Who Rules America?

The Corporate Rich, White Nationalist Republicans, and Inclusionary Democrats in the 2020s

G William Domhoff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000482003
• Edition: 8
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Amerikanische Regierung

The 8th edition, already significantly updated, has now been further updated in 2023 to include the likely impact of the post-pandemic cutbacks, the overturning of Roe v Wade, and the Trump indictments on the 2024 national elections. These factors could lead to more economic growth and social support for families, schools, and health care--or an increase in inequality, white male supremacy, and social strife, depending on the size of the voter turnout by younger voters. At this crucial moment in American history, when voting rights could be expanded to include all citizens, or legislatively limited, this significantly updated edition of Who Rules America? shows precisely how the top 1% of the population, who own 43% of all financial wealth, and receive 20% of the nation's yearly income, dominate governmental decision-making. They have created a corporate community and a policy-planning network, made up of foundations think-tanks, and policy-discussion groups, to develop the policies that become law. Through a leadership group called the power elite, the corporate rich provide campaign donations and other gifts and favors to elected officials, serve on federal advisory committees, and receive appointments to key positions in government, all of which make it possible for the corporate rich and the power elite to rule the country, despite constant challenges from the inclusionary alliance and from the Democratic Party. The book explains the role of both benign and dark attempts to influence public opinion, the machinations of the climate-denial network, and how the Supreme Court came to have an ultraconservative majority, who serve as a backstop for the corporate community as well as a legitimator of restrictions on voting rights, union rights, and abortion rights, by ruling that individual states have the power to set such limits. Despite all this highly concentrated power, it will be the other 99.5%, not the top 0.5%, who will decide the fate of the United States in the 2020s on all the important issues.

Chapter 1 Concepts, Definitions, and Power Indicators

DOI: 10.4324/9781003231400-2

This chapter provides general definitions and empirical findings relating to concepts concerning power. It presents an overview of the four main organizational networks that are the basis for the power arrangements that exist in all societies and explains how they interact in the United States. The paradoxical social psychology of power is introduced. The concept of “class” is also introduced, and its two dimensions, economic and social, are discussed. Traditional American perceptions of power, class, and color are discussed on the basis of sociological and historical studies. “Cultures of resistance,” which develop when people are subjugated, along with “cultures of resentment,” which emerge in powerful groups when they are challenged, are explained. The conspiratorial theories that often emerge in cultures of resentment are examined.

Finally, the ways in which the distribution of power can be studied in detail, through the use of “power indicators,” are introduced. In a word, this chapter prepares the way for clear sailing in later chapters when the concepts and findings in it are applied to the United States of the 2020s.

Power Is a Relationship: The Social Science View of Power

Power is first of all a relationship, whether between individuals or between groups of individuals. Power at the group level, which is the focus of this book, has two intertwined dimensions. Collective power, which is the capacity of a group, class, or nation to be effective and productive, depends upon the degree to which the individuals within that group, class, or nation have been able to develop positive social relationships and respect for each other, which lead to the necessary social morale and cooperation to develop organizations. Organizations are sets of rules and roles that human beings develop in order to accomplish a particular purpose in an easily repeated and routine way. Organizations can be very simple, or they can be extremely complex. Either way, they provide ways people can do things together, whether it is to produce goods and services, conduct elections, fight wars, pray and give thanks, or enjoy recreational activities.

Distributive power, which develops within the context of collective power, is the ability of a group, class, or nation to be successful in conflicts with other groups, classes, or nations on issues of concern to it. As is the case with collective power, distributive power arises on the basis of organizations (Mann 1986, pp. 6–7). Once an organization is established, a permanent division of labor gradually emerges as it grows in size. Large-scale organizations provide advantages in increasing collective power by making it easier to train new personnel, coordinate what people are doing, and improve the speed and efficiency with which tasks can be carried out.

