Devil Red

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.

And yet, this hardly means that all politicians are bought and paid for by the power elite. There are numerous liberal and ultraconservative elected officials who disagree with the perspectives preferred by members of the power elite. However, there aren't enough of them, they aren't well organized, and they don't have the staying power of those who are sympathetic to the corporate point of view on most issues. Historically, the general result of the candidate-selection process was a set of ambitious and relatively issueless elected officials who knew how to go along to get along. More recently, the corporate-oriented politicians often have conservative views on various "social issues" as well. This emphasis on social issues helps them get elected because some of their constituents care passionately about them, but those issues are not of substantive concern to the corporate rich. Either way, the candidate-selection process leaves an opening for the pro-corporate policies provided to elected officials through the special-interest and policy-planning networks.
In considering the candidate-selection process from the point of view of the power elite, it is important to stress that there are structural and historical reasons why money has mattered so much in American politics. The electoral rules leading to a strong tendency toward a two-party system, that is, the single member district plurality system, when combined with the historic division of the country into Northern and Southern regions with very different political economies, adds up to a situation where the parties have been such complex coalitions that until recently it was not always clear to voters what one or the other stood for. Given that state of affairs, personalities, and name recognition can matter a great deal, which provides an opening for campaign finance to help boost one candidate over another.
Over and beyond the issue of campaign finance, the party system is important because the independence claimed for the executive branch by Mills is in good part premised on the structure of power in Congress. From the 1790s until fairly recently, elite control at the legislative level started with the fact that the Northern industrial and finance capitalists controlled the Republican Party (and its predecessors) and the Southern plantation and merchant capitalists controlled the Democrats in a context where it is near impossible for a third party on the left or right to arise--or last very long--due to the nature of the electoral rules (Domhoff, 2003, Chapter 2; 2006b, Chapter 6). So, to the degree that the liberal-labor coalition that developed during the New Deal could exercise any power, it had to do so inside the Democratic Party and in the context of a bargain with the segregationist Southern Democrats that included acquiescence in elite domination of the low-wage labor force in the South, especially African Americans. It also meant tacit acceptance of the exclusion of African Americans from craft unions and good jobs in the North, which assuaged the feelings of the many Northern white workers who saw African Americans as racially inferior or as potential threats to their job security.
Thus, the liberal-labor coalition, with fewer than a majority of senators and only 100 or so seats in the House, had far less power within the Democratic Party than liberal analysts and historians usually suggest. When it came to domestic spending, the liberal-labor coalition had to agree that the South received more than its share of the pork and that the Southern whites could exclude African Americans if they so desired (Brown, 1999). On the occasions when the Northern liberals could convince the urban machine Democrats to support them on an issue in opposition to the Southerners, the Southerners joined with Northern Republicans after 1938 in a highly successful conservative voting bloc to stop any legislation they did not like, which usually involved issues related to control of labor markets in both the North and the South (Manley, 1973; Patterson, 1981; Shelley, 1983).
The importance of the conservative voting bloc to the smooth functioning of the power elite until the 1990s can be seen through an analysis of two major pieces of liberal legislation that changed the United States dramatically in the 1930s and the 1960s, the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Although it was most certainly the militancy of industrial workers in the 1930s and the civil rights movement in the 1960s that put these issues on the public agenda, and it was most certainly liberals in Congress who crafted and pushed the legislation sought by these movements, it was in fact rare differences in interests and opinions between the Northern and Southern segments of the capitalist class that made passage possible. In the case of the National Labor Relations Act, the liberal and labor Democrats gained the support of Southern Democrats by excluding the great bulk of the Southern labor force--that is, agricultural, seasonal, and domestic workers (Domhoff, 1990, Chapter 4). This emphasis on the key role of the Southern rich recently has been endorsed by Ira Katznelson and one of his co-workers (Farhang and Katznelson, 2005).

