Break Up America s Elite | Compact Mag

What these otherwise quite different elites shared was participation in certain influential institutions at the heights of their careers. For example, in the 1950s, a retired admiral, a chief executive of an industrial firm, and a career politician might all sit on the board of a national charity or be appointed to a government commission. But this didn t alter the fact that the military, corporate, and political figures had spent their lives before middle age working their way up in separate occupational silos with no significant circulation of personnel among them: The admiral had gone to the Naval Academy, the corporate executive might have had an engineering degree from a state school, and the successful politician probably was a graduate of the prestigious local private or state university in his home state or region. The members of the power elite of C. Wright Mills might have rubbed shoulders in middle age, but they hadn t usually been roommates in college.

For Mills, a populist radical writing in the Eisenhower era, the meeting of middle-aged figures as ambassadors from their separate and parallel institutions proved that power in America was intolerably concentrated. From today s perspective, however, Eisenhower s America seems like a model of elite pluralism, with multiple independent elites working their way up in careers in separate silos.

Today, sadly, America is becoming a society with lessening vertical mobility and increasing lateral mobility at the top. We can be thankful, however, that at least some barriers to lateral occupational mobility among elite university grads remain: America will be spared an Adm. Obama or a Donald Cardinal Trump.

via compactmag.com

Michael Lind.