The division of labor within an organization, which increases its collective power, also leads to a hierarchical distribution of power inside the organization itself. “Those who occupy supervisory and coordinating positions have an immense organizational superiority over the others” (Mann 1986, p. 7). This suggests that those who lead organizations can turn them into power bases. They have more information than those below them in the hierarchy, and they can reward followers and punish critics. They can shape lower-level jobs so that the flexibility and information available to lower-level employees are limited. They have the money, time, and contacts outside their organizations to shape many policy and political initiatives in ways that can benefit their own organization. They also can make alliances with the leaders of other organizations to strengthen their own position inside the organizations they lead.

In other words, collective power can, and usually does, lead to one set of people having more power over other people, which is a starker way of describing distributive power. However, and here the problems begin, there is an ongoing and delicate balance between cooperation and conflict. People do not like other people to have power over them. More generally, groups of people do not like to be subjugated, so they join together to resist. The resistance to being bossed around leads to an initial paradox concerning power. Even though distributional power arose out of collective power, and even though collective power can be very useful to a group or nation, disputes over who has distributional power can destroy collective power. Such disputes can make the organization less efficient, productive, and able to protect itself from rivals. These problems are multiplied when the social-psychological effects of having power over other people, or being without power, are taken into consideration. The powerful can very easily lose all perspective concerning themselves and other people. At the same time, being without power can lead people to think differently about themselves.

The Social Psychology of Being Powerful or Powerless

Systematic studies of the social psychology of power in controlled laboratory settings, often involving undergraduates, demonstrate how fast being powerful can influence a person’s self-conceptions as well as the conceptions of those without power. When participants in small-group experiments are randomly assigned to power roles, those who are given more power soon fail to understand the viewpoints and arguments of those given less power. They come to believe they have more control over events than they in fact do, and are more likely to condemn cheating, while cheating more often themselves (e.g., Fast et al. 2009, Galinsky et al. 2006, Lammers, Stapel and Galinsky 2010, Piff 2014). They also are more likely than those assigned to positions of less power to distance themselves from others, to think more abstractly, and to objectify others as instruments for personal gain.

As a result, those who lack power in these experimental situations become more deferential, inhibit the expression of their actual attitudes, and suffer from impairments in their thinking abilities, even though the pre-experimental cognitive tests show they are as capable as other participants. These studies thus reveal that attitudes of superiority and inferiority can develop very rapidly and then be exploited by the powerful. The powerful see themselves as smarter, and the powerless see themselves as less intelligent. So, the first rationale used by dominators—we are more qualified, more “elite,” than the others, and we therefore deserve to rule—immediately arises. Meanwhile, on the other side of the power divide, the powerless tend to agree with the powerful, at least to some extent. For example, they do less well than others on the tasks they are asked to perform (Keltner et al. 2010, Kraus et al. 2012, Miyamoto and Ji 2011, Smith 2006b, Smith et al. 2008). But there are limits, as shown by the small and large forms of resistance that powerless people develop: gossiping about “the boss,” making jokes about the “head honcho,” carrying out small acts of defiance, organizing unions, and creating other types of resistance organizations.

In addition to the short-term experimental studies, there are observational field studies in student dormitories, sororities, and fraternities, which are supplemented by questionnaires handed out to the participants. These studies find that members of new groups tend to see people who appear outgoing and to have everyone’s interests at heart, as natural leaders. Basically, a degree of power is conferred on some people, and not on others. Within the first week or two, the participants tell social psychologists that such people are informal leaders, and they continue to report the same opinions after they have come to know everyone better (Keltner et al. 2010). But as the experimental studies summarized in the previous paragraph show, after being treated as leaders, people’s perceptions are soon distorted, and they objectify others and show tendencies toward what (in settings in which there is more at stake) might be called “corruption.”

