Authoritarianism and Class in American Political Fiction

Elite Pluralism and Political Bosses in Three Post-War Novels

David Smit

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000587890
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book analyzes what many critics consider to be the three best examples of modern American political fiction—Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, Edwin O'Connor's The Last Hurrah, and Billy Lee Brammer's The Gay Place —to address a specific problem in American governance: how the intense competition for power among elite factions often results in their ignoring major groups of their constituents, thereby providing political bosses with a rationale to seize authoritarian control of the government in the name of constituent groups who feel ignored or neglected, promising them more democratic rule, but in the process, excluding other groups, so that the bosses themselves become elitist, ruling only for the sake of some constituents and not others.

1 Class, Elite Pluralism, and Political Bosses

DOI: 10.4324/9781003256410-2

To some degree, most of us recognize that while the United States is a democratic republic in which the people are governed by elected representatives at all levels of government—city, state, and national—the reality of how our representatives are actually chosen, who influences and shapes legislation that determines public policy, and how bureaucracies implement that legislation is very complicated. A tradition of theory and empirical research in political science called “pluralism” claims that power in democracies is dispersed among a host of economic and ideological interest groups represented by elected officials, government bureaucrats, and all those hired to influence legislation and shape the way the bureaucracy implements government policies. Pluralists argue that while the governing elites who represent these interest groups do not necessarily represent the interests of the people as a whole, they maintain their legitimacy because the officials who are directly involved in crafting government policies are elected by a majority of the citizenry and because all citizens, even minorities, have the opportunity indirectly through voting to influence government policy. In addition, all citizens have the right to criticize the government and to organize and support opposition to current leadership in the next election. The issue here, of course, is that voting in itself is a complex process involving governing elites, who have the resources to influence voters’ behavior and to promote or inhibit their ability to vote in the first place.

One of the major debates about our governing elites in the United States is the degree to which they are upper class and constitute if not an oligarchy, then what G. William Domhoff calls a “ruling class.” A related debate is whether political bosses, those who accumulate power and influence by appealing to the insecurities and grievances of groups who feel that they have been abandoned by the current ruling elite, are an inherent or aberrant part of our political system.

In order to address these issues, I am going to proceed as follows. First, I provide a brief history of the concept of pluralism in political science, highlighting how it evolved from a particular methodology to a theory of political behavior and finally to a philosophical inquiry into the norms and conventions that shape and limit that behavior. I explain why I prefer the term “elite pluralism” and summarize the evidence that our ruling elite is overwhelmingly upper-middle and upper class. With this as a background, I go on to address whether we should call those who govern us a “ruling elite” or a “ruling class,” which is, perhaps, best expressed in the debate between political scientists Robert A. Dahl and G. William Domhoff about the politics of implementing downtown redevelopment in New Haven, Connecticut. In analyzing the evidence on both sides of this debate, I argue that, given the presuppositions and methods of both men, their conclusions complement each other, and that conceptualized as either a “ruling elite” or a “ruling class,” those who govern us exhibit a range of what I call “ruling-class consciousness.” Then I elaborate on the concept of “ruling-class consciousness” and also apply it to political bosses, who, I argue, are merely one permutation of elite rule. Finally, I explain how I will use three concepts as a framework to analyze the behavior of the characters in the novels I study. Those three concepts are Dahl’s list of “political resources,” the notion of “ruling-class consciousness,” and political scientist William Connolly’s idea that in order to succeed, pluralism requires a “bicameral orientation” toward politics and a “presumptive receptivity toward others.”

A Brief History of the Concept of Pluralism in Political Science

The concept of “pluralism” in political science originated during the turn of the twentieth century, when scholars began what became known as the “group theory” of politics, using social science methodologies to study how government actually functions. Most of this work focused more on theories and methods of research than on detailed descriptions of political behavior. The breakthrough book appeared in 1961: Robert A. Dahl’s Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City, which provided a detailed history of politics in New Haven, Connecticut; a firm theoretical grounding for investigating how governments make decisions, and a comprehensive study of how various individuals and groups contributed to deciding three issues in New Haven in the 1950s.¹ Those issues concerned political nominations, public schools, and downtown redevelopment. In his study, Dahl introduced the notion of the distribution of “political resources” as a way to explain how various individuals and groups could influence political decision-making. Those resources included such factors as social standing, wealth, personal charisma and popularity, access to the legal system, and the ability to control jobs and the media. Dahl was primarily concerned with how the “pluralism” of diverse governing groups could maintain a stable political system over time, considering the intense and occasionally violent disagreements about policy, disagreements that could descend into mob rule.

