> Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be turning Gramsci on his head.
That certainly was not my intention. I think that you exaggerate the freedom from popular pressure the elites faced in the past - in fact they lived in the shadow of the guillotine since the French Revolution, not to mention Comrade Mauser during the Russian revolution. http://www.sozialistische-klassiker.org/Majakowski/maja1.html
But even before they faced considerable constraints, albeit these varied from country to country - they were more popular constraints in Western Europe than in England or Eastern Europe (cf. Robert Brenner, Agrarian Class Structure and Economic development in Pre-Industrial Europe, _Past and Present_ 97, 1982; Barrington Moore makes a similar point in _Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy_).
Clearly, these is a variation in elite control of society, sometimes they are firmly in control, sometimes they are on their knees, and sometimes well, their heads just roll. All I am saying that right know we seem to be in the "firmly in control" phase, at least in the US.
To reiterate, this is because the elite gained unprecedented technological and organizational advances - communications, marketing, surveillance, media blitz, technology of war, scientific understanding of human behavior - they have it all, while the non-elites still go by popular stock-knowledge. Ironically, the only sign of increased non-elite power is international terrorism, commoners never before had such capacity to project highly destructive power across the globe. Guy Fawkes http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/4402828.stm came close, but failed, and even if he had succeeded this would have been only a one time shot.
Wojtek