The Power Elite

By Ronald J. Scott
in his personal capacity

On September 22, 2024, an organization named National Security Leaders for America (NSL4A) published a letter, signed by 741 individuals (including 237 retired generals and admirals), pledging support for presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

Here is one of its statements:

“This election is a choice between serious leadership and vengeful impulsiveness. It is a choice between democracy and authoritarianism. Vice President Harris defends America’s democratic ideals, while former President Donald Trump endangers them.”

Yet, the letter provides no specific evidence to support the pejorative claims.

Serious leadership?

Since January 20, 2021, in less than four years, Russia invaded Ukraine; Iran-backed terror groups are attacking U.S. service members and Israel; China has ramped up its aggressive actions toward Taiwan, Japan, and the Philippines; and North Korea is launching missiles.

Impulsiveness?

Neo-Marxist DEI personnel and programs flourish after Trump sought to stop them. Trump never violated court injunctions or rulings. Biden ignored them (e.g., student loan debt).

Authoritarian?

In 2021 and beyond, the Biden-Harris Administration discharged over 8,000 men and women for constitutionally refusing to be injected by an experimental vaccine. This Administration has also allowed the Soviet-style weaponization of our legal system to target a political opponent.

Defends America’s democratic ideals?

America is a Constitutional Republic, not a democracy. I’ll touch upon this distinction later in the article.

During my graduate studies, I discovered the writing of C. Wright Mills, a Columbia University sociology professor. One of his books was The Power Elite, published in 1956.

According to Mills, the “power elite” are those that occupy prominent positions in the dominant institutions–military, economic, and political. Their decisions have enormous consequences, nationally and globally.

The evolving institutions that succeed weaker predecessors, which they head are a triumvirate of groups — two or three hundred giant corporations, a strong federal political order that “now enters into each and every cranny of the social structure,” and the military establishment.

Importantly, Mills explains that the elite themselves may not see their elite status, “often they are uncertain about their roles” and “without conscious effort, they absorb the aspiration to be … The Onecide” (e.g., on the right side of ideology—not history; thus, they tend to be intolerant of other views and values).

Mills sees them as a quasi-hereditary caste, often entering into positions of societal prominence through educations obtained at eastern establishment universities like Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, and to a certain extent the older Service Academies of West Point and Annapolis (Note:  examine the resumes or biographies of Cabinet officials, the judiciary, and Congress; you will find Mills’ assessment is on target).  In this manner, the mantle of the elite generally passes through families.

According to Mills, the resulting elites can be generally grouped into one of six types (quoted from Wikipedia):

1. The “Metropolitan 400”: members of historically notable local families in the principal American cities, generally represented on the Social Register
2. “Celebrities”: prominent entertainers and media personalities
3. The “Chief Executives”: presidents and CEOs of the most important companies within each industrial sector
4. The “Corporate Rich”: major landowners and corporate shareholders
5. The “Warlords”: senior military officers, most importantly the Joint Chiefs of Staff
6. The “Political Directorate”: “fifty-odd men of the executive branch” of the U.S. federal government, including the senior leadership in the Executive Office of the President, sometimes variously drawn from elected officials of the Democratic and Republican parties but usually professional government bureaucrats

One of the motivations for Mills’ book, The Power Elite, was Franz Leopold Neumann‘s book Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism in 1942. Neumann explained how a democratic state like Germany provided the conditions for Nazism.

Mills claimed that Behemoth had given him the “tools to grasp and analyze the entire total structure and as a warning of what could happen in a modern capitalist democracy.”

This should explain why America is in turmoil today—the left’s push for democracy has provided similar conditions for the chaos and turmoil preceding socialism (and the violent tension between the communists and fascists) in Germany.

The Power Elite received significant criticism, not surprisingly from members of the various “power elite” institutions. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. said, “I look forward to the time when Mr. Mills hands back his prophet’s robes and settles down to being a sociologist again,” cited in a New York Times essay, “The Deciders,” by John H. Summers, May 14, 2006.

Summers went on to say:

“The historical value of “The Power Elite” seems assured. It was the first book to offer a serious model of power that accounted for the secretive agencies of national security …

“Much of “The Power Elite” was a tough-talking polemic against the “romantic pluralism” embedded in the prevailing theory of American politics. The separation of powers in the Constitution, the story went, repelled the natural tendency of power to concentrate, while political parties and voluntary societies organized the clash of interests, laying the people’s representatives open to the influence of public opinion. This “theory of balance” still applied to the “middle levels of power,” Mills wrote. But the society it envisioned had been eclipsed.

The two key points in Summers’ analysis relate to national security institutions and “romantic pluralism.”

Already in the 1950s, Mills saw corruption taking place in the national security institutions of America:  The National Security Council, the Defense Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the State Department, and so forth.

This corruption grew to the point that we now face a crisis in which the national security regime attempted to remove a duly elected President of the United States. Comey, Clapper (NSL4A signer), Brennan (NSL4A signer), some generals and admirals referenced below, and/or host of other members of the power elite, spied on Trump and his coterie,

• deceitfully pursued prosecutions,
• impeached the President for a fabricated crime,
• distorted Trump’s response to the COVID-19 narrative,
• induced fear in the public to shut down a booming economy,
• and now demonstrate the same Behemoth tactics spawned by the George Floyd folklore that are creating the necessary conditions for socialism, as in fascist Germany and a communist Russia.

There are credible reports (Note this link has since been removed by YouTube) that a Floyd-type incident was the basis for planning the type of rioting that took place in Minneapolis (and in other Democrat-controlled metropolitan areas).

