This is a question for Doug. Somewhere in the last year or so, you mentioned a new project which implicitly targetted the new Power Elite. I assume these minions would be defined by their economic profiles, and a narrative would follow characterizing them through their relevant statistics, sort of Wall Street applied....
Today, C. Wright Mills classic work arrived at work, via UPS. My point in reading this classic which I missed years ago, was to contrast the somewhat silly political philosophy of Strauss, against this vast and far more imposing facade of power, and its realpolitik. I think or at least hope that the US right will fail to convince this elite that its primary interest is the identity of the white master race, the essential back bone of western civilization. The only logic that makes sense is that money is green, and will stay green, and it really doesn't matter where it comes from or how, as long as power is held within the circles of a carefully managed few---rainbow or monotone, who cares?
Anyway reading through the first few pages of The Power Elite, I was struck by a stunning difference of time and space. Back then, in the early to mid-fifties, the military exercised an enormous power, that it absolutely does not command today. I had forgotten how much the military establishment had control of foriegn policy and domestic vigiliance over us at the time. It is something that most people who didn't grow up during the period can not conceive. The whole center of the Cold War period was its military readiness to conduct war on a global scale, as WWII had been conducted. All that has disappeared, and with it the great influence of military planners on the nature, the direction and goals of the society. It is simply impossible to understand that the military mentality permeated every aspect of life. From crew cuts to the mania for physical fittness, the sense of duty and obligation, rules of conduct, even the illicid sense of Liberity, as a drunken, fuck-fest, then back to the barricks.
Elementary school drills, calisthenics, t-shirt, shorts, tennis shoes, tight underwear, jock straps, mouth wash, cigerettes, gum, starched shirts, crisp pants with cut creases, most of all denial of pleasure---every fucking thing exhuded the military mentality in my youth. Long hair, beards, BO, marijuana, random and meaningless sex, forays into literature, the arts, laying around for days doing nothing---all of that was devoted to systematically de-militarizing life.
Weber makes a big thing out of the regimen of religious discipline and its premire place for preparing humanity for capital. In the post war period, the army drill sargent provided a similiar regimen for success in war and business.
And now, who or what has the disciplinarian role? That society should devote all its resources, all its wealth, and people over to the regimen of capital. Or in Clinton's mantra, its the economy stupid. Yes, we all must submit to the discipline of neoliberal capital planners for only they know what is the greatest and highest good. In relation to that, the idealism of the old Cold War military order seems almost romantic excess.
CG
ps. At the moment I have Weber's Protestant Ethic, Mills, Power Elite, Voegelin's New Political Sciences, Drury's Kojeve all open and read at the same time in order to develop a total view of the post war, when almost all these works had their greatest influence. It's a great exercise---they all blurr into an astonistingly pessimistic view...