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.”
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.
