C. Wright Mills and The Junior Scholastics Myth of American Politics

While the general faithlessness and disregard of politicians for the electorate is fully recognized, their disregard is held to be not of their making. In the view of economic ideology, "real" power is not in the hands of politicians. They are seen as mere servants of powerful special interests and dominant economic forces working behind the facade of politics.

Seen this way, whenever the moneyed interests profit from a political act they must have ordered the act, so if war brings profits to corporations the war is attributed to the corporations’ power. In the ideology of economic power, there is no political act save as it can be attributed to a powerful economic interest. In our current war in Iraq which has served some corporations well, and others not as well, such as the greedy big oil corporations which are not currently happy with their investments in a failed war, where once they supposedly held the power in instigating the war, they suddenly hold no power in stopping it. One might suppose that the military corporate interests are therefore currently mightier than the big oil interests. Others are suggesting that all these interests are bowing before the mightier Israel lobby. By this account, the executive branch and its political cohorts are running willy nilly before whatever moneyed interest is the strongest at the moment.

The blending of contradictory viewpoints, that of the apologist who will assert that the American economy is dominated by giant corporations even though the people have historically resented monopolies— and a more "leftist" view, that big business is a result of autonomous economic forces more potent than the politicians forms into a single comprehensive ideology in the writings of C. Wright Mills. After devoting years of study uncovering the "power elite" in America, Mills concluded that corporations and generals make all our important political decisions. Mills’ notions were that political parties occupied the "middle levels" of power alongside trade unions and farm organizations. The reason for their reduced state was that American parties are not "disciplined" national organizations capable of forcing their legislators to hew to a party "program." Instead, they merely represent the parochial interests or sentiments of their local constituencies (as if a liberal San Francisco Congressman were independently representing San Franciscans by voting in secret caucus for anti-gay Democrats in a conservative district).

According to Mills, legislators assembling in Congress are too weak to say boo to a general, the same general who owes his very rank to Congressional approval. His picture of powerless, fragmented parties is a common one which has endeared many to his notions but the only reason that Mills, a professed radical could swallow such ideas was that it enabled him to make a circular argument, dressing up an assumption and putting it forth as conclusion.

As an ideologue he assumed in advance that self-government is inherently futile in the face of corporate and military power. With this assumption it follows that Americans want self-government but that it does them no good to want it, they are prevented by the party system with representatives who are prevented from representing them— but not from anything in the party system itself. They are prevented from it by the power of corporations and the generals. Therefore he does not disagree that the party system is a system for providing representative government, he just accepts the apologists’ myth of fragmented political parties which is taught in civic textbooks to this day.

Mills merely bought the central myth of the American political system, that the two parties are powerless in themselves, that whoever is responsible for the deeds and decisions that make up our history, the party oligarchies are not part of it. But to understand why things happen as they do in America we must look precisely where the prevailing political ideology tells us not to look. Mills fell for the politicians and their mastery of the bait and switch.

Moisei Ostrogorski and his two stupendous volumes "Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties", 1902, (volume two devoted to America) is worth the study particularly in its unabridged form. For a hundred dollars a person could avail him/herself of one of the best educations possible about the American political system. He elucidates how the electorate from the earliest days of the caucus system in America were made dummies to a political oligarchy and the organization, the Machine. While operating ostensibly as a republic the political oligarchy knew their survival was contingent in this republic only if it could bring into its camp a substantial portion of the wealth and social influence existing in society at large.

Alexander Hamilton asserted this political truth and applied it. Through the private influence of influential allies, the oligarchs would have at their disposal the prime requisite for their rule. Men of wealth and influence would, as Hamilton asserted, control in large measure everything in society in order to directly impinge upon the minds of the citizens, the newspapers, periodicals, the church committees, libraries, universities. Allied to corruption that was the rule yet immune to the electorate (our future corporations and special interests) this command of the social influence in the country was the way in which the political elites destroyed the ability of free people to act for themselves, to think for themselves.

By allying wealth to power and corrupting moneyed interests to pay the bribes, the powerful protect themselves. But from whom? While one can think the political elites are managed by wire-pullers as Ostrogorski brilliantly demonstrates, the most powerful wire-pullers are the political elites who pull the tightest strings over we the people to whom this republic rightfully belongs. It may sound quaint now that it is destroyed, but nevertheless that is what the American republic is, or, was. Because the political elites have usurped power that ostensibly belongs to us, however they have thwarted the republic and destroyed it, they still need a "republic" however empty it is of form. No matter how much they are intent upon making us irrelevant they need us more than anything else. Without a republic they themselves would cease to exist. And so would the corporations who hold no inherent power of their own but are dependent upon the republic and the political elites who dispense privilege, curry their bribes and like thieves must look over their shoulders and never rest content no matter how the "citizens of a democracy gave themselves a Caesar who will snap his fingers at them afterwards."