The New Power Elite: Inequality, Politics and Greed

By Alan Shipman, June Edmunds and Bryan Turner

The key questions about today’s elites are easy to ask. How did a few spectacularly wealthy bankers and fund managers, whose magic money-tree crumbled to sawdust in 2008, get themselves bailed out with public funds that no health service or infrastructure commission could dream of? Why did democratically elected governments allow the ‘1%’, and those at even more exquisite decimal places, to flee further enriched from a market meltdown that would traditionally have culled their ‘capital’? Why, when voters in America, Europe and Asia turned against governments that had made them pay twice for corporate excess, did they rally behind dissenting members of the elite, rather than traditional anti-elitist parties? What enables the domination of politics and business by an unchosen few – skewing the distributions of power, wealth and status even further skywards – when such pyramids were meant to be flattened long ago by democratization, meritocratic selection and social mobility?

‘Greedy Elites’ derives answers from the latest empirical evidence on rising concentrations of economic and political power, allied to new theories of how elites maintain, apply and justify their ascent over the rest of the society. It traces contemporary turbulence to the membership and internal dynamics of elites – economic, political and social – and the way they manage their connections to the rest of society. The composition and conduct of decision-making ‘higher circles’ remains central to explaining how national and multilateral political arrangements remain stable for long periods, interspersed with phases of abrupt change. ‘Greedy Elites’ also sheds light on why the patterns of change are often common across countries that differ in strength of democracy and civil society, and why they typically raise fractions of the previous elite to greater prominence, despite mass protest aimed at bringing the whole elite down to earth. Sixty years after C. Wright Mills’s pioneering probe of the Power Elite in the US, ‘Greedy Elites’ offers new and internationally applicable ideas on the importance of frictions within the elite in sparking and steering wider social change; the shifting relationship between power and money within elites; the alternative ways in which elite fractions enrol ‘middle’ and ‘working’ class elements in their power struggles, and the typical developmental consequences of elites alternately forming and breaking up distributional class coalitions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Apr 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9781783087891

Alan Shipman

Alan Shipman is the managing director of Group 5 Training Limited. He was the project editor for ISO/IEC 27701:2019 and is also the chair of IST/33/5, which is responsible for the UK's contributions to the work of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC27/WG5 which deals with identity management and privacy technologies. Alan has over 30 years’ experience of managing personal information, both as a data processor for a service organisation and as a data controller. He is a regular speaker at conferences, covering all aspects of information management. Alan has been involved in the development of BS 10008 throughout its life (first published as guidance in 1996), which deals with the management of electronic information of all types, including the conversion of paper-based information to electronic forms. His experience includes advising organisations in both the public and private sector on the implementation of BS 10008.

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The New Power Elite

ANTHEM’S KEY ISSUES IN MODERN SOCIOLOGY

Anthem’s Key Issues in Modern Sociology series publishes scholarly texts by leading social theorists that give an accessible exposition of the major structural changes in modern societies. These volumes address an academic audience through their relevance and scholarly quality, and connect sociological thought to public issues. The series covers both substantive and theoretical topics, as well as addressing the works of major modern sociologists. The series emphasis is on modern developments in sociology with relevance to contemporary issues such as globalization, warfare, citizenship, human rights, environmental crises, demographic change, religion, postsecularism and civil conflict.

Series Editor

Peter Kivisto – Augustana College, USA

Editorial Board

Harry F. Dahms – University of Tennessee at Knoxville, USA

Thomas Faist – Bielefeld University, Germany

Anne Rawls – Bentley University, USA

Giuseppe Sciortino – University of Trento, Italy

Sirpa Wrende – University of Helsinki, Finland

Richard York – University of Oregon, USA

The New Power Elite

Inequality, Politics and Greed

Alan Shipman, June Edmunds and Bryan S. Turner

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2018

by ANTHEM PRESS

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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

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© Alan Shipman, June Edmunds and Bryan S. Turner 2018

The authors assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),

without the prior written permission of both the copyright

owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-787-7 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-787-0 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface

Afterword: The Best and the Rest

References

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures

6.1Distribution of average income growth during expansions, US, 1949–2012

6.2Average household real income, US, 1979–2011

Tables

2.1Degree of closure and extent of ties

4.1UK latent class structure

4.2Yesterday’s harmonious trajectory

4.3Today’s discordant trajectory

5.1Phases of political and commercial elite orientation

7.1Redistributive options among three classes and the state

PREFACE

The key questions about today’s elites are easy to ask. How did a few spectacularly wealthy bankers and fund managers, whose magic money tree crumbled to sawdust in 2008, get themselves bailed out with public funds that no health service or infrastructure commission could dream of? Why did democratically elected governments allow the ‘1 per cent’, and those at even more exquisite decimal places, to flee further enriched from a market meltdown that would traditionally have culled their ‘capital’? Why, when voters in America, Europe and Asia turned against governments that had made them pay twice for corporate excess, did they rally behind dissenting members of the elite rather than traditional anti-elitist parties? What enables the domination of politics and business by an unchosen few – skewing the distributions of power, wealth and status even further skywards – when such pyramids were meant to be flattened long ago by democratization, meritocratic selection and social mobility?

The New Power Elite derives answers from the latest empirical evidence on rising concentrations of economic and political power, allied to new theories of how elites maintain, apply and justify their ascent over the rest of society. It traces contemporary turbulence to the membership and internal dynamics of elites – economic, political and social – and the way they manage their connections to the rest of society. The composition and conduct of decision-making ‘higher circles’ remains central to explaining how national and multilateral political arrangements remain stable for long periods, interspersed with phases of abrupt change. It also sheds light on why the patterns of change are often common across countries that differ in strength of democracy and civil society, and why they typically raise fractions of the previous elite to greater prominence, despite mass protest aimed at bringing the whole elite down to earth. Sixty years after C. Wright Mills’s pioneering probe of the Power Elite in the United States, we offer new and internationally applicable ideas on the importance of friction within the elite in sparking and steering wider social change; the shifting relationship between power and money within elites; the alternative ways in which elite fractions enrol ‘middle’- and ‘working’-class elements in their power struggles; and the typical developmental consequences of elites alternately forming and breaking up distributional class coalitions.

Elites and Classes

We make the case that elite analysis, while complementing rather than substituting class analysis, was too long subordinated to it. Social classes and the (distributional) coalitions formed between them are important for political stability, economic progress and the phases of instability that punctuate that progress. But elites, possessing an agency and cohesion that classes inevitably lack, are instrumental in creating and maintaining these coalitions. Intra-elite tensions and rivalries play an equally essential part in breaking up and realigning them. In every country, when a sizeable ‘middle class’ emerges as a third force between landowners and peasants, it plays a key role in creating the stable political arrangements that push economic development into industrialization. Renegade elite fractions, whose only reinforcements once came from the ‘mass’, now have a safer intermediate group to turn to for support in seeking political change (achieved by replacing the incumbent fraction or forcing it in a new direction).

Successful coalition-building invites its own destruction because an expanding middle class becomes divided, with upper and lower elements losing shared interest while finding affinity with classes above and below. While middle-class expansion usually means a shrinking working class, this too can become divided. Those who gain a measure of protection from the employers and professionals above them lose antagonism towards them, and may aspire to join them; those who lack such protection lose any loyalty to the boss, but may be open to alliance with an elite that can battle that boss from above. Elite-driven policy responses, especially the promotion of globalization and technological innovation often treated as ‘exogenous’, can lead to a re-expansion of the working class whose legally protected ‘insider’ and unprotected ‘outsider’ elements make it even more easily divided. The simultaneous sharpening of competing class interests and fraying of intra-class cohesion enables increasingly powerful elites to divide, rule and prolong their own ascendancy.

The shift (with advancing industrialization) from a simple owner/worker division to as many as seven discernible classes widens the available options for elites to build coalitions, and for renegade fractions to split them by reviving class antagonism. We give past and contemporary examples to illustrate the theoretical possibilities in action, linking strands of economic history and historical sociology which ‘political economy’ has only just started to connect. Social sciences’ continued focus on class, while helping to understand the increasingly complex stratification below the elite level, has led to neglect of the agency that mobilizes class interests and converts them into policy – which can only be exercised by smaller numbers that have floated above the class system.

The Argument in Brief

Chapter 1 gives an overview of the global reaction against elites since the start of the century, observing that holders of concentrated power and wealth sought to ground this in expertise and accountability precisely when publics were ceasing to view these as justifications. Rising expectations of what elite rule should deliver, alongside political and economic limits on what they could do, led to increased questioning of elites’ competence and sensitivity towards their corruption, turning their unrepresentativeness from a source of prestige into a further incitement to revolt. A charge sheet emerges, summarized in the table below, which at first suggests an existential challenge to elites’ long rule.

