American democracy, it’s blindingly evident, is in crisis. Terms that once characterized faraway repressive regimes—oligarchy, elite, plutocracy—are now invoked to describe the current political ...

The late, visionary sociologist C. Wright Mills stated in 1956 that acts of elite deviance that cause social harm, regardless of their criminality in a legal sense, are part of the “higher immorality ...

The Power Elite was the last of his three books addressing what he called “the main drift” of American public life. The first, The New Men of Power (1948), called out organized labor’s failure to ...