Local Power Structures
Although most political scientists thought there was no way Hunter's conclusions about the concentration of power in Atlanta could be plausible in a country with competing political parties, a free press, and the right to assemble and organize into interest groups, the critiques of his findings were methodological in nature. His interview method for constructing elite social networks and learning about their activities, based on asking knowledgeable people to nominate the people they thought to be powerful, and then in turn interviewing those who were nominated, was later shown to be a sophisticated way to uncover networks of power (Kadushin, 1968). However, it was pejoratively called the "reputational" method by Dahl and fellow pluralists to make it seem like mere fluff. They said it used questions that were too general to be of any use--even though it did ask people to discuss their involvement in policy issues they deemed important--and was probably contaminated by what informants read in the newspapers besides (Polsby, 1980; Wolfinger, 1960).
But the reputational method was hardly the failure that pluralists proclaimed it to be. Dozens of researchers ventured into cities and communities in several different countries, usually reporting that upper-middle-class informants with professional and business occupations believed the biggest businessmen and corporate lawyers of the given locale to be at the center of a cohesive power structure (see Hawley and Svara, 1972, for a summary of many studies). The fact that business leaders were not as prominent in the foreign cities that were compared to American cities in two studies gave the method further legitimacy because it showed it could be sensitive to cross-national differences (D'Antonio and Form, 1965; Miller, 1970). When other methods were used in conjunction with the reputational method, there was usually, but not always, a considerable overlap in the findings (e.g., D'Antonio and Form, 1965; Miller, 1970; Preston, 1969; Thometz, 1963). Later the value of the method was demonstrated at the national level in Norway (Higley et al., 1976), Australia (Higley and Deacon, 1985), and the United States (Higley and Moore, 1981; Moore, 1979).
Despite all this evidence for the usefulness of this social network method, Hunter's findings seemed dead and buried by the early 1970s. However, political scientist Clarence Stone (1976, 1989) unexpectedly renewed the debate by returning to Atlanta to study the city in the context of its more recent battles over urban renewal and its transition to black political leadership. The results, using different methods than Hunter did, including the decisional method advocated by pluralists, were basically a vindication of Hunter through two of the best case studies ever done on an American city. Even better, Stone's findings fit with the newly emerging idea that land owners, not industrial capitalists, are the major movers and shakers in most cities, with the main goal of increasing real estate values through the intensification of land use (Molotch, 1976). To the degree that this pro-growth coalition faces opposition, it comes from neighborhoods that want to protect their amenities against downtown expansion, high rises, and freeways. More abstractly, this means there is a built-in conflict between exchange values and use values in cities that is resolved or compromised in a variety of ways, some halfway reasonable, some very ugly, as in the case of the urban renewal program that cleared the way for downtown elites to remake their cities (Domhoff, 2005a; Logan and Molotch, 1987). This conflict leads to some unexpected but understandable alliances, with building trades unions often siding with the growth elites in a vain attempt to create more jobs in the overall economy, whereas environmentalists, university students, and left-wing activists usually line up with the neighborhoods even though there is nothing inherently progressive or environmentalist about neighborhood protection (think racial or ethnic exclusion, for example).
Based on my review of the literature in the early 1980s, I concluded that the idea of the city as a "growth machine," dominated by landed elites and their allies, fit with all the case studies that had been done up to that point (Domhoff, 1983, Chapter 6). Then the idea gained further support in later studies by Todd Swanstrom (1985), John Mollenkopf (1983), and Richard Gendron (2006). This strong claim even encompasses New Haven, a fact I demonstrated in a case study based on documents unavailable to Dahl at the time of his study, along with my new interviews and a reanalysis of Dahl's own interviews, which he graciously shared with me in 1975 (Domhoff, 1978, 1983). My New Haven study is now updated with more recent archival documents discovered in the papers of Mayor Richard Lee and his main aide, Edward Logue, which became available in the late 1990s and early 2000s. These papers reveal that Yale played an even larger role than I originally thought in obtaining federal funds for the city in a timely manner. The paper trail on this issue is near-perfect (Domhoff, 2005b). So, 50 years later, we can say that Hunter's basic findings on the dominance of cities by land-based growth elites have emerged triumphant. Although some differences remain among the theorists I have mentioned, which I have spelled out elsewhere (Domhoff, 2006a), just about every power investigator at the urban level now starts with the downtown land owners and developers as the primary suspects, and just about everyone agrees that growth is their primary focus.