Chapter 2 refines the key concepts of power and elites, showing how social sciences’ overly successful quest to dissociate it from agency and dissolve it into structure left them unprepared for the new centuries’ glaring visibility of elites, and shows of public anger against them. It explores the way that popular and academic analysts of elites have seized on ‘networks’ as their primary instrument of power, but without respecting important distinctions between personal and position-based sources of power and between strength and length of connections as determinants of its strength. This leads on to an identification of the ‘higher circles’ comprising today’s elites with an expanding non-profit sector added to the traditional triad of political, business and military chiefs.

Chapter 3 reviews the long-running debate on the ‘circulation’ of elites as a source of their renewal and continued relevance, and the more recent identification of elite-brokered ‘class coalitions’ as essential to keeping dynamic societies stable. It explains why elites must be viewed as active and classes as passive in the construction and reconfiguration of such coalitions, examining various historical and contemporary illustrations. A political ‘right’ which once looked to an elite to override and contain the battle between classes has recognized their co-optability by that elite, while a political Left once inspired by class struggle now acknowledges the need for elite coordination – a crossover that signals the essential role of class in provoking and resolving divisions within elites.

Chapter 4 refines analysis of the class ‘coalitions’ supporting elite rule by using empirical studies of class to characterize its shifting divisions in contemporary society. It shows how coalitions can be undermined by the economic progress they enable, and reconfigured by elite fractions – empowered or displaced by that progress – which recruit disaffected classes to augment their attack on other fractions. Particular attention is paid to the past and present roles of the ‘middle class’ and its sometimes cooperative, occasionally combative, relations with groups above and below it. The distinct roles of ‘middle’ and ‘working’ classes in intra-elite battles are examined with historical and contemporary examples, which end with a discussion of how elites try to restore order when such class enrolment sparks demands for wider change than they are willing to concede.

Chapter 5 examines the tangled history of links between ‘power elites’ and ‘wealth elites’, from the convergence assumed by elite theorists of the nineteenth century to efforts at their institutional separation in the twentieth, and their politically conceded reconvergence in the twenty-first. It notes that despite growing evidence that decisions by increasingly powerful national political elites have become more closely aligned with the interests of increasingly powerful internationalized business elites, the details of any unified ‘capitalist’ agenda remain elusive. Instances of commercial interests buying specific favours eclipse any purchases of general ‘pro-business’ policies, with the preservation of existing personal fortunes still a clearer motive for political intervention than the capture of new profit-making opportunities.

Chapter 6 links the preceding social and political arguments to recent evidence of rising economic inequality, highlighting the way that elites’ power concentrations have been enhanced by the capture of recent gains from economic growth by the already well-off (and their insulation from economic downturns). It shows how ‘globalization’ and ‘technical change’ have often been used to explain (as irremediable) increases in inequality that actually result from changes of policy, especially away from income redistribution. Linking empirical findings from the United States and Europe to the class divisions assessed in Chapter 4, it explores the changing role of the newly enriched ‘upper’ middle class, the squeezed ‘lower’ middle class and the ‘precariat’ dropping out of the traditional working classin changing the pattern of class coalitions and the tactics of elite fractions seeking to realign them.

Chapter 7 asks why democracy, apparently extending across the old industrial and many of the newly industrializing countries throughout the past centuries, has apparently done so little to challenge elite rule or the income and wealth concentrations that underlie it. Attention is paid to new ‘political economy’ theories in which the elite concedes democracy to avert its wholesale expropriation, and longer established theories in which franchises are extended only after decisions affecting economic policy and resource allocation have been depoliticized so that popular choice cannot deflect them. Historical evidence is provided that democratization promotes the making and breaking of class coalitions that traditionally served to keep elites in power, and is thus more realistically viewed as a consequence of elites’ rule than a likely route to their overthrow.

Chapter 8 concludes the analysis by reconciling two apparently contradictory features of today’s elites: a ‘philanthrocapitalism’ under which wealth and power are meritocratically attained and altruistically deployed, and a rampant greed that a desire to give back to society and solve its most urgent problems is genuine and widespread in contemporary ‘higher circles’, but insufficient to defuse the public’s anti-elite anger due to suspicion of ulterior motives. In particular, corporate philanthropy tackles problems that can usually be traced to past corporate excess, and that governments are left unable to solve by constraints placed by private interests on the public realm. Additionally, philanthropy functions as a source of elite cohesion that ensures the ongoing ascendancy of the powerful few over the less cohesive classes – middle and professional as well as ‘working’ – that still ultimately pay for billionaires’ largesse. Celebrities, whose power to glamourize and humanize elites by dwelling among them has risen with the reach of broadcast and social media, now merge with its commercial and political elements to ensure their resilience against contemporary attack.

