characteristic of the local (lower) and Congressional (middle) levels. Although interest groups function on the lower and middle levels, there is little diversity at the upper level.  The upper elite does, of course, contain advocates of different social orientations and degrees of socialism, but the underlying viewpoint is stable.  The upper elite that runs America is comprised of presidential appointees selected from the broader power elite, which Mills depicts as coming from multiple sources: the Metropolitan 400 or social register types, the corporate rich, and the senior officers in the military.

When Mills wrote the book, the military and the military budget were more important than now.  Mills was unaware of the Fed's role (hence the centrality of banking interests) in the subsidization of the power elite and the US governmental system. As a result, he understates the importance of banking interests, which Murray Rothbard and Ronald Radosh tease out in their New History of Leviathan and that James Perloff illustrates in his Shadows of Power.

Mills  briefly describes the central role of the white-shoe law firms and investment banks, but these were more central in the 1950s than Mills describes them; they have become  more so since Nixon's ending of the gold standard in 1971.

According to Mills, the president and his advisers select the highest-level elite from the various groups within the power elite.  During the Kennedy years social and intellectual elites, represented by the Bundys, Dean Rusk, and Robert McNamara (recommended by fellow Skull-and-Bonesman and partner of Prescott Bush at Brown Brothers Harriman, Robert Lovett ) were dominant.  More recently, much as in the days of George Washington, bankers like Henry Paulson (who parallels but is not the intellectual equivalent of Hamilton) have been dominant.

The upper elite interacts within itself, and typically there are one or two degrees of separation between any two members.  Mills  does not claim that there is any sort of conspiracy, for that would be foolish.  Rather, each takes cues from the other.  Conformity derived from educational-and-university experiences obviates the need for overt conspiracy.

The last few chapters move from analysis to broadside as Mills criticizes what he calls the crackpot realism of America's narrow-minded upper elite.

Mills's depiction of America as having moved from a public liberal to a mass society is on point.  His emphasis on the mass media as transforming Americans from a free, imaginative people to a nation of cowed serfs (my word, not his) is also on point.  Mills is not that far from writers like James Perloff, who writes about the Council on Foreign Relations.  No president since Hoover has been independent of  the CFR.   That does not imply conspiracy any more than the leadership of a modern corporation's interacting with each other is a conspiracy.  The elite interacts and forms opinions. Its mindset, like that of leading university professors, is conformist, lockstep, cowardly, and lacking in vision.

Mills offers little hope for those who care about America or hope to see a change from the current trend. It occurred to me that his book was the inspiration for Eisenhower's 1961 speech about the military-industrial complex.   If Mills is right, then a useful long-term strategy in politics is to support third parties.  Another is simply to jump ship and move to a smaller country in which a mass culture and an elite bred to narrow-minded arrogance and the subjugation of a foolish mass of TV-news-viewing idiots won't exist because of the smaller scale.

In the Federalist 10 Madison argued that America's large scale was an impediment to the formation of faction.  As transportation and communication modernized, universities began to serve as the proving ground for elite conformity and groupthink.  The power of America's elite is made possible by large scale combined with modern communication methods.  The Internet and other postmodern developments, such as community activism, pose a challenge to America's mass culture.  Nevertheless, as long as Americans continue to support the two mass parties and as long as at least a plurality of Americans derive their news from mass-market newspapers and television,  the trends that Mills observed will continue to escalate.

Shining Light on the Shadows of Power: An Interview with James Perloff

I just submitted this piece to The Lincoln Eagle in Kingston, NY. 

Shining Light on the Shadows of Power: An Interview with James Perlofff

 Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

James Perloff has written four books on the elite governing America, on Darwinism, and on the relationships among institutions that dominate American politics from behind the scenes. In The Shadows of Power Perloff traces the history of the Council on Foreign Relations. In his most recent book, Truth Is a Lonely Warrior, Perloff analyzes how history and current events are leading us toward a world government dictatorship. Perloff’s website is http://jamesperloff.com/. The Lincoln Eagle (TLE) interviewed Perloff by email.