C. Wright Mills, Power Structure Research, and the Failures of Mainstream Political Science
by G. William Domhoff
in New Political Science 29 (2007), pp. 97-114
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/theory/mills_critique.html
Introduction

2
Perhaps the most fruitful distinction with which the sociological imagination works is between 'the personal troubles of milieu' and 'the public issues of social structure.' This distinction is an essential tool of the sociological imagination and a feature of all classic work in social science.
Troubles occur within the character of the individual and within the range of his or her immediate relations with others; they have to do with one's self and with those limited areas of social life of which one is directly and personally aware. Accordingly, the statement and the resolution of troubles properly lie within the individual as a biographical entity and within the scope of one's immediate milieu - the social setting that is directly open to her personal experience and to some extent her willful activity. A trouble is a private matter: values cherished by an individual are felt by her to be threatened.
Issues have to do with matters that transcend these local environments of the individual and the range of her inner life. They have to do with the organization of many such milieu into the institutions of an historical society as a whole, with the ways in which various milieux overlap and interpenetrate to form the larger structure of social and historical life. An issue is a public matter: some value cherished by publics is felt to be threatened. Often there is a debate about what that value really is and about what it is that really threatens it. This debate is often without focus if only because it is the very nature of an issue, unlike even widespread trouble, that it cannot very well be defined in terms of the immediate and everyday environments of ordinary people. An issue, in fact, often involves a crisis in institutional arrangements, and often too it involves what Marxists call 'contradictions' or 'antagonisms.'
In these terms, consider unemployment. When, in a city of 100,000, only one is unemployed, that is his personal trouble, and for its relief we properly look to the character of the individual, his skills and his immediate opportunities. But when in a nation of 50 million employees, 15 million people are unemployed, that is an issue, and we may not hope to find its solution within the range of opportunities open to any one individual. The very structure of opportunities has collapsed. Both the correct statement of the problem and the range of possible solutions require us to consider the economic and political institutions of the society, and not merely the personal situation and character of a scatter of individuals.

The Sociological Imagination
Chapter One: The Promise
C. Wright Mills (1959)
Nowadays people often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct. What ordinary people are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up scenes of job, family, neighborhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and remain spectators. And the more aware they become, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel.
Underlying this sense of being trapped are seemingly impersonal changes in the very structure of continent-wide societies. The facts of contemporary history are also facts about the success and the failure of individual men and women. When a society is industrialized, a peasant becomes a worker; a feudal lord is liquidated or becomes a businessman. When classes rise or fall, a person is employed or unemployed; when the rate of investment goes up or down, a person takes new heart or goes broke. When wars happen, an insurance salesperson becomes a rocket launcher; a store clerk, a radar operator; a wife or husband lives alone; a child grows up without a parent. Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

