Juggernaut’s Pilots

The Powers That Be: Processes of Ruling Class Domination in America, by G. William Domhoff. Random House, 206 pp., $10.00.

In days of Yore it is said that Hindu devotees of Juggernaut (also known as Vishnu) would dive under the wheels of a wagon laden with an idol representing Him and be steamrollered flat in sacrifice. Those who suggested that a good number of the devotees were pushed by priests were labeled heretics and offered to the wheels of Juggernaut. Today a slightly different Juggernaut (also known as “the State”) steamrollers devotees and those who cannot escape the clutches of the priests of State. But then as now the greatest heresy is contained in this innocent question: Who pilots Juggernaut’s wagon?

G. William Domhoff dares that heresy. He believes that the United States is politically dominated by a ruling class composed of the richest 0.5 percent of the population. Power is wielded in terms of Marxian class-hegemony; the ruling class, owners and managers of the major businesses, are pitted against the working class, owners of no income-producing property. Fortunately, Domhoff is no cookbook Marxist, for if he were, The Powers That Be would be predictably dull. Skip to this tome’s subtitle, Processes of Ruling Class Domination in America and concentrate on the first word, processes. This book is about how the ruling class manifests its will and Domhoff breaks it down to four processes: Special-Interest, Policy-Formation, Candidate-Selection, and Ideology.

The leadership of the ruling class or power elite (a concept Domhoff borrows from the work of C. Wright Mills) is comprised of the ambitious, upwardly mobile leaders from the military, academe, and business (e.g. Robert McNamara) and the involved members of the ruling class itself (e.g. David Rockefeller). Domhoff’s eclectic class-hegemony thus defies pluralism, the prevailing theory of power in the social sciences. The pluralists hold that the State evolves policy by way of a free-for-all scrimmage among a myriad of special-interests. They put the original emphasis on processes, insisting on “... shifting coalitions of interest groups on specific issues as the key to understanding power ...” and maintain that the special interests of labor, capital, minorities, farmers, environmentalists, et al., contribute to the policy-formation process.

Though Domhoff prefers the yardstick of outcomes as opposed to processes to determine who rules, with The Powers That Be he has abandoned this predilection and picked up the pluralist gauntlet. “You want processes?”, Domhoff seems to be saying, “I’ll give you processes!”

Warming up on the special-interests process, Domhoff concedes that his ruling-class domination theory runs into trouble when applied to the legislatures, regulatory agencies, cabinet departments, and legislative committees. Run rife with lobbyists, super-lawyers, trade and advisory associations, the special-interest process maps easily onto the pluralist model. Power is spread widely across this facet of the State, allowing access to everybody. Besides, the pluralists say, the giants of industry battle one another for government contracts, subsidies, and procedural rulings in their favor. What sort of class-hegemony is that? Domhoff counters that all of the inter-ruling-class conflict is on specific rather than general grounds and if you look at the overall picture you will see business, medicine, law, and agriculture divided from unions, minorities, and middle-level liberal organizations just as class-hegemony theory predicts. Domhoff also argues that the bribes, influence peddling, gifts, and promises of jobs in industry which make the wheels of Juggernaut spin favor the money muscle of the ruling class. The piddling gains won by the working class in the special-interest process exert almost no influence on the big-league policy issues of foreign aid, fiscal matters, population, welfare, and the environment.

The larger long-term issues are dealt with in the policy-formation process. This section constitutes almost one third of the book and is Domhoff’s bread and butter. The passwords in policy formation are “national interest,” “nonpartisan,” and “objectivity.” In policy-discussion groups the power elite cultivate this image of impartiality while they converge on consensus opinions about the general issues to suit their interests. Unlike the special-interest groups which are staffed by the lower echelon of the power elite, the policy-formation group members come from the wealthiest families, the boards of the most powerful corporations and banks, the most prestigious law firms and universities, and the highest ranks of journalism. It is in the off-the-record meetings, luncheons, and seminars where the power elite assemble and iron out differences that Domhoff believes ruling-class consciousness is developed.

The conspiratorial right’s old nemesis, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), figures highly in the study of the policy-formation process. Members of the CFR include financiers, executives, and lawyers from the biggest of the big businesses, and a substantial number of journalists and academicians. Focusing on foreign affairs, members meet with experts in an attempt to resolve issues of the day. Often the discussions lead to the formation of study groups led by scholars and arrive at a formal statement. One such study ended in the publication of Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy in 1958 by Dr. Henry Kissinger. Domhoff finds study groups like Kissinger’s at the roots of foreign policy initiatives such as the decision to back Vietnam to the hilt, the reversal of U.S.- China policy, and the invention of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the United Nations.