In the late 60s, a number of scholars, foremost among them William E. Connolly (1967, 1969), began a major critique of pluralism, arguing that its methods of investigation were not value-free, that on the contrary, the political systems it accurately described were inherently biased in favor of entrenched interests inimical to marginalized groups: the poor, minorities, the working class. Over the course of his career, Connolly gradually redefined pluralism not as a description of a political state of affairs, but as a psychological and philosophical disposition, the civic virtue of a “bicameral orientation” in which people hold to their own political faith and philosophy while respecting those of others, an orientation toward others that is necessary for democracy to function in the first place. Nowadays, pluralism is understood more in Connolly’s sense than Dahl’s, but the tension between the two captures the paradox of elite rule.

• If real power in politics is a constant and complex contest among a diverse but ever-shifting collection of interest groups, only indirectly responsible to voters or the interests of the citizenry as a whole, then it is questionable just how democratic our political system really is.
• If what holds our “real” political system together is not so much the articles of the U. S. Constitution, state constitutions, and local laws, but a largely unacknowledged framework of norms and conventions that determine how a diverse collection of interest groups actually govern, then the only thing that prevents some interest groups from violating these norms and conventions and seizing power is merely Connolly’s psychological and philosophical disposition of respect for the faith and philosophy of others.

The shift in theoretical notions of pluralism suggests that the models of political systems are themselves conditioned by immediate circumstances. Originally group theory focused on making the study of politics more empirical, using social science methodologies to study how government actually functions: hence the focus on interest groups influencing governmental decision-making. Dahl refined these methods in his study of New Haven and used his data to develop a larger theory of democracy based on the “pluralism” of diverse governing groups as protection against violent dissent or mob rule because the near post-war period was concerned with stability; Connolly’s pluralism focuses on the protection and respect for diverse minority beliefs and values in the face of impervious elite rule because by the 1970s, the political culture was more concerned about minority rights and rising inequality. Connolly’s pluralism is in a sense cultural, and he is hard-pressed to demonstrate how it can be cultivated in light of the fact that a disposition toward civic virtue can be so easily abused by both factions of the elite and political bosses.

Elite Pluralism

I prefer to use the term “elite pluralism” to describe America’s political system, because the term acknowledges the role of social class as a factor in political decision-making. However, “elite pluralism” is not a commonly used term in political science today and is used more frequently in political sociology.² In the immediate post-war period, there was a great deal of discussion opposing pluralism to a body of scholarship called “elite theory,” which posited that the various pluralist factions of our governing elites constituted a “power elite” or a “ruling class.”³ Pluralist theory basically carried the day, although elite theory still provides a powerful tool for analyzing the influence of class in political behavior.⁴

I use the term “elite” in the common-sense formulation of E. E. Schattschneider that in politics some people and groups obviously have more power than others because they have more of what Dahl calls “political resources.” I would argue that those resources are correlated with class standing. Schattschneider’s example (1960, 35) is that some people simply have more money than others, and therefore have the means to advertise their opinions or pay people to help implement certain policies more than the less affluent have. The fact is that those in the upper class intrinsically have more resources or they have access to greater resources than most people below them in the socio-economic hierarchy: they not only have more money; they are usually better educated than the general population and are raised in families with a network of connections to those already in power, giving them greater access to governance than members of the lower classes. This is simply a fact of life, and more ideal societies would find a way to lessen these inequalities.

The ruling elite is composed not only of our elected officials and appointees to the judicial system but also members of the bureaucracy who implement policy and all those groups and organizations devoted to influencing policy or providing ideological rationales for policy-making. Most studies of the social class of ruling elites focus on the federal government. One study of the class status of all the major groups in and associated with the national government found that only thirty percent are upper class “in social origin”—defined as having at least one parent already in the ruling elite—but that the remaining seventy percent are mostly upper-middle class with only a small percentage from the poor or working class (Lerner et al. 1996, 26). However, the class status of members of different groups in the ruling elite varies considerably depending on the group. Robert Lerner and his colleagues (1996, 26) found that people who work for think tanks and consulting firms that try to influence policy are the most likely to be upper class. Thomas Dye (2002, 209) also argues that those who shape national policy-making, that is, those who serve on the boards of foundations and think tanks that influence policy-making at all levels of government—groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Business Roundtable, the Committee on Economic Development, the Brookings Institution, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation—are overwhelmingly upper-class and upper-middle-class white men. Nearly all are college-educated, close to a majority of them hold advanced degrees, or at least attended an exclusive prep school or graduated from a well-known private university. A majority are top corporate leaders. On the other hand, Lerner and his colleagues (1996, 26) found that officials of labor unions and lobbying groups based on economic issues are most likely to come from working-class backgrounds.