TLE: In your work you refer to the Establishment. What does that mean? Who controls America?

Perloff: In America’s Sixty Families Ferdinand Lundberg wrote: “The United States is owned and dominated by a hierarchy of its sixty richest families…” He was talking about names like the Rockefellers, Morgans, Mellons, Vanderbilts, Du Ponts, Astors and Warburgs, and he showed their control was such that they preselected the presidential candidates before the nominating conventions took place. Things haven’t changed today. Voting gives us the illusion that power belongs to the people, but it really belongs to the rich and the few.

TLE: The media contributes to that process. Whose views does the media reflect?
 
Perloff: That of the media’s ownership. Lundberg documented in 1937 that a plutocracy owned nearly all of the major media organs. We have diverse outlets but not diverse ownership. Today, Time Warner owns CNN, AOL, Time magazine, People, Money, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, New Line Cinema – the list goes on and on. Similar with News Corp. You have maybe a dozen giant multinationals owning all the major media.

TLE: How can Americans obtain information about current events given that their media, such as ABC, MSNBC, The New York Times, and Time are controlled by banking-and-corporate interests?

Perloff: People should investigate alternative media: magazines like The New American, radio shows like Deanna Spingola’s, websites like henrymakow.com, and books like my own Truth Is a Lonely Warrior, published in Kindle and paperbound last year.

TLE: What is the biggest problem facing Americans today?

Perloff: Of course the problems are innumerable: political, economic, and social. If they were boiled down to one, I would say it is a self-serving shadow government that runs the country from behind the scenes of our democratic trappings.

TLE: A related issue is that of education, which works in tandem with the media to indoctrinate rather than inform or educate. How can parents eliminate indoctrination from their children’s education?

Perloff: The best alternative is home schooling; if not home schooling, private religious schooling; where these alternatives are not possible, give them information resources as an antidote to media indoctrination. Truth is more powerful than lies.

TLE: Why is there a trend toward increasing centralization and government authority?

Perloff: That is a means of consolidating power. The Founding Fathers understood that centralized power leads to tyranny, which is why they gave us limited government with numerous checks and balances.

TLE: What is the link between the Federal Reserve Bank and the money center banking interests, the Rockefellers, Morgans, and Warburgs, and more recently Henry Paulson, Goldman Sachs, George Soros, and other bailout beneficiaries?

Perloff: The Rockefeller, Morgan and Warburg interests were all represented at the secret 1910 meeting on Jekyll Island where the Fed was planned. Paul Warburg was the Fed’s first vice chairman. Henry Paulson was CEO of Goldman Sachs immediately before he became treasury secretary and then oversaw, with Bernanke, the 2008 $700 billion bailout of Wall Street, which included billions for Goldman Sachs. The Fed is a golden goose for the private banks.

TLE: What has been the role of the Council on Foreign Relations with respect to the relationships in the prior question?

Perloff: The role of the Council is to formulate foreign policy, but that policy is cohesive with the wishes of bankers and the Fed. The Council was founded by the very same people who founded the Fed; the Council’s first president was J. P. Morgan’s personal attorney; David Rockefeller was the Council’s chairman for many years.

TLE: What has been the link between the Council and the presidents?

Perloff: The Council dominates the cabinets of presidents whether Democratic or Republican. When my book went to press last year, the count was 21 Secretaries of Defense, 19 Treasury Secretaries, 18 Secretaries of State, and 16 CIA directors have been members of the Council. This is why foreign policy changes very little, if at all, from one president to the next. In the meantime, how many Americans have even heard of the Council?

TLE: Do the Council and the Establishment favor one-world government? Why?

Perloff: The Council on Foreign Relations was founded in 1921 for the express purpose of creating a one-world government. In the immediate context, it was founded as a reaction to the U.S. Senate’s rejection of the 1919 Versailles Treaty, which would have entangled us with the League of Nations. The plans for the UN were drawn up by Council members. The EU and NAFTA are regional stepping stones. World government would be the consolidation of all power on the planet and thus invoke tyranny on a global scale. This is predicted in the Bible, by the way, in the book of Revelation.

