American Elites and the Presidential Election

Most news media don’t pay much attention to discussion of American elites, except for the politicized but poorly defined “millionaires and billionaires” of the 2012 presidential campaign. All societies are dominated by elites, regardless of how egalitarian the societies believe themselves to be. These elites direct the political process and steer the prevailing economic system.

Decades ago, in the Vietnam era, I recall a university professor warning his students that power rarely resides where you think it does, or where the news media tell you it does. This particular scholar believed it was naïve to think that the President, Congress or the Supreme Court was the seat of true power in the United States.

Some think that true power resides with the elites that support presidents and legislators. These elites change in size, nature and power as economies and societies change. They provide the money, manpower and other resources to advantage candidates and political stances in the national arena.

Just before the recent presidential election, geographer and futurist Joel Kotkin wrote a perceptive analysis about the changing American elites and their relationship to power that may help explain what happened in the Obama-Romney race.

Kotkin wrote in The Daily Beast:

The middle class, we’re frequently told, decides elections. But the 2012 race has in many ways been a contest between two elites, with the plutocratic corporate class lining up behind Mitt Romney to try and reclaim its position on top of the pile from an ascendant new group—made up of the leaders of social and traditional media, the upper bureaucracy and the academy—that’s bet big on Barack Obama. In the 2008 election, the “Wall Street plutocrats,” as Kotkin labels them, were divided and split their support between Obama and McCain. In the 2012 campaign, most of the “corporate ultra-rich” backed Romney, including the financial institutions that were the governor’s major donors: Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse and Wells Fargo.

Kotkin then observes:

But don’t mourn too much for Obama, who’s held his own in the cash race by assembling a new, competing coalition of wealthy backers, from the “new hierarchies of technical elites” that Daniel Bell predicted in 1976 in The Coming Of Post-Industrial Society. For that group, Bell wrote, nature and human nature ceased to be central, as “fewer now handle artifacts or things” so that “reality is primarily the social world”—which, he warned, “gives rise to a new Utopianism” that mistakenly treats human nature as something that can be engineered and corrected by instruction from their enlightened betters. This approach, although often grounded in good intention, can easily morph into a technocratic authoritarianism. Along with Hollywood, Obama’s big donors have come from the tech sector, government, and the academy—with his top five made up of the University of California, Microsoft, Google, the U.S. government, and Harvard. Tech heavyweights such as Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg have given maximum donations to the president, as have Eric Schmidt and four other top executives at Google. These idea wielders make fortunes not through tangible goods but instead by manipulating and packaging information, and so are generally not interested in the mundane economy of carbon-based energy, large-scale agriculture, housing, and manufacturing. They can afford to be green and progressive, since they rarely deal with physical infrastructure (particularly within America) or unions or the challenges of training lower-skilled workers.

Kotkin calls this new group of winners the “Clerisy,” a term first used by Samuel Coleridge in the 1830s for “an enlightened educated class, made up of the Anglican church along with intellectuals, artists, and educators, that would school the rest of society on values and standards.”

But the futurist warns:

[I]n many ways the New Clerisy most closely resembles the First Estate in pre-revolutionary France, serving as the key organs of enforced conformity, distilling truth for the masses, seeking to regulate speech and indoctrinate youth. Most of Obama’s group serves, as Bell predicted, a “priestly function” for large portions of the population. This post-industrial profile has shielded the post-industrial elite from the harsh criticism meted out to Wall Street grandees and energy executives by green activists, urban aesthetes, and progressive media outlets. Steve Jobs, by any definition a ruthless businessman, nevertheless was celebrated at Occupy Wall Street as a cultural icon worthy of veneration. There are of course libertarians and even traditional conservatives in academia, the media, the think-tank world, Silicon Valley, and even Hollywood. But they constitute a distinct minority. For the most part, the members of the groups that make up Obama’s Clerisy, like any successful priestly class, embrace shared dogmas: strongly secular views on social issues, fervent environmentalism, an embrace of the anti-suburban “smart growth” agenda, and the ideal of racial redress, of which Obama remains perhaps the most evident symbol.

This coalition of economic and social power, holding the reins of the great digitized information machine, made it possible for Barack Obama to win re-election despite a stagnant economy, a growing fiscal crisis and numbing unemployment. Democrats understand the New Clerisy, and thrive in its shadow. Republicans have yet to come to terms with the new power elites.