To a degree that has come to seem controversial today, Mills was not cynical about the importance of reason—or its attainability, even as a glimmering goal that could never be reached but could be approximated ever more closely, asymptotically. To the contrary. He wrote about the Enlightenment without a sneer. (22) He thought the problem with the condition of the Enlightenment at mid-century was not that we had too much Enlightenment but that we had too little, and the tragedy was that the universal genuflection to technical rationality—in the form of scientific research, business calculation, and state planning—was the perfect disguise for this great default. The democratic self-governance of rational men and women was damaged partly by the bureaucratization of the economy and the state. (This was a restatement of Weber's great discovery: that increased rationality of institutions made for less freedom, or least no more freedom, of individuals.) And democratic prospects were damaged, too—in ways that Mills was trying to work out when he died—because the West was coping poorly with the entry of the "underdeveloped" countries onto the world stage, and because neither liberalism (which had, in the main, degenerated into techniques of "liberal practicality") nor Marxism (which had, in the main, degenerated into a blind doctrine that rationalized tyranny) could address their urgent needs. "Our major orientations—liberalism and socialism—have virtually collapsed as adequate explanations of the world and of ourselves," (23) he wrote. This was dead on.
It goes without saying that Mills felt urgently about the state of the world—a sentiment that needed no excuse during the Cold War, though one needs reminders today of just how realistic and anti-crackpot it was to sound the alarm about the sheer world-incinerating power that had been gathered into the hands of the American national security establishment and its Soviet counterpart. It cannot be overemphasized that much of Mills' work on power was specific to a historical situation that can be described succinctly: the existence of national strategies for nuclear war. Mills made the point intermittently in The Power Elite, and more bluntly in The Causes of World War Three, that the major reason America's most powerful should be considered dangerous was that they controlled weapons of mass destruction and were in a position not only to contemplate their use but to launch them. Mills' judgment on this score was as acute as it was simple: "Ours is not so much a time of big decisions as a time for big decisions that are not being made. A lot of bad little decisions are crippling the chances for the appropriate big ones." (24) Most of the demurrers missed this essential point. (25) To head off pluralist critics, Mills acknowledged that there were policy clashes of local and sectoral groups, medium-sized business, labor, professions, and others, producing "a semiorganized stalemate," but thought the noisy, visible conflicts took place mainly at "the middle level of power." (26) As for domestic questions, Mills probably exaggerated the unanimity of powerful groupings. He was extrapolating from the prosperous, post-New Deal, liberal-statist consensus that united Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy more than it divided them. Like most observers of the Fifties, he underestimated the potential for a conservative movement. (27) But about the centralization of power where it counted most, he was far more right than wrong.
One has to recall the setting. Mills died a mere seven months before the Cuban Missile Crisis came within a hair's breadth of triggering a nuclear war. Khrushchev's recklessness in sending missiles to Cuba triggered the momentous White House decisions of October 1962. Enough time has passed since them without thermonuclear war that an elementary point has to be underscored: the fact that Kennedy's inner circle backed down from the brink of war was not inevitable. It was, shall we say, contingent rather than structural. A handful of men—they were men—had full opportunity to make the wrong decision and produce mass death. They made the right decision, as did Khrushchev, in the end, and the superpowers clambered back from the precipice. At that world-shattering moment when eyeballs faced eyeballs, the men in charge had the wisdom not to blow their eyeballs and millions of other people's away. They had the opportunity and the means to make other decisions. They were hair-raisingly close. The fact that they didn't make the wrong decisions doesn't detract from Mills' good judgment in taking seriously this huge fact about America's elite: that they were heading toward a crossroads where they might well have made a momentous, irreversible wrong turn. Who these men were, how they got to their commanding positions, how there had turned out to be so much at stake in their choices—there could be no more important subject for social science. Whatever the failings of Mills' arguments in The Power Elite, his central point obtained: the power to launch a vastly murderous war existed, in concentrated form. This immense fact no paeans to pluralism could dilute.
Mills not only invoked the sociological imagination, he practiced it brilliantly. Careful critics like David Riesman, who thought Mills' picture of white collar workers too monolithically gloomy, still acknowledged the insight of his portraits and the soundness of his research. (28) Even the polemical voice of a Cuban revolutionary that Mills adopted in Listen, Yankee—a voice he thought that Americans, "shot through with hysteria," (29) were crazy to ignore—was quietly shaped by Mills' ability to grasp where, from what milieu, such a revolutionary was "coming from." While he did not fully appreciate just how much enthusiasm Americans could bring to acquiring and using consumer goods, he did prefigure one of the striking ideas of perhaps his most formidable antagonist, Daniel Bell—namely, the centrality, in corporate capitalism, of the tension between getting (via the Protestant ethic) and spending (via the hedonistic ethic). (30)
In a sense, Mills' stirring invocation to student movements at the turn of the Sixties stemmed from his sociological imagination. He was deeply attuned to the growth of higher education and the growing importance of science in the military-corporate world. More than any other sociologist of the time, Mills anticipated the ways in which conventional careers and narrow life-plans within and alongside the military-industrial complex would fail to satisfy a growing proto-elite of students trained to take their places in an establishment that they would not judge worthy of their moral vision. If he exaggerated the significance—or goodness—of intellectuals as a social force, this was also a by-product of his faith in the powers of reason. Believing that human beings learn as they live, he was on the side of improvement through reflection. Thus, he thought that Castro's tyranny, and other harsh features of the Cuban revolution, were "part of a phase, and that I and other North Americans should help the Cubans pass through it." (31) In his last months, he was increasingly disturbed about Fidel Castro's trajectory toward Soviet-style "socialism," and restive in the vanishing middle ground. There are two fates that afflicted free-minded radicals in the twentieth century: to be universally contrarian and end up on the sidelines, or to hope against hope that the next revolution would invent a new wheel. On the strength of Mills' letters, my guess is that Mills would have gone through the second fate to the first, yet without reconciling himself to the sidelines.

