Explaining the Right Turn
Just about the time power structure researchers provided satisfactory explanations for the big legislative decisions that mainstream political scientists usually refer to as evidence for pluralism, the power elite took a right turn. Explaining that right turn became a new acid test for rival theorists. One thing was for sure. It finished off the state autonomy theorists, who by and large deduced from their flawed studies of the Progressive Era and New Deal that the economic problems of the 1970s would be solved through the expansion of the state. They already had egg on their faces due to the clear involvement of moderate conservatives in decisions they thought were made without any capitalist participation, such as the Social Security Act, but those decisions were made decades earlier, so the new research could be ignored. What they could not explain away was capitalists so blatantly and straightforwardly taking charge of the state and trying to shrink parts of it right in front of their noses. According to them, something like this could never happen.
Although the right turn did in the state autonomy theorists, who now call themselves historical institutionalists and are largely indistinguishable from the pluralists, except for their rediscovery of "institutions" as a substitute for "interest groups," it did provide an opening for a new brand of pluralists with a new angle. Now neo-pluralists could say that big business had not ruled in the 1960s and 1970s, but that it did take charge once again after 1980, a tack best exemplified in the work of David Vogel (1989) on the "fluctuating fortunes" of business. According to Vogel, the previously disorganized corporations, with their interests under siege, finally were able to pull themselves together and reverse the tide. But we already knew through mountains of research that the corporations were highly organized among themselves, and closely linked to the policy-planning network and the federal government, so this is a completely inadequate explanation that I have dismantled elsewhere (Domhoff, 1990, Chapter 10).
How do power structure researchers explain the change? By looking at the shifting constellation of forces between the power elite and the liberal-labor coalition. In a word, the civil rights movement dynamited the power arrangements that persisted from the New Deal to the mid-1960s. The story begins with a correction of what turned out to be Mills's biggest mistake as a power analyst: his conclusion that there were no longer any potential power bases in the middle and lower levels of the society. This belief led him to ignore the possibility of independent mobilization and political action by African Americans using what turned out to be a surprisingly resourceful and resilient organizational base--the black churches of the South, which provided organizational skills, money, cultural and social solidarity, and charismatic leadership (Morris, 1984). However, the churches did not act alone. Traditional black colleges and the sleeping car porters union also provided power resources that Mills had overlooked.
There is one more mistake by Mills that has to be addressed before we can understand the right turn. He thought there was a "truce" between organized labor and the moderate conservatives in the power elite that was a stable and permanent one, with class conflict contained within administrative and judicial structures. Contrary to that claim, which Mills discussed for only a sentence or two in The Power Elite after giving it several paragraphs in The New Men of Power (1948), we now know, based on historical research by James Gross (1974, 1981, 1995) on the origins and activities of the National Labor Relations Board, that there never was any real acceptance of unions on the part of the moderate conservatives.