The findings from these two different types of studies are complemented by experimental work on obedience to authority. In these experiments, each participant is asked to apply increasingly stronger electric shocks in order to force the person that the participant sees on a screen (who actually does not receive any shocks) to comply with a command. These shocks seemingly cause the victims to experience much greater discomfort each time. With a series of clear prompts from the experimenter, such as “you must go on,” and “I take full responsibility” for what you are doing, fully 60% of the participants will increase shocks to the highest level on the fake shock generator (Milgram 1974). Due to increasing ethical concern about deceiving participants in social psychology, the original obedience studies were not directly replicated (e.g., Zweigenhaft 1978). Nevertheless, modified studies, with greater candidness in them, led to similar results in both the United States (Burger 2009, 2017) and elsewhere, including Poland most recently (Doliński et al. 2017).

Taken together, the three different types of studies suggest a second paradox concerning power. In some settings, power is more or less given to certain individuals at the interpersonal level in order to benefit the group as a whole. Social psychologists call this process affordance. However, this freely given affordance is soon abused by the leaders as they become more self- important and self-absorbed (Keltner et al. 2010). Thus, just as collective power can arise naturally to create a better situation for everyone in the group and lead to distributive power that grows excessive, so too, informal leaders who are afforded some degree of power can soon begin to dominate the group. Rules are then needed to limit the power of the leaders, who by then may be too headstrong and full of themselves to accept the rules.

These findings from small-group studies apply to leaders of large-scale organizations. Corporate managers may overwork their employees, which becomes all the easier if people desperately need a job. Elected officials may ignore the preferences of those who voted them into office and decide they like hanging around with other “successful” people. Military officers may unnecessarily harass those who serve under them and practice forms of discrimination. Periodically, there are widely publicized cases of religious leaders who have taken advantage of individuals in the congregation, especially young girls or boys, or other particularly vulnerable individuals. These instances come from different religious communities of various faiths.

Based on these paradoxes about power, the process of creating a large-scale set of power organizations, whether a corporate community, a government, or a military organization, can be fraught with tensions and dangers for the society as a whole. The mobilization of greater collective power therefore depends on the resolution of prior questions about distributive power arrangements within and between powerful organizations. Who has power over whom has to be settled within organizations, classes, and nation-states before collective power can be exercised in any useful way. Otherwise, relentless infighting among rival organizational leaders greatly weakens a society. It can lead to the collapse of dominant economic classes, mighty armies, or seemingly strong governments, as hundreds of historical examples over many centuries amply confirm (e.g., Lachmann 2000, 2010, Mann 1986, 1993).

The Four Major Power Networks

Generally speaking, the ability of a group or class to prevail begins with its control of one or more of four major organizational networks. The economic network is made up of organizations focused on creating and distributing “goods” (material products) and services that people desire, whether out of need or for pleasure. It is primarily concerned with satisfying material needs through the “extraction, transformation, distribution, and consumption of the objects of nature” (Mann 1986, p. 24). The political network provides settings in which people can agree to general rules and resolve disputes. This network leads to government, which regulates activities within the geographical area for which it is responsible, including the movement of people, economic goods, and weapons in and out of its territory.

The military network uses overwhelming deadly force to kill, subjugate, or enslave opponents from other societies and to protect the society from invaders with similar intentions. Finally, and just as important as the other networks, the religious network provides people with meaning, forgiveness, solace, and a sense of community. Meaning, forgiveness, solace, and a sense of community are necessary to help mitigate people’s anxieties, fears, guilt, and uncertainty, which can make it impossible for them to function well in other organizational settings. The religious network therefore can generate loyal followers and large budgets, which are supported by tithing and other gifts. They also create revered leaders, who sometimes increase their power through the ways in which they use their large budgets. (More generally, a religious network is the most frequent type of ideology network, which is a more generic term that includes all types of millenarian movements, including communism and fascism (Mann 1986, 2004). For the purposes of this book, however, it is the religion network, based in churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques, that matters.)

The four power networks can combine in different ways in different times and places to create widely varying power structures. For example, military force has led to the capture of the government and control of the economic system in many countries, past and present. In other countries, religious groups have been able...