councilor.org
| Source | Louis Proyect |
| Date | 05/03/29/11:55 |
| The Chronicle of Higher Education Review
From the issue dated April 1, 2005 The Neglect of the American Elite By STEVE FRASER and GARY GERSTLE A paradox has baffled historians and citizens generally for as long as there has been a United States of America: How can a nation consecrated to freedom and equality nonetheless give rise to great hierarchies of power and wealth that undermine the very foundations of that extraordinary promise? The paradox is more pointed than that. The country is a democracy. The people rule. And yet the people do not rule; elites, patriciates, castes, classes have ruled in their stead. Sometimes they seem to rule with the people's interests in mind; sometimes not. Phrases like "ruling class" or "ruling elite" sound a discordant note. They do not feel as though they belong in the vocabulary of American politics and its history. After all, the very openness, fluidity, and social heterogeneity of American society defy anything as exclusive, ongoing, and inaccessible as a "ruling class." There is something ineffably alien about such notions, stepchildren imported from the lingua franca of the Old World and its sedimentary layers of titled aristocrats, landed gentry, military castes, and dynastic families. It is a cherished American folk belief, after all, that classes do not exist or, if they do, are always going out of existence. Democratic political institutions, whatever their defects, will not tolerate a continuous monopoly of power by a tiny clique of self-anointed overlords. And even if such usurpation might be attempted, the sheer overwhelming tidal force of the American economy would wash it away in an onrushing flood of new enterprise, new technology, and new sources of wealth that would inundate the old ruling groups and either force them open to rising elements of the middle classes or dissolve them entirely. So, too, the ethnic promiscuity of American society, its open invitation to people from every country and culture to come aboard and grab a share of the American dream, inexorably wears away at the internal cohesion, that vital complex of shared traditions, beliefs, and customs that any ruling milieu depends on for its élan and its sense of entitlement. Over the last quarter-century, historians have by and large ceased writing about the role of ruling elites in the country's evolution. Or if they have taken up the subject, they have done so to argue against its salience for grasping the essentials of American political history. Yet there is something peculiar about this recent intellectual aversion, even if we accept as true the beliefs that democracy, social mobility, and economic dynamism have long inhibited the congealing of a ruling stratum. This aversion has coincided, after all, with one of the largest and fastest-growing disparities in the division of income and wealth in American history. We have all grown used to characterizing the 1980s and 1990s as the second coming of the Gilded Age. "Crony capitalism" has re-entered our everyday political vocabulary, a term carrying unsavory associations, suggesting the cross-fertilization of privileged economic and political circles in open defiance of the normal protocols of democratic politics. Since historians, like everybody else, are hardly immune to the subtle influence of the pressing issues of their own day, even as they burrow deep into the distant past, it is noteworthy that so few have felt the urge of late to explore the class dimensions of power in years gone by. That this recent neglect of the way ruling groups formed, exercised their power, and came to an end has followed the "social-history revolution" of the 1960s also seems peculiar. That revolution generated a remarkably fertile outpouring of historical research and writing that focused on the experience of oppression going all the way back to the colonial origins of the New World and beyond. But the meticulous examination of the lives of slaves, immigrants, industrial workers, Native Americans, impoverished underclasses, women, disenfranchised minorities, and others has, for the most part, not concerned itself with the social and political history of those presumably responsible for their oppression. However valuable and innovative such historical detective work on the experiences of the subordinate often was (and is), it drained intellectual attention away from the collective lives of the superordinate. Of course, these histories treated as axiomatic the power and exploitation exercised by upper classes, master races, and patriarchs. Beyond that, any more intimate examination of how ruling groups coalesced, how they exercised their authority in an ostensibly democratic political environment, how they formulated the ideological justifications for their empowerment, how they faced up to crises and challenges to their supremacy -- those and a dozen other similarly intriguing questions often fell from view. Neglecting the powerful had not been characteristic of historical work before World War II. To the contrary, the story of the ruling elites had preoccupied historians for a very long time. Moreover, to talk about classes and the struggles between them was common parlance. Indeed, for the first 150 years of the nation's life, the language of ruling and subordinate social groups defined the contours of one of the grand narratives of American history. Measured by the long sweep of that history, stretching back into the colonial era, it is the recent muting of those concerns about the concentration and exercise of power that seems odd. That does not mean that those who once stressed such matters were right. But it does mean that a whole set of historical metaphors and categories of analysis once taken for granted have lost much of their legitimacy. Beginning sometime after World War II, and with increasing force in the wake of the Reagan "revolution," a gathering consensus concluded that events, "History," the impersonal forces of the market, or some other analogous abstractions rule, not classes or elites. Certainly the cultural cold war helped stigmatize notions of "class struggle" and "ruling classes" as so much communist verbiage, a purely propagandist rhetoric that failed to capture the more centerless, polymorphous, and pluralist makeup of American politics and social organization. Yet precisely the opposite conviction runs likes a red thread through much of the nation's past. It is virtually impossible to make sense of any of the great epochs in American political history or of the grander chronicle of democracy in America without coming face to face with "Tories," "moneycrats," "the Monster Bank," "the slaveocracy," "robber barons," "plutocrats," "the money trust," "economic royalists," "the Establishment," the "power elite," or the "military-industrial complex." All those colorful variations echo a single theme: that, the fluid and anarchic character of the American experience notwithstanding, organized political and social groupings have arisen at key junctures in the country's history and have succeeded for more or less extended periods of time in exercising broad dominion over the nation's political economy and even its cultural and social life. One might view that rich imagery of the pursuit of power either as a reproach or as a vindication of the pursuit of happiness -- a reproach insofar as it suggests that the American promise of freedom and equality has been a sham and a delusion, a vindication inasmuch as