The famous sociologist and professor C Wright Mills (1916-62) did not come right out and say post-war America had a ruling class. Perhaps he feared being labelled a Marxist, a problematic proposition in those early heady days of the Cold War. In any case, he used the term ‘power elite’ to describe a confluence of players – certain congressmen, the permanent state, key corporate heads, intelligence agencies, the legacy media, Hollywood and so on – whose interests were not necessarily aligned with those of regular Americans. The power elite concept turns out to be as relevant as ever, only those in power today are not conservatives but progressives. This goes some way to explaining the rough treatment Donald Trump has endured since entering the political fray in 2015 as a provocateur promising to ‘drain the swamp in Washington’.
The first thing to say about America’s power elite, then is that over time it transmogrified from a conservative in orientation to a progressive one – a change that C Wright Mills, if not Antonio Gramsci of the Long-march-through-the-institutions fame, would have found startling. The trajectory of the FBI is a case in point. Beverly Cage’s comprehensive biography of J Edgar Hoover, G-Man (2023), tells the story of a conservative man who dedicated his professional life to establishing the FBI as a stand-alone sovereign power. Hoover, from 1935 to 1972, not only built the FBI into a bemouth but found every way possible to bypass political oversight and give his agency genuine autonomy. If he had not died in office in 1972, writes Cage, Hoover would have surely saved his friend, President Richard, from the ignominy of Watergate. Such is the effect the permanent state can have on the most prominent of political figures.
A lifetime conservative, Hoover saw the role of the FBI as protecting ordinary Americans from malevolent forces – gangsters in the 1930s, Nazi saboteurs in the 1940s, communist conspirators in the 1950s, New Left activists in the 1960s and so on. Nowadays the FBI is only conservative in the sense it wishes to conserve the authority of the organisation, an un-elected body funded to the tune of $10.8 billion a year by the American taxpayer. Hoover’s greatest legacy, therefore, is that he created a centralised and secretive political apparatus in Washington which has now been hijacked by his nemesis – leftists and progressives.
It is unlikely, especially in our past-Cold War era, that pragmatic careerists such as Mueller, Comey and Wray possessed a sophisticated view of ideology. Their opportunistic adoption of progressive identity politics, PC orthodoxy in other words, has served as a useful justification for the FBI retaining its role as an integral part of the power elite, although now we might call it the left power elite. The FBI, or at least its upper echelons, still prides itself on protecting Joe Citizen from malevolent forces, only nowadays those malevolent forces are more likely to be conservative – the Tea Party fifteen years ago and Donald Trump since he pledged to ‘drain the swamp’ in Washington DC.
The Russian Hoax, perpetrated by the Department of Justice and the FBI in collusion with the Democratic Party and mainstream media outlets, was an attempt to undermine the Trump administration from its first moment in office. This was the left power elite at work. When, on the eve of the November 2020 election, Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop revealed that the ‘big guy’ – that is, then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden – had likely betrayed America for financial advantage, 51 former intelligence chiefs published a memorandum denouncing the laptop revelations as ‘Russian disinformation’. The FBI, which had possession of the computer hard-drive for months beforehand, cast its vote for the ‘the deep swamp’ by remaining silent. Joe Biden’s pointman, Anthony Blinken, who went on to be Biden’s Secretary of State, co-ordinated the (as we now know) mendacious memorandum. The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC et al ran with the Russian disinformation tale. Leaving aside all the other claims and counter-claims about the legitimacy of the 2016 election, the Hunter Biden laptop cover-up surely cost Trump the election.
When Donald Trump, billionaire property developer, Reality TV celebrity and inveterate PC offender, descended the Trump Tower escalator on June 16, 2015, he would have had no idea of the political firestorm he was about to ignite. Trump only gave himself a 20 percent chance of winning the Republican primary, and he seemed as shocked as Hillary Clinton on the night he won the 2016 General Election. Doubtless the larger-than-life Trump assumed his foray into politics would be just another (albeit more glamorous) chapter of his Reality TV career. But ‘glamorous’, despite his four years in the Oval Office and now potentially another four, is not the word to describe his political life. Even the indefatigable Trump might have been experiencing some regrets as he dropped to the ground, on June 12, 2024, after Thomas Crooks began taking shots at him from an unsecured rooftop, with a clear line of sight, no more than 150 metres away.
Many ordinary Americans have become supporters of Trump’s America First agenda. Building a wall on the US-Mexican border to stymy illegal immigration, standing up to China’s predatorial economic practices, imposing tariffs to protect American industry, pressuring NATO members to pay their way and so on makes sense to a lot of Americans. If Trump’s backers, ‘the red tribe’ we may call them, believe he alone can save America from ruination, his opponents – ‘the blue tribe’ – hold the opposite view. For them, at any rate, Trump is ‘America’s Hitler’, populism is a euphemism for fascism and the crowds that attend his rallies are xenophobic, nativist, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, Islamophobic and – as Hillary Clinton once declared – deplorable.
Membership of the two tribes, for the foreseeable future, is almost wholly predicated on one’s attitude to Donald Trump. This makes the upcoming election more contentious than previous ones, going all the way back to 1860 on the eve of the Civil War. Supporters of Trump are unlikely to accept defeat given his advantage in most pre-election polls, their suspicions about foul play in the 2020 election and the weakness of Kamela Harris’s candidacy. Vice President Harris, according to Trump supporters, personifies much of what is wrong about modern-day identity politics. To criticise her as the “DEI candidate”, according to the Democrats and their allies in the legacy media, is to be racist and/or sexist. And yet to criticise the practice of Diversity, Equity and Inclusiveness itself constitutes a case of white supremacism. There is, obviously, an element of circularity in the logic of progressives.
The Trump haters are no more likely to accept defeat on November 5 than the red tribe. After all, the Department of Justice and the FBI, in conjunction with the legacy media and the Democrats, went to war against the first Trump administration, using every means at their disposal to destroy his presidency. The same might be said about the lawfare battle waged against Trump ever since he announced his intention to run again for the White House. The FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private residence in Florida, on August 8, 2022, can be viewed as a continuation of the outrageous persecution of the people’s champion or a fitting and proper investigation of an outrageous character who has no place in American politics. The enormous disparity in those two opinions tells us all we need to know about the irreconcilable differences between the red tribe and the blue tribe.
Any chance the two tribes might peaceably divide up the country between themselves is a non-starter given that a sizeable minority of blues/progressives inhabit so-called red states, especially in urban centres, while the rural population in blue states, California, Illinois, New York for example, lean towards Trump. The two opposing tribes, consequently, are stuck with each other – and the November 5 election, however fair and legitimate it might be, will not bring them together. Were Trump to finds himself back in the Oval Office, it will be up to the power elite to re-think their thinly disguised partisanship. Otherwise, quips Kash Patel, FBI HQ might find itself closed only to be re-opened the next day as a ‘museum to the Deep State.’