TLE: What is the link, if any, among Agenda 21 and the trends that you describe in your books?

Perloff: Environmentalism, as expressed in Agenda 21 and other programs, is a pretext for controlling people. Up until the 1960s, war was considered the best means of controlling populations, but with the advent of nuclear weapons, the Establishment was concerned that war might no longer be a viable option, so the environment was chosen to succeed war as the new primary threat to survival. Global warming and other false scares have been dreamed up and promoted in order give government the excuse to micro-regulate our lives. Now they’re even talking about giving the government remote control of home thermostats. 

TLE: What has been the role of the US government in financing its own enemies, including Stalin, Mao, al Qaeda, and the Ayatollah Khomeini?

Perloff: It is well documented that Stalin’s predecessors, Lenin and Trotsky, were financed by the Rothschilds and US banking firms like Kuhn, Loeb. During World War II, When Stalin was threatened with destruction by the Axis powers, he was rescued with billions of dollars’ worth of American Lend-Lease. Mao would not have risen to power without the help of the U.S. State Department: Google my article “China Betrayed.” Regarding the Ayatollah, google my article “Iran and the Shah: What Really Happened.” Of course, there’s quite a bit on the Internet on al Qaeda being a creation of Western intelligence services.

TLE: Will the future bring a one-world government with a violent dictator at its head?

Perloff: From the Bible, from Orwell, from the trend of events and from the internal documents of the plutocracy we are talking about, that appears to be the case, but for the sake of righteousness, which is obedience to God, we should resolutely oppose it.

Thank you, Mr. Perloff. I hope that readers will buy your books and wean themselves from the mass media.

Antony C. Sutton's America's Secret Establishment

Antony C. Sutton's America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones. Waterville, Oregon: Trineday LLC, 1983, 1986, 2002.

How many books go into third editions?  This one, which Kris Millegan reprinted in 2002, is worth reading.  I attended a libertarian-oriented cocktail party in Manhattan this summer, and one of the attendees, a respected educator who, as a young man, met Ayn Rand and, as a grown-up, helped the Soviet Union transition to a freer economy, recommended Sutton's book to me.

I don't, as a rule, believe in conspiracy theories.   Apparent conspiracies arise from subjective paranoia,  prejudice, or mischaracterization of a pattern as a conspiracy.  This may not detract from the theory's value because insights about a pattern can be useful even if the pattern does not bear the C-word's weight.  For instance, James Perloff's Shadows of Power, which does not claim that the Council on Foreign Relations is a conspiracy (it is not), presents a useful narrative. In the case of America's Secret Establishment, Sutton, a respected historian who spent years with the Hoover Institution, claims that Skull and Bones, the Yale secret society, is one.

While Sutton shows that it does qualify, the broad trends that Sutton describes aren't attributable solely or even mostly to it;  he overstates its importance.  Nevertheless, Sutton's work is useful not only as a discussion of an idiosyncratic, secret, elite group that seems to have furthered the financial aims, sometimes illegal, of a subset of its members, but also, and more importantly, as a discussion of how America's elite became enamored of statism, has manipulated public opinion by creating the illusion of a two-party system with a fake liberal-conservative dichotomy, and has established a crony capitalist system based on economic regulation and control facilitated by the fake dichotomy.    Sutton's book, written in 1983, is prophetic as the American state becomes increasingly corrupt, dysfunctional, and totalitarian.

When Sutton wrote the first edition, George H.W. Bush was vice president. Since then, Bush and his son, both Skull and Bonesmen, have been presidents--to ill effect.  Written before the first Bush presidency, the book shows that Bush's use of the phrase "new world order" comes directly from Skull and Bones's history.

