It is appropriate that Hollywood has become reliant on sequels and remakes. Americans love nostalgia, returning to the familiar. The current remake that is all the rage in political culture is the denunciation of the “establishment.” It appears even more widespread than during its original run in the 1960s. The only problem is this time it makes no sense. When young antiwar and anti-consumption activists of the hippie era shouted vitriol at the “establishment,” they were largely referring to the vested, interlocked interests of what sociologist C. Wright Mills, in his 1956 book of the same name, called The Power Elite.
Mills argued that the wealthiest corporations, authoritative officials and agencies of political power, and military brass effectively “run America.” Careful to distance himself from conspiracy theorists, he explained that members of the power elite do not hatch secret plots in penthouse suites and underground offices. Nor do they even act consciously in concert. Instead, their shared incentive, mainly to protect and advance the system that serves their interests, ensures that they will make decisions that further the “managerial revolution” at the expense of actual democracy.
Like most attempts to explain complex societies with a totalizing thesis, Mills oversimplifies. The quiet revolutions of the civil rights, women’s liberation, environmental, and gay rights movements, all of which gained steam in the decade following the publication of The Power Elite, demonstrate that the U.S. was much more dynamic than the quasi-plutocracy of Mills’s sociopolitical x-ray.
Despite his tendency to cut out the nuances, there is no denying that his analysis contains a large degree of truth. Less than five years after his book hit the shelves, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a walking embodiment of “the power elite,” would presciently warn of the dangers of the “military-industrial complex” in his farewell address to the nation. Lines like “we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions” sound like they are lifted out of The Power Elite.
Regular contributor to the Washington Monthly, Mike Lofgren, provided a deeply insightful and witty update of The Power Elite when, drawing upon years of experience working as a congressional staffer for the Republican Party, he wrote The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of Shadow Government. Quite different from the ravings of a Steve Bannon, Lofgren identifies the “deep state” as the “nexus between the United States government and the military-industrial complex, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley.” The “cozy relationship” between these sectors includes the revolving door from private industry to public administration and the lobbying firms shuffling in between. Regardless of the people or party who occupy official positions of power, Lofgren convincingly argues, the “deep state” exerts a profound influence on public policy.
When 1960s activists targeted “the establishment” for condemnation, they meant something approximate to what Mills, and later Lofgren, dissected. For example, Abbie Hoffman routinely described a high school experience in which he wrote a paper questioning the “existence of a Supreme Being,” and the teacher called him a “commie” before giving him a failing grade, as his “first rupture with the establishment.” Hoffman didn’t mean that the teacher was part of the establishment, but that by suppressing the free exchange of ideas and by maintaining rigid borders of debate, he was doing the establishment’s bidding.
Hoffman became a key figure in the New Left, which would ridicule the “establishment” for the hypocrisy of promoting “democracy,” while presiding over Jim Crow, restrictions on campus speech, and the Vietnam War.
Unlike the turbulent 1960s, our current days of rage suffer from a vocabulary drained of meaning. Chief among the empty terminology is the designation, “establishment.” It now applies to anyone and everyone, meaning, at once, everything and nothing. Rather than identifying the entrenched interests of power, it is a schoolyard taunt intended to bully politicians, pundits, and even faceless social media users who do not strictly adhere to the populist line, whether right or left. Adding to the absurdity is that those who deploy it often have power themselves, sometimes at greater levels than those they denigrate as “establishment” lackeys.
Beginning with the reactionary, nationalist right, it was common to hear supporters of Donald Trump, even after he won the presidency in 2016, argue that his critics represented the “establishment” that he was fighting. In a piece of surrealist theater, the official White House website posted toward the end of Trump’s first term that he “fought the establishment and won.” It would take the mind of Philip K. Dick, the science fiction writer, not C. Wright Mills, to imagine a universe where the “establishment” does not include a billionaire real estate tycoon who has been elected president of the United States, while exercising Jim Jones-like control over one of America’s two major political parties. In his current effort to eviscerate an independent Department of Justice, triumvirate government, and entire sectors that he has labeled enemies, such as the press and academia, Trump claims that he is fighting against the “rigged system” of a political establishment that is still conspiring to obstruct his agenda. Recently retired White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt repeated with the consistency and eloquence of a parrot that Trump is waging war against a “corrupt establishment.” Many of the podcast bloviators in the world of MAGA mania, such as Bannon and Patrick Bet David, repeat Leavitt’s characterization as if they are praying the rosary.
The politics of the contemporary right are authoritarian, meaning that even if they were opposing “the establishment,” their ideological fantasy is to bring to power a new establishment that is much less democratic and much more violent. Take a look at ICE agents menacing city streets for confirmation of the Republican Party’s authoritarian “anti-establishment” ambition.
It is not only the populists within the Republican Party who have perverted the term “establishment” until it has lost all significance, but also the populists within the Democratic Party, more specifically those who have self-applied the terms “progressive” and “socialist.” In the recent Senate primary in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed dismissed Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s endorsement of his opponent, Haley Stevens, by claiming that he represents the people, and implying that Whitmer “represents the establishment.” At this moment of his arrogant utterance, El Sayed represented no one. Whitmer, a twice-elected governor in a swing state, with an approval rating consistently over 50 percent, has real supporters. One would assume that she, at least, represents them. When El Sayed denigrated Whitmer, Senator Elizabeth Warren stood there next to him, smiling and nodding, seemingly unaware of her own hypocrisy. Even though Warren likes to claim that she is a “fighter” against the “corrupt establishment,” she is a U.S. Senator in her third term, with much more national influence than Whitmer. Her beneficial and creative policy ideas led to direct action from the Barack Obama and Joe Biden administrations. In fact, during his 2020 campaign, Biden fought against Sanders loyalists who claimed that he was an “establishment” shill. Still, during his term in the White House, the 46th president consistently worked with progressives like Sanders and Warren to advance an ambitious agenda on organized labor, health care, and antitrust efforts. This year, Warren forged a bipartisan agreement on a housing bill with Republican Senator Tim Scott and Trump administration officials, and it has become law. Whether she likes it or not, she is just as much the “establishment” as any other elected federal official.