The CFR, strongly interlocked on directorial and executive levels with the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie Foundations, depends on these bastions of wealth for its financial lifeblood. The CFR interlocks with the government, too. A 1971 CFR report bragged that “Over a third of the Council’s 1500 members have been called on by the government during the last 20 years to undertake official responsibilities.” I doubt if any of them went kicking and screaming. If the CFR is, as Joseph Kraft has admiringly referred to it, a “School For Statesmen,” we should profit by asking exactly what lessons of statecraft it teaches and applies to the running of the American state.

Domhoff traces the step-by-step process by which a CFR lesson became United States foreign policy. When Ww II broke out in 1939 the leaders of the CFR went through the well established lines of communication it had with the State Department to gain quick official support for a CFR study of both war aims and postwar policy for the United States. Dubbed the War and Peace Studies Project and financed by Rockefeller Fund grants, the study recruited the power elite of the era and divided the task between five groups, Economic and Financial, Political, Armaments, Territorial, and Peace Aims. Long before Pearl Harbor jingoed the United States into the war, the War and Peace group was urging President Roosevelt to apply the Monroe Doctrine to Greenland and promoting the trade of fifty destroyers to Great Britain for naval bases on British possessions.

By the fall of 1940 the War and Peace group had posited a “Grand Area” of the Western Hemisphere, Far East, the United Kingdom, and most of the non- German world territory in which American dominance should hold sway. The Economic and Financial group concluded that the American economy (read Empire) must link with the British Empire, Asia, and South America if it intended to avoid trade imbalances, shortages of raw materials, and a lack of markets for its goods. America should re-arm, oppose Japanese expansion, and don a more international face in order to bring the Grand Area under control and provide a solid core for the future health and growth of the American economy.

By 1942 the advisory status of the War and Peace group was all but abandoned. The State Department adopted the group’s study structure; Council members sat on important postwar planning committees; and CFR policy had been effectively merged into official foreign policy. Domhoff writes, “The council defined the national interest in terms of economic expansion, and then formulated the policies which the government later implemented to realize that vision. If the quintessence of class domination is the ability to translate class interest into the national purpose, then the role of the Council on Foreign Relations in shaping the postwar world reveals class domination in week-by-week detail.”

Domhoff groups the CFR with the Committee for Economic Development (CED), the Conference Board, Business Council, and Business Roundtable in what he calls the moderates of the policy network. Lying on the other side of the fault-line of the New Deal which Domhoff says split the power elite are the ultraconservatives of the policy network—the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), the Chamber of Commerce, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and the American Security Council (ASC). Cleaved on almost perfect Yankee- Cowboy lines, the moderates are mostly Eastern, old money, internationalist in foreign policy, and big big-business, while the ultraconservatives tend toward the Sunbelt, newer money, isolationism, and small big-business. Domhoff says the differences between the moderates and ultraconservatives have declined since the early 1960s, though they remain at violent odds over the question of unions.

Detractors of ruling-class theory point to the conflict between the moderates and ultraconservatives. Both groups represent monied interests and all this squabbling they engage in hardly refines class consciousness. So what gives?

Domhoff’s overview of processes puts the CFR- CED moderates at the high post of policy implementation. If the moderates decide to defuse radical change on the left they enlist labor, liberals, and minorities on behalf of their policies. If, on the other hand, the CFR- CED moderates desire to forestall any change they opt out of the dialogue and let the NAM-AEI ultraconservatives destroy the popular agents of change. He doesn’t claim that this model is all inclusive, but does maintain that for the major issues of our era, foreign aid, welfare, civil rights, etc., his model is accurate. According to Domhoff,

Pluralists like to point out that social security, health care legislation and other measures signify an important improvement in living conditions for a great many people. While this is true to some extent, the proof of the pudding in terms of power is the ability to maintain the class system that sustains ruling class privileges and prerogatives. On this score, the ruling class has done very well within the general policy area.

But at whose expense?

Domhoff’s usual emphasis on outcomes is waived here as the moderates crush the ultraconservatives in the field of policy implementation. How can the ultraconservatives be counted as part of the ruling class if they are constantly overruled by the moderates?

I think Domhoff’s error can be found in the rigid class-hegemony construct he uses to define the ruling class. It is not necessary to invoke Marx to see that the United States, or any State for that matter, is ruling-class dominated. Wherever there is a State there is a group of individuals that holds the reins of State power. Those individuals are the ruling class and everybody else belongs to the ruled class. The real ruling class cannot be separated from the State; masked as the broker of a social contract nobody ever signed, the ruling class/State mobilizes what Franz Oppenheimer called the “political means” to acquire wealth. Domhoff fails to see that the social security, health care legislation, and other so-called progressive legislation only tightens the ruling class/State’s hammer-lock on the ruled class. Every new tax diminishes the ruled class’s ability to rule its pocketbooks—compulsory education legislation transfers the rule over one’s own education to the State—morals laws grant rule over one’s own body to the State. Not once does Domhoff even hint that the source of ruling class domination is the State. Though he may be on the right track in identifying the moderates of the CFR-CED axis as the kingpins of political power, there can be no equivocation about this point: If you want less ruling class domination, you must have less State.

