Who Governs?
Billionaire activists like George Soros and Sheldon Adelson exert political influence beyond the dreams of political scientists past.
Over 40 years ago as a college sophomore, I read with pleasure some of Robert Dahl’s works on the functioning of American democracy. The books themselves have left my possession long ago, but I have warm recollections of the precision and elegance of Dahl’s arguments. They were an antidote to the SDS/Marxist theory of a corporate oligarchy which controlled America, a notion of American society then still influential on elite campuses, but one which, as the revolutionary ’60s burned out and gave way to the ’70s, had begun to seem jejune if not actually apologetic for communist brutality.
Essentially—and I am relying on Wikipedia and not memory—Dahl contended that the United States was a polyarchy, a plural society where discrete formal and informal power structures competed and compromised over political outcomes. It wasn’t perfect democracy, but it was more than decent by historical and comparative standards. Today left-wing analyses are better remembered, C. Wright Mill’s interlocking Power Elite, and William Domhoff’s series of works, depicting American society in the iron grip of a mostly malevolent and self-serving WASP ruling establishment. I’m sure those works have been superseded, and am not certain that anyone even talks about Robert Dahl anymore, though he was president of the American Political Science Association and a highly regarded figure at Yale.
To what extent has academic political science has caught up with contemporary power in America? Certainly neither Dahl, nor Mills nor Domhoff had room in their conceptualizations for phenomena like this, in which billionaire George Soros invested $33 million to turn Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson from a small police blotter item to a national cause-célèbre. Of course the story is slightly more complex than that (Snopes gives it a mixed partially true rating); what it means is that the Soros-funded Open Society Foundation streamed $33 million to “grass-roots” activist groups from all over the country which then engaged efforts to take the Ferguson protests national and keep them at the center of national attention. The Open Society Foundation had given money to such groups before, and according to its director did not directly supervise their agitation over Ferguson. But anyone curious how hundreds of professional activists could decamp from New York and Washington and elsewhere and stay for months in Ferguson (don’t they have jobs to get to? who pays for their meals?) now has an answer. ...
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