(See from Unconstrained Analytics: MEMO: Warning on Racism (Nov. 2019); Requiem for Minnesota – When Does a State Become a Counterstate?)

Floyd was just a pawn in their strategic effort to “fundamentally transform America.”  Obama and his Organizing for Action enterprise play a critical role in this effort. They have teamed up with Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and the Communist Party USA (as explicitly announced by CPUSA leader John Bachtell in 2018—see Lesson from midterms: A united people can win – Communist Party USA (cpusa.org).

Mills’ treatment of “romantic pluralism” is what the left calls diversity and multiculturalism. The original understanding of American pluralism was an appreciation and tolerance for different views and values that joined in a common purpose as American citizens.

Academic institutions at the time, such as Harvard, Princeton, and Yale were primarily focused on preparing Americans as religious clergymen and public servants.

Today, those same institutions have evolved (“succeeded weaker predecessors”) into secular humanistic elite production centers. Their emphasis on diversity and multiculturalism has nothing to do with uniting America—just the opposite. So, to hide this ideological push, the left accuses former President Trump of dividing the nation.

When I first read The Power Elite, I rejected Mills’ arguments that included the military as one of the three “power elite” institutions. After all, as a Service Academy graduate (the USAF Academy), I had ascended to the rank of a senior officer in this institution and considered myself a true public servant. I still do in my role as a private citizen, patriotic to the flag, our republic, and one nation under God.

So, when in June of 2020, I read about retired generals and admirals speaking contemptuously about the President of the United States, I see why Mills wrote what he did.

Here are recent examples: generals (Mattis, see here and here; Kelly, see here and here; Allen, see here and here; Powell, here and here; and Honoré, see here) and admirals (Mullen, see here; and McRaven, see here).  There are others as well.

Do they not see what a dangerous example they set for other members of the armed forces?

One of the Articles of the UCMJ prohibits contemptuous language such as theirs. If they gave up their military pension and rank, reverting to a private citizen, then perhaps their sacrifice would justify their impulse—but then they would have no credibility. To use their rank to justify their credibility and message is a gross ethical violation, and potentially a criminal action (see Victor Davis Hansen’s recent article here).

These generals and admirals rebuke a duly elected President with assertions backed by no facts.  They also demonstrate their own lack of understanding of what America’s Constitutional Republic is all about.

For example, William Cummings in a USA Today  article states:  “Former Secretary of State Colin Powell says that he will once again not vote for Donald Trump, calling the president’s approach to politics ‘dangerous for our democracy’ and asserting that Trump has ‘drifted away” from the Constitution.’”

A properly educated American would know that our Framers feared the extremism of democracy and the extremism of autocracy (see Federalist Papers 10, 14, 26, and 63).

A republic was the “golden mean” between the extremes of autocracy and democracy. This understanding helped make America the most unified, peaceful, and prosperous nation in the history of the world, at least until the Progressive Era when Americans drifted from the history of our founding and the power elite pushed for democracy.

In Powell’s defense, Americans are no longer being taught these distinctions because the left controls education (as advanced by Marx and Engels in their 1848 Communist Manifesto), and they push for democracy while celebrating diversity, multiculturalism, and new norms that violate America’s Judeo-Christian tradition; all of which divide our nation.

They believe the majority rules, even if it is only perceived thanks to the media’s amplification of a minority voice (as in the summer/fall of 2020 public protesting and rioting we watched on the news). This is the fruit of democracy: mobocracy.

The danger at this critical point in our history is that polling and voting tend to follow public sentiment. Public sentiment is shaped by the media, Hollywood, and academia. Most are far left of center and appear to coordinate/collaborate in messaging (like 1930s Gleichschaltung that thrust Hitler into power).

For over three and a half years, President Trump had been viciously attacked by the left. His political agenda is consistent with the fundamental concept of a republic, which is intended to constrain autocratic and democratic impulses and passions. His agenda is a threat to the left’s design to fundamentally transform America.

Soviet, Chinese, and American communists have been hard at work to influence the ideological leanings of America’s media, Hollywood, and academia. While there is a growing body of literature to confirm this assertion, this interview by Soviet KGB defector, Yuri Semenov, provides an explanation about who is behind the George Floyd riots.

The left is working overtime to produce Soviet- and Chinese-style propaganda such as this recent article by Adam Serwer in The Atlantic Magazine.  Despite outright falsehoods, Serwer somehow believes it is expected not to be nice (more so hateful) to people who are not part of your ideology.

An Italian Archbishop, Carlo Maria Viganò, who has courageously addressed corruption in the Roman Catholic Church, understands President Trump’s motivations, agenda, and dilemma. He calls out a fellow American Archbishop, who criticized President Trump for his visit to and photo op at the National Shrine of Saint John Paul II.

Viganò reminded the archbishop and other clergymen and citizens that we are experiencing a battle between the children of light and children of darkness.

See his letter to the President here.  Bravo for his courageous letter.

The generals and admirals were trained to fight enemies of our Constitutional Republic and American way of life. Yet, they align themselves with the children of darkness who strive to destroy the American way of life. Archbishop Viganò clearly sees this and knows the children of light have truth and prayer for their weapons.

The generals and admirals were likely honorable men at earlier times in their lives. Perhaps there is hope for a return to those times.

As Mills pondered, “elite themselves may not see their elite status, ‘often they are uncertain about their roles’ and ‘without conscious effort, they absorb the aspiration to be … The Onecide.’

_
Col. Ronald J. Scott, Jr. (U.S. Air Force, ret.), Ph.D., USAF Academy Class of 1973.

First published in Real Clear Defense