“Who, after all, runs America? No one runs it altogether, but in so far as any group does, the power elite.”
C. Wright Mills (1959). The Sociological Imagination, Oxford University Press. p. 31.
Mills’ The Power Elite thesis (1956) has sustain the length of time to the present. I have said it before. We have never really escaped the paradigms of thought laid out in the mid-century: from hard to soft fascism, to inflationary capitalism, from science fiction totalitarianism, to insane consumerism.
Mass society has never learnt from its mistakes. In The Washington Post today (September 19, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT), journalists Rachel Lerman, Julie Zauzmer Weil, Emma Kumer and Clara Ence Morse, tell us “how rich each candidate is compared with the average American.” The Cognition history of American politics has played out in Mills’ more perceptive “elites versus anti-elites” narratives. The irony is that Mills and his academic associates, the historians Richard Hofstadter, Frank Freidel, and Ken Stampp, were seen to form both a Conflict historiographic school of thought, and it is rival, a Consensus historiographic school of thought. From the standpoint of the early 21st century, it is nonsense; the stupidity of mid-century polemics, as we today the stupidity of polemics. Trying to box the mid-century historians was, and is, stupidity. At the time, Hofstadter complained he disliked the term ‘consensus historian’ several times, and criticized Daniel Joseph Boorstin for overusing the consensus and ignoring the essential conflicts in history (Rushdy 1999: 129; Kraus and Joyce 1990).
Mills (Buch 2022d). was strongly influenced by pragmatism, specifically the works of George Herbert Mead, John Dewey, Charles Sanders Peirce, and William James, and added to pragmatic-paradigmatic thinking was Karl Marx and Thorstein Veblen, Max Weber and Karl Mannheim, with a dose of Neo-Freudianism. It is stupidity to box-in thinkers.
The work of these American historians and sociologists are very distinct from modern American conspiracy theory. Mills’ The Power Elite (1956) is clearly based on what he claimed as “The Sociological Imagination“ (1959). It was a positive move because the thinking challenged a structural functionalist approach to sociology, as it opens new positions for the individual to inhabit with regard to the larger social structure. The crossover conflict-consensus dialogue debunks — if any person bothers to read and think — the stupidity of the beloved false ‘dismissals’ of the hard materialists; those who are only interested in profiting themselves, and “screw” everyone else.
Narratives of elites versus anti-elites tie together the global themes of thinking from circa 1950 to the present: egalitarianism, anti-intellectualism (against powerful institutions perceived to be controlled by elites), populism, and the political theory of pluralism (Buch 2022e). Although these are global themes the way of thinking creeps into decision-making at the local level (Buch 2023a, d, h, i, k, l). It has been a substantive argument (Buch 2022a, b; 2023c, f; 2024b) of the author-writer-scholar in the last seven and half years, and five days, since my lover-lifepartner-wife passed on the 17 December 2016. But who listens? It is a cutting-edge theory of historiography (Buch 2022c; 2023b, e; 2024a). But who listens? The work addresses contemporary and global educationalist theories (Buch 2023g, j).
In conclusion is what I have already stated, but who listens?
The American national mythology, as we review Richard Hofstadter (1955, re-issued 1988; 1963;1965; rev. edition, 2008), Susan Jacoby (2008), and Russell Jacoby (1987; 1999; 2005; 2011; 2020), can be seen as another answer, and, in fact, the all-encompassing problem Ideal. Here the problem is how the ideal is misunderstood, unhistorical. A better historical understanding shows that history is not myth; and persons are making decisions to be wilful ignorance. There is another part of the problem Ideal. In being misunderstood, the myth is not practiced. Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are not practicing the American national mythology as in its historical intentionality. The American state militias were never meant to become a permanent military force to defend state rights; least of all its violent rhetoric and its violent historical incidents.
REFERENCES AND BACKGROUND RESEARCH
I acknowledge the use of phrases from Wikipedia entries cited (hyperlinked). I annual donate to Wikimedia.
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Neville Buch
Latest posts by Neville Buch (see all)
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