Motivation and Background

Long-ignored denunciations of elite greed, by perturbed patricians on the right and enemies of privilege on the left, seemed to gain sudden traction as the new millennium opened. Bonus-soaked bankers suddenly tottered into ‘credit crunch’, appealing for rescue to the governments whose purse strings they had previously pulled. A wave of terrorist attacks on symbols or flaunters of commercial wealth exposed the failure of a globalized market system to include and enrich all social groups, and its peculiar vulnerability when the disaffected took up arms or malicious computer code. Scientists and public intellectuals, whose pronouncements once made them opinion formers and gave them the ear of policymakers, found their prognoses and prescriptions suddenly challenged as they collided with contrary data or ‘common sense’. Political and business bosses, where unable to scapegoat discredited experts, found their tenures inexorably shortened as a misled public lost its deference for all leaders. Screen and stage stars stood (alongside bishops, gurus and televangelists of diverse faiths) accused of power abuse transmuted into sex abuse, while sporting heroes were forced to defend their records against charges of chemical enhancement.

These rejections of past political, commercial, cultural and cognitive elites appeared to culminate in political earthquakes across several continents. A fall in fossil energy prices linked to global recession and carbon emission curbs prompted street protests against governments that had relied on oil and gas revenues to fund generous public services alongside low taxes – toppling long-time dictatorships in Libya and Egypt in 2011, and forcing repressive action by governments in Iran (2009), Russia (2011–12), Sudan (2011–13), Bahrain (2011–14), Syria (2011–18) and Venezuela (2014–18) in order to cling to power. Democratic arrangements that might earlier have defused such discontent began instead to channel it in unexpected directions that proved equally disruptive. In mid-2016, voters from England’s affluent south and deprived north combined with the disaffected Welsh to vote for the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union (EU), despite majorities of its Scots and Northern Irish constituents (and Londoners) wishing to remain. Later that year, Donald Trump took time out from his real-estate empire and reality television appearances to enter the White House, the least prepared of presidential candidates defeating the ultimate professional, after rousing a Republican vote in former Democratic heartlands. Other electoral upsets followed in 2017 with a once-mocked opposition leader (Jeremy Corbyn) demolishing the Conservatives’ majority in the United Kingdom, the independent Emmanuel Macron snatching the French presidency from traditional left and right parties, and Germany’s long alternation of Christian Democrat and Social Democratic rule interrupted by the rise of populist parties.

Often unpredicted, these twists were commonly presented as a popular revolt against elites. Mainstream parties and previously tolerated autocrats were seen to have become – or been captured by – members of a small ultra-privileged circle, who no longer understood or promoted the interests of ordinary people. Protests were directed at ‘adjustment’ and ‘austerity’ policies that deflected economic pain from concentrated financial and business interests onto households and small traders with much shallower pockets, and ‘security’ strategies that turned potentially liberating new technologies into harbingers of low pay and perpetual surveillance. Anti-globalization movements – which had drawn together various strands of socialism, environmentalism, nationalism, communitarianism and global justice campaigning to contest the notion that all alternatives to Western economic liberalismhad ended after the Cold War – saw a common theme beneath these grievances. The seething masses were calling time on a project of international and interregional integration that had promised benefits for all, but that actually gave unprecedented riches and globetrotting opportunities to an already lucky few while bringing insecurity and misery for the rest.

Yet it soon became clear that Trump, initially the most bruising of bedfellows for the US Republicans, had been expertly co-opted by them. His first year in the White House saw fellow finance and real-estate billionaires appointed (alongside five-star generals) to key posts, regulations stripped away as enforcement agencies were passed to directors who denied the need for them, and deep cuts in top income and corporate tax rates financed (if at all) by stripping healthcare subsidies and tax breaks from the lower-paid. Voters lured by promises of protection against unfair foreign competition and corporate domination were threatened instead with the biggest drive against labour protection and income redistribution since Ronald Reagan. The EU’s traditional ruling parties, often exploiting the discord across the Atlantic, rebuilt their accustomed coalitions – promptly reaffirming their commitment to monetary and trade integration that placed severe limits on fiscal redistribution and price inflation, the traditional routes by which elite wealth and power are cut down to size.