The entire Democratic divide over who belongs to the “establishment” escalated during the 2016 primary between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Not even the most loyal Clinton supporter could deny that she wielded much more power in the political system than Sanders. Still, the perpetually aggrieved senator from Vermont took his argument a step too far when he would often claim that he was leading a populist movement against the “establishment,” implying Clinton’s campaign was an insurance policy for the decadent status quo. Clinton won the nomination because of her overwhelming support with Black, Latino, and working-class voters. Black and Latino voters trusted Clinton on issues of racial equality and social justice, because she spent decades laboring on those issues, unlike Sanders, whose class-centric politics emerged from one of the whitest states in the union. Clinton campaigned with Black mothers who lost their children to police brutality, and she emphasized her support for the DREAM Act. Similarly, her sustained focus on women’s rights appealed to women of all races, but the vote tallies suggest otherwise, especially among Latina and Black voters. Sanders’s so-called “political revolution” was largely a product of the white professional class and managerial compact.
The same dynamic has bifurcated voters in recent races involving supposed anti-establishment heroes, like Zohran Mamdani, the aforementioned El-Sayed, and the disgraced, accused rapist, Graham Platner. The “progressive insurgents” claim that they are versions of Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith working to balance the machinations of the power elite. Still, the voters with the most economic and political distance from that elite disagree.
The conversation becomes even more complicated when you consider how quickly the term can shapeshift to serve the populist insurgency. The mainstream press and most Americans now take it for granted that Biden’s stubborn decision to run for reelection in 2024 as an octogenarian was a monstrous failure. Everyone seems to have forgotten that after his disastrous debate performance that led to the pressure campaign to get him to withdraw from the contest, the two most vocal politicians to insist that Biden remain the Democratic nominee were anti-establishment warriors, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—precisely because they were thankful for how Biden helped further their progressive policy agenda and considered the push to pressure him to drop out as driven by wealthy elites.
It appears that “establishment” has become a pejorative for any elected official, especially a Democrat with years of experience in government. However, Sanders, who has been in Congress both the House and Senate since 1990 and has indicated he will run for another six-year term in 2030, seems exempt from this critique. While that reductive definition of time served might have salience in a race pitting a longstanding official against a genuine “outsider,” it has damaged political discourse. A person’s record is no longer relevant. Instead, all that matters is where they fall in an increasingly Manichean system of classification. It also enhances suspicion, even contempt, against the work of government itself, a development that, contrary to the wishes of progressives who want to enlarge the role of government in American life, serves the austerity agenda of the right.
Governor Whitmer’s achievements in Michigan, including the elimination of an abortion ban, launching tuition-free education programs, economic relief for retirees, and leading the successful effort to flip the state legislature Democratic for the first time in decades, suddenly became irrelevant to El-Sayed, the nodding Elizabeth Warren, and his supporters. She was “establishment.”
The slur was much more effective against Michael Bennett in Colorado. The Democratic U.S. Senator is a reliable force for educational programs, women’s rights, gun control, and protections and health care access for LGBTQ+ people. Still, he lost his recent race for governor, mainly because he could not distance himself from the accusation that he was part of the “establishment.” The accusation derived mainly from Bennett’s acceptance of PAC money and his approval of two Trump cabinet nominees, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. While disapproval of Bennett’s acquiescence on these appointments is understandable, it should not have overshadowed his sterling record, nor should it have led to the implication that he lacks integrity.
Keeping company with the so-called “establishment” is the same reason why Janet Mills, a popular two-term governor in Maine, lost her bid for a Senate primary against Graham Platner. Many prognosticators claimed that Mills could not win a tough Senate race, because as her alliance with Chuck Schumer would indicate, she is too cozy with the “establishment.” Platner’s series of self-imposed humiliations, from the Nazi tattoo to the sexual assault allegations, should act as a warning that “anti-establishment” doesn’t always live up to the hype. In Mills’s case, “establishment” could mean tested, seasoned, and successful.
While it is true that American political culture is currently stumbling under the influence of the populist intoxicant, the Democratic Party, and voters more broadly, should develop a more exacting criterion for separating accomplished leaders from office-holding hacks.
The political party that believes in the ability of government to advance the causes of peace, shared prosperity, and social justice cannot affix a scarlet ‘E’ on anyone with experience working in government. It’s incoherent.
The late U.S. Senator from Minnesota, Paul Wellstone, who became the “progressive” stalwart of his tenure, which lasted from 1990 until his life was cut short in a tragic plane crash, famously said, “Politics is about the improvement of people’s lives.”
The simple but profound work of improving the lives of people who struggle with a variety of physical, financial, and social afflictions requires enacting public policy and efficiently executing public administration. It demands proximity to that thing that too many Americans, left and right, unthinkingly denounce as “the establishment.”