G. William Domhoff (1983, 127) cites studies that members of Congress from the early 1940s to the early 70s were virtually all professional people or former business executives. Although only twenty percent of the senators and five percent of the representatives in his samples were upper class, none of them were from the working class. A more recent study of the backgrounds of senators and representatives in the post-war period by Nicholas Carnes (2013, 5, 20) broadly confirmed Domhoff’s findings. Carnes found that only two percent of members of Congress had working-class backgrounds and only six percent had ever had any experience at all working in a blue-collar job.

National cabinet members are much more upper class than Congress. Beth Mintz (1975) found that sixty percent of cabinet members for most of the twentieth century until 1972 were upper class and close to eighty percent were members of the business community, defined broadly to include people sitting on boards of directors and working in law firms specializing in corporate clients. Philip Burch (1981, 278, 383, and Appendix B) in a study similar to Mintz’s found that sixty-four percent of cabinet and diplomatic appointees from 1933 to 1980 were rich landowners, financiers, and corporate lawyers. Burch’s figures for cabinet and diplomatic appointees in post-war administrations were these: sixty-three percent of the Kennedy–Johnson administration were members of the economic elite, as were sixty-nine percent of the members of the Nixon-Ford administrations, and sixty-five percent of the Carter administration.

As far as I know, there are no major academic studies of the class standing of officials in state and city governments other than Dahl’s study of New Haven. However, there is sufficient anecdotal evidence in histories of particular states and cities and in the biographies of the bosses that ruled them to suggest that the statistics about the class standing of officials at the national level generally reflect the class status of officials at the state and city level. I will refer to these histories and biographies in my analyses of the three novels I study.

Despite this evidence, the argument lingers as to the degree to which the upper-class nature of our ruling elites should be characterized as being an oligarchic “ruling class” or what various scholars call “strategic elites” (Keller 1963), a “polyarchy”; that is, a “rule of the many” (Dahl 1971), or a “political directorate” (Aronowitz 2003). Perhaps the best example of the issues involved in determining the nature of elite rule is the debate between Robert Dahl and G. William Domhoff about political decision-making in New Haven in the 1950s.

The Dahl–Domhoff Debate about the Nature of Elite Rule

Overview

In Who Governs? Dahl developed a taxonomy of those who play a significant role in determining government policy: professional politicians, of course, but also “high-interest non-professionals,” social and economic notables who have a certain amount of status, wealth, and influence in the community, and “occasional, specialized participants,” such as parents and teachers who get involved politically only around issues of education, or those who volunteer to work for their political party only during key national and state elections. Naturally, only the professionals, both leaders and sub-leaders, are engaged full-time in political activity (Dahl 2005, 300–01).

To Dahl, all of these political players, indeed all American citizens, possess to some degree the “political resources” to accomplish their goals, resources such as the time to devote to politics and sufficient status and wealth in the community to influence local government officials. I will deal with Dahl’s list of political resources shortly.

In applying his concept of how individuals and groups used their “political resources” to influence government policies in New Haven in the 1950s, Dahl determined that in his primary example of political behavior—the implementation of a massive urban renewal project in New Haven—Mayor Richard Lee was the key decision-maker in making a project that had been in the development stages for at least a decade into a reality. While Dahl found that a host of players contributed to the effort, it was Mayor Lee who “sold” the program to the electorate and acted as a power broker on the host of issues that needed to be settled to get the project done. While Dahl acknowledged that class status and wealth were a major resource for those working on urban development, he did not think that these resources provided what he called “social and economic notables” with inordinate power and influence.

In his criticism of Dahl’s study, Domhoff argues that Dahl did not sufficiently account for the “institutional bases in corporations, banks, law firms, and business associations” in New Haven that set the agenda and provided the rationale and planning for the political decision-making that followed. In his study, Domhoff focused on documenting the web ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Class, Elite Pluralism, and Political Bosses
• Part I
• 2 Robert Penn Warren and Huey Long’s Louisiana: 1928–32
• 3 A Class Analysis of All the King’s Men
• Part II
• 4 Edwin O’Connor and James Michael Curley’s Boston: 1914–50
• 5 A Class Analysis of The Last Hurrah
• Part III
• 6 Billy Lee Brammer and Lyndon Johnson’s Texas in the 1950s
• 7 A Class Analysis of The Gay Place
• Conclusion
• Index