The ‘Arab Spring’ meanwhile turned quickly to winter, with conditions no less cold for those who had protested against reborn autocracy in countries of the former Soviet Union and the theocracy in Iran. China strengthened its one-party system under communist general secretary Xi Jinping, its opposition-quelling tactics closely studied in Vietnam, Cambodia, Turkey and many other high-growth ‘emerging’ and ‘frontier’ economies. In Latin America, a political pendulum that had swung leftwards at the turn of the century election of left-leaning governments in (among others) Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia and Chile began to swing back towards conservatism, as old problems of corruption and wealth inequality re-emerged. While South Africa and Zimbabwe showed tarnished leaders the exit early in 2018, there was familiar frustration for similar spring-cleaning efforts in Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The New Power Elite confronts current social-science thinking on elites with these recent bursts of action for and against them. It offers a multidisciplinary explanation of why elites periodically lose control, why important structural changes often happen when they do and why in most cases they quickly regain it despite the changed political and economic landscape. Rejecting the historical inevitability of some past accounts, it also identifies the conditions in which elites can be genuinely toppled, and replaced by anti-elitists who inevitably acclimatize to palaces that are only partly demolished. As the book went to press, elites were still in unusual disarray in the United Kingdom – sliding towards a ‘Brexit’ which all mainstream parties and most business representatives had initially condemned as economically damaging and socially divisive. Signs of comparable top-level conflict were showing on both sides of the high-stakes duels between Saudi Arabia and Iran, North and South Korea, and Russia and Ukraine.

Extensions

More could doubtless have been said about the typical origin of conflicts within elites (ideological, generational, personal) that eventually split them into fractions; about the ways in which those fractions recruit other sections of society to fight their intra-elite battles; and about the role of the near-elite (aspiring political leaders, not-quite-big-enough businesspeople) in shielding or exposing elite fractions when other groups rise against them. Space constraints have also limited our selection of national examples, although we hope to have provided enough from outside the United States and Europe to show that our analysis extends beyond the ‘West’. A focus on the process of elite circulation has meant more abbreviated discussion of the reasons that require it – internal decay (via incompetence and corruption), divided reactions to adverse external change, the equally powerful divisions that arise through elites presiding over favourable change, and the limited extent to which political adaptation can be accomplished through changes of mind rather than substitution of one for another.

We anticipate criticism from existing scholars of elites – especially those who declared them socially sidelined or intellectually irrelevant at the turn of the century, and those who have always downplayed their role in favour of class-based, evolutionary, economic-optimizing or technology-driven views of what drives social change. Constructive attacks from established scholars on an earlier draft of this book led to an amicable parting from our original publisher and a substantial restatement of our argument to deal with incumbent objections. We remain grateful to those who parted ways with our argument earlier, and sincerely thank our new imprint – long a constructive challenger in the academic publishing hierarchy – for providing an alternative channel with a speed that preserved topicality.

We avoid speculating on the outcome, in America and Europe, of ongoing fallout from the ‘populism’ – often enlisted by warring elite fractions – which took root in the unique early twenty-first-century hotbed of fiscal austerity and monetary largesse. Early evidence on the most successful populists suggests that their performance in office was quickly unravelling, as they were forced to abandon the expedient class alliances that had sealed their electoral majorities. We hope they will defy this pessimistic inference from historical precedent. A lawsuit from Trump and associates would doubtless boost our sales, but the commander-in-chief was embroiled in bigger battles as this book went to press.

Alan Shipman

June Edmunds

Bryan S. Turner

January 2018

Chapter One

ELITES UNDER SIEGE

We know whom to blame for our bad situation – and they are few enough to name, if not quite close enough to land our custard pies on. Country and provincial-town dwellers complain of a metropolitan elite, so ensconced in the big city’s artificial prosperity they ignore the plight of other regions. Reformers blame stagnant or falling social mobility on the influence of ‘elite schools’, passing on cultural advantage generationally under a false impression of merit. Even once-revered elite sports stars are under suspicion for the substances they took on the way to the top. Donald Trump’s election as US president and UK voters’ decision to leave the EUreflect the failure of ‘elites in both parties to speak to the sense of disempowerment that we see in much of the middle class’ according to public philosopher Michael Sandel (Cowley 2016).