Because government is about detail and policy is about ideas it is important to note the source of the policy-formation group’s ideas—think tanks. The major think tanks, the RAND Corporation, the Stanford Research Institute, the Brookings Institute, etc., are all heavily interlocked with the big foundations, policy groups, and major banks and businesses by common funding and common directors. A steady flow of information and personnel pulses back and forth between the think tanks and their allied organizations. The “court intellectual” is recruited, trained, and made a loyal member of the power elite by means of access to power and privilege in this process.

Presidential commissions are revealed as part of the process which makes private policy into public, official policy. Of the fifteen commissions on foreign and military policy between 1954 and 1972 twelve were headed by a member of the CFR—two others were headed by CED trustees.

Relying on the findings of the think tanks and policy-formation groups, the presidential commissions generally rubber-stamp the earlier ruling class positions and sell the new policies to the public. By assigning women, ethnics, and labor representatives to the presidential commissions the ruling class appeases the pluralist sensibility and makes the findings more credible.

The pluralists also point to the inclusion of the varied special-interests in electoral politics as evidence to support their theory of power. Domhoff demolishes the pluralists on this count, proving that the candidate-selection process is the slave of the policy process. American two-party politics, an anomaly among democratic states, discourages principles, policy discussion, and political discussion and relies instead on “image building, name calling and gossip” to win votes. Domhoff quotes political scientist Theodore J. Lowi: “Majorities produced by the American two-party system are simply numerical majorities; they usually have no political content whatsoever.” In this light America’s third party, the Libertarian Party, stands out. Long on principle, policy discussion, and political education, the LP is capable of reinfusing political content back into the candidate-selection process.

Domhoff closes his book with a brief look at what he calls the ideology process in which the ruling class propagandizes the masses. Exactly what ideology does Domhoff’s ruling class promote? His assertion that the ruling class disseminates an ideology whose “underlying principles are called laissez-faire liberalism” which have “enjoyed a near-monopoly of American political thought since at least the beginnings of the republic” reads like a poke in the eye. When was the last time you heard David Rockefeller toe the laissez-faire line? Which side of the ideological fence did the major California banks sit on during the Proposition 13 debate? Answers: Never, and on the pro-State, pro-tax, anti laissez-faire side of the fence, respectively.

Ruling class ideology veers toward the mixed economy, big business-big government bag, with a strong accent on interventionist foreign policy. Domhoff shows how the Marshall Plan, born in the CFR’s War and Peace project, was sold to the American public. Truman’s 1947 Committee on Foreign Aid, chaired by ruling class pin-ion W. Averell Harriman, made official the old CFR suggestion to stabilize the Grand Area. The private Committee for the Marshall Plan, chaired by another ruling class regular, Henry L. Stimson, was assigned to retail the Plan to the public. Regional Committees were set up, a media campaign started, petitions in every congressional district circulated, and positive congressional testimony prepared.

Subject to Domhoff’s scrutiny is the Advertising Council. Established during Ww II to sell the war, it now places $460-million worth of free advertising each year. Though most of its ads are of the innocent “Smokey the Bear” variety, Domhoff finds much ideological bias in favor of the big businesses which control the advisory committees of the Ad Council. Various Ad Council campaigns pinned the blame for pollution (“People start pollution, people can stop it”), and the energy crisis (“Don’t be fuelish”) on individuals rather than corporations or government. Domhoff especially damns the mid-70s series of Ad Council advertisements which attempted to teach economics via billboards, television, and magazines.

Elsewhere in the ideology network, corporations answer critics’ complaints about corporate products and practices with empty institutional advertising of the “There’s a lot of good chemistry between us”— DuPont ilk.

The Powers That Be bills itself as an interpretive theoretical essay. Readers looking for Domhoff to name individuals, organizations, and corporations can refer to his earlier works, The Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats, Who Rules America?, and The Higher Circles. As valuable as those works are in determining the identity of the ruling class, this new book surpasses them by laying bare part of the method by which the ruling class fuses itself to the State. The Powers That Be is not going to give Juggernaut a flat tire, but with its publication the identity of Juggernaut’s pilot is less anonymous and the machinery which powers the wagon’s wheels is much more visible.

Jack Shafer writes articles, reviews and screenplays in Los Angeles.