Many of the names in Sutton's narrative have aged, but they have been pivotal in the creation of the 21st century's deteriorating America. These include McGeorge Bundy, W. Averell Harriman,William F. Buckley, and Daniel Coit Gilman. It is not clear, though, that the old-line WASPs whose ancestors arrived here in the 1630s have the same panache that they had even twenty years ago.  Today, people like the Waltons, the Kochs, Buffett, Soros, and Bloomberg dominate the upper echelons of the Forbes 400; not all of them are as vulnerable to the kinds of manipulations that Sutton describes by which Skull and Bones insiders got control of key foundations and furthered the aims of progressive education via non-Skull-and-Bonesmen like John Dewey.

Moreover, the Order of Skull and Bones, to which Sutton refers simply as "the Order," seems to have increased its diversity by the 1980s, although names like Taft (including the Order's founder, Alphonso Taft, Grant's Secretary of War, and his descendent, William H. Taft,  president and US Supreme Court chief justice) continue to appear.  This presents a problem for Sutton's model because he asserts that the old, monied names that have dominated American foundations and the formation of its educational system view even the Rockefellers as upstarts.  If so, then what is the deeper meaning of an Order that has not only included six Bushes over a century, but in recent years also has included names like Shapiro, Nguyen, Moscoso, Meyer, Gottheim, Grossman, Ruiz, Jimenez, Mehta, and Sarnelli, according to Sutton's list of the Order's members at the end of the book?

What is valuable about the book is Sutton's philosophical probing of the Hegelian model behind progressive education, the support foundations have given to various soft totalitarian causes, and American support, via Order-related banks like Guaranty Trust and Harriman Brothers, for the nation's putative opposition--the Nazi and the communist movements, both of which received essential funding from the Order-related banks.

The concepts of  Hegelian state worship and managed conflict that Sutton explores and says have been characteristic of the Order also have been characteristic of the entire Progressive movement, including not only the Order but also a large swath of Americans including Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson--as he transitioned into support for Progressivism. Progressives came from the University of Wisconsin, and virtually every other university, as well as Yale.

Sutton is wrong that Kant and Hegel are closely linked, especially with respect to state worship.  Kant's categorical imperative is liberal; it requires that humans be treated as ends in themselves. However, Kant in some ways represents a transition to statism, as does utilitarianism from Bentham on.  Von Mises is wrong that utilitarianism is necessarily individualist.  The 18th and 19th century versions mostly were, but in Mill there is a transition to a more socialistic utilitarianism which we also saw in recent years in the Chicago School's and Judge Posner's support for bailouts of incompetently run investment companies.

Intellectual histories of 19th and 20th century America, studies of the histories of American universities, and studies of the transformation of the American economy show that there was a widespread transition from individualism to Progressivism and collectivism  in the 1890s and that part of the reason was that Americans like Richard T. Ely were educated in Germany, where collectivist ideas, including Hegel and the related German historical school of economics, were taught.  It is not surprising, then, that the elite of the elite, Yale's handpicked members of the Order, have also advocated Hegelian, Progressive,  and soft totalitarian ideas.  In the case of Ely, Sutton neglects to mention that marginalist economists like John Bates Clark wrested control of the American Economics Association from Ely.  In the end, this point may not have mattered much because marginalism is consistent with conservative versions of Progressivism.

Sutton's book is valuable because it traces in incredible detail one sub-group within the Progressive movement, the Order's, criminal financing of both Bolsheviks and Nazis and because Sutton gives a valuable philosophical interpretation.  Progressivism and the Order adopted a Hegelian dialectical approach to political strategy whereby they support both sides (both liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, communists and Nazis) in order to achieve a totalitarian synthesis that neither side, both of which are manipulated, anticipates.

The book is extraordinarily useful in showing that the claims of Progressivism about helping the poor and being democratic were always lies; from the beginning Progressivism had totalitarian aims.  Today's America is increasingly reflecting those aims.  As a recent Rasmussen poll showed, only 14% of Americans believe that their descendents' futures will be better than theirs.  Might they consider that they are responsible for voting the likes of Kennedy (McGeorge Bundy,  Harriman), Harriman, Roosevelt, and Obama into office--and that the decisions that the American Establishment has made, and for whom the average voter pulls a lever each election day, are the reasons  that things are going down hill?