In Middle Eastern and former Soviet countries, citizens have risen to challenge military and business elites, and their long-held claim to be upholding a national integrity that was incompatible with democracy. Peoples granted ‘independence’ in the twentieth century bemoan their postcolonial path under a ruling elite that often grew rich rather faster than they did, often tracing the problem to the inequalities, arbitrary borders and inappropriate institutions bequeathed by a departing Western elite. Longer-established democracies in the United States and Europe appear no less vulnerable to the sudden rise of ‘grass-roots’ protest, which incumbents dismiss as populist but which voters greet voicing grievances that elites had long silenced. Opponents once silenced by the appearance of democracy and meritocracy are now in full cry against elites’ ability to stay on top by rigging the labour-market competition (Reeves 2017), twisting welfare-state arrangements to their own benefit (Hayes 2012) and tuning the political machine to their own preferences (Gilens & Page 2014), partly by tying their economic interests to those of the better-off groups above them (Bartels 2008 29–126), helped by their control of biased media (Chomsky 2002). The counter-cry is muted. Former supporters conceded long ago that societies’ most privileged have ‘lost touch with the people’ (Lasch 1996: 3), succumbing to self-interest and forgetting the social duties once attached to great wealth and political power.

In short, the ‘glaring invisibility of elites’ (Savage & Williams 2008: 2), if it ever really existed, has given way to a searing visibility – and apparent vulnerability. Elites are accused of recapturing political and economic control (or never really ceding it, despite the ostensible spread of democracy and containment of monopoly), and of failing to exercise their power for the common good. They are blamed for catastrophic losses of national security (symbolized by the 9/11 Twin Towers attacks of 2001 and subsequent worldwide terrorism outbreaks), of social cohesion (strained by policy changes and population movements which shake the suburbs while not waking the gated communities) and of economic prosperity (destroyed in the global financial crisis of 2008, whose legacy of slow growth and bad debts was shackling recovery ten years later). Anger against them has moved beyond television studios and debating chambers, causing electoral upheavals and spilling out onto the badly potholed streets.

A Plague on All Your Palaces

Coordinated attacks on elites, and swiftly rising anti-elite protest movements, are hardly new. The People’s Party in the United States rode a wave of rage against elite corruption at its Omaha convention in 1892. Europe experienced a wave of populism, targeting the then numerically dominant peasantry, in the mid- and late nineteenth century, calmed by strengthening dictatorships in the east and grudging franchise extensions in the west (Mudde 2015). Many Africans and Asians suffered for the first half of the twentieth century under the alliance of local and foreign elites that ruled them as colonies; a suffering extended through the second half as national political and business elites proved the big winners from independence, using superior wealth, education and language skills to stride the global stage while problems of poverty and illiteracy persisted at home.

Those leading the new charge against elites often give the impression that they have recently emerged or re-emerged, acquiring power that used to reside in more representative and accountable institutions. But elites were no less powerful half a century ago, when the long post-war economic boom collapsed into a decade of ‘stagflation’ in the West and even longer, costlier economic malaise in China, the Soviet Union and the global South. Or a century ago, when their mismanagement of domestic policy and international relations created conditions for the First World War, and its gory second coming. Willingness to submit to them has been eroded by suspicion that elites have decayed, losing the capacity and incentive to deliver competent rule. This performance-related attack on the powerful and privileged easily converts into the belief that their ascendancy is fundamentally wrong, that the time when elite rule was workable and desirable has passed. But history suggests that if they reform and redeem themselves sufficiently quickly, by steering away from the rocks, societies will soon stop questioning their right to stay at the helm.

Past elites were generally even less representative of general populations than today’s – invariably more dominated by males, the racial majority and those from privileged social backgrounds. Yet they managed to remain in place, even while yielding to more democratic procedures – sometimes through repression and misinformation, but more often by shaping political, business and military strategies that delivered good results. The Bretton Woods system, designed by a handful of officials from Europe and America and extended globally through their still-vast empires, oversaw a post-war boom that reversed the damage of the Great Depression and the Second World War. The equally top-down United Nations structures imposed ‘liberal’ values on the subsequent decolonization, while small cliques of military strategists preserved a Cold War balance of power despite nuclear proliferation. Multinational corporations and their equally globetrotting financiers concentrated corporate control (and employment contracts) into unprecedentedly few hands, but could justify such dominance by delivering full employment with rising living standards and consumption opportunities. Scientific research, while still a preserve of rich amateurs and selectively educated white males, delivered path-breaking discoveries in nuclear physics, organic chemistry, mathematics, computerization and disease control. Elites could admit to unwarranted privilege while still justifying it through performance that brought social benefits. When they made expensive mistakes – as in Suez in 1956, or the Bay of Pigs in 1961 – they admitted and quickly corrected them.

For a long time, publics appeared to acquiesce in elite rule if, on reasonable calculation, the benefits outweighed the costs. Benefits were measured by (usually counterfactual) comparison with the situation under non-elite rule. How would life be if major-consequence decisions were transferred to a ruling group composed of ordinary citizens, or of representatives who were much like them in terms of income, wealth, social status and knowledge? Costs included the financial and social impact of nurturing and maintaining an elite, given that more public and private moneytends to be absorbed in accumulating and maintaining its superior ‘human capital’ and ‘social capital’ stocks. More recently, provenance has been added to performance as a second condition for public acquiescence. Elevation into the elite must be genuinely (and visibly) meritocratic, involving some demonstrated ability and effort rather than (just) connections and resources for fast-track promotion. If unjustified social privilege trumps merit in the battle for elite training places, the rest of society is seen to lose twice over. It pays to turn an already advantaged group into an elite, and then suffers less-than-competent rule, through top jobs being assigned by who can pay the most rather than those who do them best.

Radical political activists and social commentators complained for decades about a ‘conservative elite’ or ‘establishment’, which represented and defended traditional concentrations of wealth and power. The old anti-elitism targeted a ruling clique which defended its right to rule on the basis of superior knowledge (conferred in ‘elite schools’) and awareness of the wider social interest, reflected in noblesse oblige. These left-leaning complainants now find themselves under return fire – as representatives of a ‘liberal’ (metropolitan) elite, whose opposition when ineffective merely strengthens the conservatives, and when effective supplants them with an equally remote elite that serves society even less well.

Over time, radicals from deprived social origins have given way to those who share the old elites’ educational and economic privileges, becoming comparably distant from those they seek to represent. Socialist and social-democratic movements have thus succumbed to the accusation of tolerating, even colluding with, structural trends their founders sought to oppose. In particular, rising inequality is accepted on the assumption of a ‘trickle down’ which never reaches the ground, and cosmopolitan entitlements promoted against the wishes of local and national constituencies who expected preference over‘outsiders’. Erstwhile supporters’ complaint, that their interventions have done nothing to redistribute wealth and power, then dovetails with opponents’ long-levelled charge that these interventions stifle wealth creation and put jobs and incomes in danger. In consequence, the political left around the world was largely sidelined after a global financial crisis that would logically have moved it centre stage.

Conservative elites were forced into retreat by the need to instil greater administrative competence, often after military defeat (Neild 2002: 12). During the twentieth century, ‘reformers’ ousted older parties and leaders from government – through electoral contests or coups – with the aim (and claim) of bringing more efficient policy design and implementation. Hereditary or cronyistic company bosses were swept from their boardrooms in a similar way, by executive high-flyers schooled in new disciplines of management science and financial engineering. And as weaponry melded with high technology, it passed to a new officer class trained in strategic analysis and game theory, displacing the military ‘old guard’. Steeled with seemingly evidence-based, scientifically informed policies, modernizing elites launched more boldly into managing economies, restructuring businesses and re-engineering societies. It is these meritocratically authored, liberally motivated grand designs that are now being shot down by the people they sought to serve.

In the United States, Democrats who believed unshackled science and regulated economics would restore security and sustainable prosperity were beaten to the White House (and both houses of Congress) in 2016 by more demotic Republicans, with their promises to shield low-skilled workers from harms blamed on globalization and automation, and solve ‘global warming’ by simply pretending that it did not exist. European elites, trying to match America’s achievements, were assailed for mimicking its misjudgements. The EU, which for its first 40 years appeared to restore the economic viability and democratic accountability of its constituent member states (Milward 1992), now seemed doomed to undermine them through inept elite initiatives. An ill-judged single currency experiment robbed its core members of fiscal and monetary policy discretion, condemning them to decades of restrained economic growth and rising debt (Stiglitz 2012; Bibow 2017). The ‘democratic deficit’ rendered member-state governments unable to tackle social problems by traditional fiscal means, leaving voters’ anger to be deflected against migrants when it could not be defused.

Publics around the world have signalled their disillusionment with elites by electing or accepting alternative leaders who convincingly style themselves as anti-elitist, however privileged their own backgrounds or crude their tactics. In the Philippines, suspicion that neither the dictatorship of the Marcoses nor the democratic Aquino governments had tackled the country’s fundamental problems led to the election as president in 2016 of Rodrigo Duterte, whose approach to prominent people suspected of corruption or drug dealing moved quickly from naming and shaming to naming and extrajudicial execution. Thousands of citizens were either executed on the streets or left to rot in jail. In Italy, the Five Star Party founded in 2010 by comedian Beppe Grillo became the largest parliamentary party in 2013 and won the mayoralty of Rome in 2016 on an anti-corruption platform, seizing the initiative in a referendum campaign over the ruling Democratic Party’s constitutional reform plan. In Iceland, the realization that established party leaders had not only presided over a ruinous financial boom and bust in 2000–8 but also made secret deals to protect their personal finances from it drove an electoral swing towards the anarchic Pirate Party, which held the balance of power after early elections in 2016. Colombia’s voters in October 2016 rejected a deal to end the 52-year conflict with FARC guerrillas, forcing president Juan Manuel Santos into a revision of the peace deal, which he then refrained from putting to a second referendum. Globally, populism is on the march against elites deemed too distant from everyday reality.

The political upsets of 2016–17, including Trump’s election as US president and the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the EU, followed successful campaigns against ‘consensus’ views of what was in the public interest, to which all traditional parties of government had subscribed. Some parties forged in opposition to rampant capitalism were caught in its driver’s seat – not sufficiently twisting the wheel – when it financially crashed in 2008 and had to be rescued with public funds diverted out of social welfare and infrastructure. Left-wing groups lucky enough to be out of power when it crashed were unable to capitalize on capitalism’s crisis, because it threatened to staunch the flow of wealth their redistribution plans relied on. So the initiative was seized by new activists whose chosen scapegoats for stalled living standards – free trade, immigration, multinationals, multiculturalism and the politicians who had encouraged them – enabled them to harness radical rhetoric to a conservative retinue, giving new sheen to a centuries-old populist reaction.

Wherever and whenever they do it, those protesting against elected or appointed authority around the world appear to be expressing six common beliefs:

1. A small number of very powerful individuals and organizations wield enormous and inordinate power, shaping the lives and livelihoods of many others who lack such power.

2. This elite does not deserve its power, and exerts it in ways which work to the disadvantage of the majority – who are left worse off, or not as well off, as they would have been without elite rule. This disadvantage may occur despite the elite’s intention to benefit the wider society, or because it has no such intention.

3. Elites have become more powerful over time, and their actions have become more inimical to most people’s interests over time.

4. Most elites combine inordinate power with inordinate wealth, one being the cause or the consequence of the other. Even when the ‘power elite ’ consists of different people from the ‘economic elite ’, it tends to implement policies that benefit those with the highest income and wealth, and this is often the reason why elite rule disadvantages the majority.

5. Power elites have survived democratization without perceptible reduction or redistribution of their concentrated power; and economic elites have survived democratization without noticeable reduction or redistribution of their concentrated income and wealth.

6. In consequence, meaningful change (in the interests of the majority) can only be achieved through extra-parliamentary or extra-congressional action – which might include profit-making entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, voluntary ‘third-sector’ activity, violent overthrow of the ‘system’, or establishment of alternative communities outside the present ‘system’.

The intellectual, technological and economic progress made by most societies, despite their being ruled by small elites for all or most of their history, challenges the idea that elites are inherently inimical to the wider social interest and deliberately choose policies from which elites gain and most others lose. Instead, the present (seemingly existential) challenge to elites results from twin performance-related problems: incompetence in implementing policies designed to improve society, and corruption which dulls the incentive for better implementation. The resultant lapse in performance has combined with rising expectation to create a crisis of elite legitimacy. When publics challenge their elites, the unrepresentativeness long characteristic of elites becomes a particularly important focus of attack. The elements of this sequence (incompetence, corruption, rising expectations and unrepresentativeness) can now be assessed in more detail.

Incompetence

Times that were far more elitist (with fewer people at the top, wielding far more power than today’s rulers dream of) have also tended to be times when a majority acquiesced in elite rule, and even applauded it. Such times could be dismissed as those in which the majority was deluded, lacking the education or accurate information that would have allowed it to recognize its masters as oppressive and incompetent. But the evidence favours another interpretation: elite rule is usually regarded as acceptable, and even desirable, provided the elite justifies its place by setting and achieving goals that serve the majority. Privilege survives if performance related, whether good performance precedes the bestowal of privilege or occurs when this has already been bestowed.

Any belief that a small group of people are inherently superior, and deserve to rule others whatever they do, tends to have disappeared by the time societies industrialize. Modern elites must demonstrate their superiority by measurably outperforming others at particularly important tasks. Royal descent or divine right