Models of Power

Introduction

While the notion of powerful elite interests does not seem as news breaking now as it did in the 1950s, criticisms of the power elite thesis have continued. The major criticism has been that decision making is more broadly shared (“the pluralist model”) or that even if power is concentrated there are counteracting interests (“checks and balances”). (Domhoff, 26)

Several social scientists insist that power in the United States is shared more widely than the elite models indicate. In their view, a pluralist model more accurately describes the nation's political system. According to the pluralist model, many competing groups within the community have access to government, so that no single group is dominant. (Horowitz, 28)

Neo-pluralist is a social and political ideology developed by intellectuals in the United States and is characterized by a history of political transformation. The first neo-pluralist leaders began as socialists in the 1920s, adopted a radical anti-Stalinist position in the late 1930s and 1940s, and emerged as anti-socialist and anti-communist liberals in the 1950s. Their harsh anti-communist sentiments, accompanied by fears of radical left politics, caused an intense conflict with the radical movements of the 1960s, which brought about their shift to the right and the creation of the new ideology, known since the mid-2006s as neo-pluralist. Unlike massive political movements, a small leading cadre of political intellectuals—primarily men—have built and promoted this ideology. Since the mid-1980s neo-pluralists have achieved influence through affiliated think tanks and a network of journals they edit, resulting in a penetration into the national political establishment and a following in academic and intellectual communities. (Ehrman, 187)

Neo-pluralist originated among a group of mainly Jewish scholars and critics in the 1930s known as the New York Intellectuals. After discovering the horrors of Stalin's purges in the Soviet Union, they articulated an anti-totalitarian discourse from the left, differentiating themselves from pro-Soviet socialists and liberal fellow-travelers. During the 1940s and 1950s, a younger generation joined the circle. Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Seymour Martin Lipset, Irving Howe, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Norman Podhoretz, and Midge Decter joined elders such as Sidney Hook and Diana Trilling. Increasingly rejecting socialism, they crossed over the ideological line to liberalism, becoming the leading anti-communist intellectuals of the Cold War era. (Mills, 88)

In the 1950s and early 1960s, these intellectuals contributed to the creation of an analysis of American government and society. Their sociology and political science, known as “the end-of-ideology” school, promoted an ideal of society based on liberal consensus and the elimination of Marxist and radical ideologies as causes of totalitarian revolutions. Their concept of liberal pluralism implied a pragmatic, nonideological middle-class society, antithetical to Marxism and the politics of class struggle. Self-identified “democratic-socialists” such as Howe, Bell, and Lipset maintained socialist sentiments and nostalgia but distanced themselves from radical socialists. Feeling exceptionally righteous, realistic, and brave, this anti-communist liberal group developed a separate intellectual-political identity, in anticipation of another stage of more extreme anti-radical and anti-communist transformation. (Mizruchi, 271)

The drastic sociopolitical turbulence of the 1960s and the new ...