C. Wright Mills, Free Radical
http://www.uni-muenster.de/PeaCon/dgs-mills/mills-texte/GitlinMills.htm
by Todd Gitlin
Whether or not the rest of this sentence sounds like an oxymoron, C. Wright Mills was the most inspiring sociologist of the second half of the twentieth century, his achievement all the more remarkable for the fact that he died at 45 and produced his major work in a span of little more than a decade. For the political generation trying to find bearings in the early Sixties, Mills was a guiding knight of radicalism. Yet he was a bundle of paradoxes, and this was part of his appeal whether his readers were consciously attuned to the paradoxes or not. He was a radical disabused of radical traditions, a sociologist disgruntled with the course of sociology, an intellectual frequently skeptical of intellectuals, a defender of popular action as well as a craftsman, a despairing optimist, a vigorous pessimist, and all in all, one of the few contemporaries whose intelligence, verve, passion, scope—and contradictions—seemed alive to most of the main moral and political traps of his time. A philosophically-trained and best-selling sociologist who decided to write pamphlets, a populist who scrambled to find what was salvageable within the Marxist tradition, a loner committed to politics, a man of substance acutely cognizant of style, he was not only a guide but an exemplar, prefiguring in his paradoxes some of the tensions of a student movement that was reared on privilege, amid exhausted (1) ideologies, yet hell-bent on finding, or forging, the leverage with which to transform America root and branch.
In his two final years, Mills the writer became a public figure, his tracts against the Cold War and U. S. Latin American policy more widely read than any other radical's, his Listen, Yankee, featured on the cover of Harper's Magazine, his "Letter to the New Left" published in both the British New Left Review and the American Studies on the Left and distributed, in mimeographed form, by Students for a Democratic Society. In December 1960, cramming for a television network debate on Latin America policy with an established foreign policy analyst (2), Mills suffered a heart attack, and when he died fifteen months later he was instantly seen as a martyr. SDS's Port Huron Statement carries echoes of Mills' prose, and Tom Hayden, its principal author, wrote his M. A. thesis on Mills, whom he labeled "Radical Nomad," a heroic if quixotic figure who, like the New Left itself, muscularly tried to force a way through the ideological logjam. After his death, at least one son of founding New Left parents was named for Mills, along with at least one cat, my own, so called, with deep affection, because he was almost red.

全球暖化的政治倫理——為氣候政治建立目的王國
應用倫理研究通訊
http://www.ncu.edu.tw/~phi/NRAE/newsletter/no32/03.htm
葉保強*
壹、前言

政策網絡理論的途徑
http://72.14.235.104/custom?q=cache:iWplrWFLWXYJ:web.ntpu.edu.tw/~yuhwa/study%2520of%2520policy%2520networks/chap2.doc+Jessop&hl=zh-TW&ct=clnk&cd=7&gl=tw&inlang=zh-TW&client=pub-3278190510955599
政策網絡宛如一面鏡子，反應西方先進工業社會行政與政治的多元性與複雜性，政策網絡的理論途徑解釋政策過程中參與者高度複雜的關係，有其啟發性的價值，相當程度的影響公共行政與公共政策理論的建立。另一方面，政策網絡理論發展過程中，也有其脆弱的一環，最致命的缺點是概念定義的混淆，Rhodes與Marsh(1992)即憂慮概念混淆的危機將使政策網絡的研究步上統合主義(corporatism)1的後塵。其次，理論應具有描述與解釋的功能，但是政策網絡分析似乎難以跨越描述性層次而進入政策解釋功能。基於此，本章首先釐清政策網絡的概念定義，繼而解釋政策網絡理論的發展途徑，以及建構政策網絡的理論架構，並對於政策網絡途徑是否能解釋政策過程加以論證。
政策網絡概念的發展
一、政策網絡的概念定義