it implies that democracy has been a permanent revolution, forever embattled against those who have tried to abrogate that promise. Either way, America is depicted as densely populated with an assortment of social groups that all seem to behave suspiciously like ruling classes or elites. Survey the landmarks of the national drama. Every president of enduring reputation up to John F. Kennedy is remembered for some vital crusade against a usurping or entrenched elite. Washington and Jefferson overthrew the minions of the British monarchy and then fended off attempts at aristocratic counterrevolution by homegrown Tories. Andrew Jackson waged war against a "Monster Bank" that presumed to monopolize the credit resources of a fledgling nation and turn enterprising citizens into its vassals. Lincoln purged the nation of its mortal sin by extirpating the "slaveocracy." Teddy Roosevelt unleashed rhetorical thunderbolts against those "malefactors of great wealth" whose gargantuan corporate combines showed no regard for the public welfare and bought and sold senators and congressmen like so many pigs at a market. Woodrow Wilson promised, if swept into office, to take on the "money trust," that financial octopus whose tentacles were strangling to death the economic opportunity and democratic independence that were every citizen's birthright. In the midst of the greatest calamity since the Civil War, FDR chased the "money changers from the temple" and declared that his New Deal would henceforth police and punish the "economic royalists" who had brought on the Great Depression. Even the mild-mannered Dwight Eisenhower left office cautioning the country against the overweening power of the "military-industrial complex." In the wake of the conservative intellectual ascendancy that accompanied the rise of Ronald Reagan, however, what had once been a main current of the country's historiography became little more than a tributary. It is true that plenty of books have appeared over the last decade or so revisiting the lives of legendary business titans such as Jay Gould, Edward H. Harriman, J. Pierpont Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller. But nearly without exception, they steer clear of treating those figures as emblematic of some ruling elite. Nowadays it may seem old-fashioned, against the American grain, or even subversive (pace President George W. Bush's warning that to criticize his tax cuts for the wealthy was to indulge in "class warfare") to talk about classes, about the struggles between them, about something as exotic and alien as a ruling elite. But it is not. The corpus of thinking about hierarchy and democracy that extends all the way back to the first days of the Republic has left behind a series of questions still worth pondering. We need to focus on the variety of economic elites that have ruled, or attempted to rule, the nation. We need to look at the different ways in which elites have constituted their political, ideological, and social worlds; examine the internal fissures and external challenges that have threatened and sometimes undermined those worlds; explore the special problems facing elite pretensions to political power in a democracy. That requires a focus on instability and change as integral features of elite rule in America. One fundamental transformation involves the etiology of power. In the era of Adams and Jefferson, government seemed the principal incubator of elite aspirations to overweening authority. By the time of the Industrial Revolution, however, civil society, in particular the centers of greatest economic power, had supplanted government as the breeding ground of aristocratic hubris. Government had become either the servitor of powers greater than itself or the inspirational hope of those who saw it as the only mechanism capable of wrestling the country's illicit ruling cliques to the ground. That great sea change in where power was rooted and on whose behalf it might be deployed arose in most societies undergoing the transition from precapitalist to capitalist mechanisms of wealth creation. Moreover it was itself organically connected to an equally profound change in the way elites organized and conceived of themselves. In the late-18th and early-19th centuries, elites configured themselves as an aristocratic caste whose position rested on lineage, inbreeding, and various forms of social exclusivity. Even apart from their real and personal property, their inherited cultural capital commanded deference from those not so blessed. Over time, those boundaries blurred along with the explosive expansion and differentiation of the economy. Those occupying the commanding heights of the economy and the political system began to look more like a class, open to -- even forced open by -- newcomers of more plebeian origin. That new social fluidity further complicated attempts to discern just who ruled and how. That was emphatically the case, moreover, as rising corporate industrial and finance capital overcame or merged with more settled and dynastic forms of landed and mercantile wealth. That proliferation of power centers, in turn, generated internal divisions that could take on cultural and political as well as economic shape. Most significant, it produced a fissure within the "leisure class" between those absorbed by their own self-interest and self-regard, psychologically and politically deaf and blind to the economic mayhem and social antagonisms accumulating around them, and a fraction of that same universe -- people such as the Roosevelts, for example, or those to-the-manner-born "Establishment" figures of the next generation -- who self-consciously took up the challenge of ruling on behalf of the whole commonwealth, even if that meant now and then risking the enmity of their social peers. Within those circles, a sense of social trusteeship subdued the instinct for self-indulgence. Here the possibility of collaborating with subordinate segments of the body politic -- the labor movement, for example -- was actively explored, leaving the makeup, not to mention the verifiable existence, of a ruling group even more intriguing to ascertain. Fissures that profound took on measurable visible form only during mortal crises. One thinks of the constitutional period, the Civil War, the political firestorm ignited by populist and antitrust passions at the turn of the 19th century, the Great Depression, and the defeat in Vietnam and the end of U.S. world economic supremacy in the 1970s. What is fascinating about those occurrences is that they show how dominant groups faced up to the challenge and either succumbed in war or public ignominy or else surmounted it, whether through pure self-assertion or shrewd political compromise. Whatever the outcome, the life and death of ruling elites is one of the enduring themes that run through the long literature of wealth and political power in America. It remains so today as the country witnesses the tribulations of its latest ruling group, born at the dawn of Reagan's "morning in America" and now struggling to master what may be either the high noon or the twilight of the new American Century. Steve Fraser is a writer and historian living in New York. Gary Gerstle is a professor of history at the University of Maryland at College Park. This essay is adapted from the book they edited, Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy, published this month by Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2005 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho