Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy
Even in a nation founded on the principles of freedom and equality, small, motivated groups wield inordinate amounts of power. The notion itself is straightforward, but the 11 historians contributing to this volume examine it rigorously, documenting the dominance of American ruling classes like the antebellum South's "slave power," the North's "Merchants and Manufacturers," the "nouveau riche industrialists" of the Gilded Age and the Cold War's "Foreign Policy Establishment." Each essay chronicles the myriad factors that led to the consolidation of power by one such set of aristocrats, and then explains the internal divisions and external changes that led to their downfall and empowered their successors. For example, a small clique of graduates from top New England boarding schools and universities coalesced into the "Establishment," dominating foreign policy with their worldview until "Vietnam raised questions that the foreign policy Establishment was not successfully able to answer." The most recent manifestation of this elite baton-passing, according to a convincing entry by Michael Lind, resulted in the "southernization of American society"-under which the country morphed into "a low-wage society with weak parties, weak unions and a political culture based on demagogic appeals to racial and ethnic anxieties, religious conservatism, and militaristic patriotism." The volume captures the essence of varied eras and their elites, but at times the narrative suffers from dry academic prose and a shortage of illustrative anecdotes. Curiously, the editors conclude that despite 200 years of cyclical history, no current challenge is arising to overthrow the currently prevailing "counterrevolution against the New Deal." In fact, in suggesting that "the democratic urge to rein in the dangerous ambitions of privileged elites has gone frail," they undermine the key lesson of the compilation itself.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.