Most modern schools of political thought adhere to some version of elite theory, the notion that political decision-making is dominated by a small class of individuals. Of course, there are as many models of elite theory as there are elite theorists, as some might say. Generally, elite theory models fall within a handful of archetypes. This essay will argue that the Polygon is best envisioned as a Managerial Elite model and should be contrasted against the kind of Power Elite models popularized by C. Wright Mills as well as the Democratic Pluralist models of authors like Robert Dahl.

The elite are defined by two fundamental traits: they maintain effective (not absolute) control of the distribution of resources in society, and in doing so receive preferential treatment. Keep in mind that control does not necessarily mean ownership. Certainly, there is a significant advantage to separating these two functions, namely that the person who controls a resource but does not own it will not suffer as greatly from the depletion of that resource. Think of the phrase, “privatizing the profits, socializing the losses” as an example of this distinction. Also keep in mind that there are resources in society other than money; influence, authority, and status are also valuable resources.

There are three major threats to the position of the elites. The first threat is the remnants of bourgeois power, the holdovers from the previous elite system. This includes judicial and constitutional checks on power, local self-government by petit-bourgeois elites, vestigial authority in the legislative branch, and the power of personal fortunes held by individuals outside the managerial elite. The second threat emerges out of populist movements. Populism is an effective base through which a person of exceptional personal qualities might emerge who can seize the institutions of society by force. Various presidential dictatorships throughout history illustrate the threat of a popular leader with a core of competing elite statesmen and the masses at his disposal. The final threat is out-of-control intra-elite competition. While some level of intra-elite competition is healthy and normal, pathological levels of competition destroy their ability to maintain control.

In order to maintain control, the elite must dominate three elements of society: the economic, the cultural, and the composition of the elite class. The first element can be controlled through the regulation of employment, taxation, and the budgets of massive institutions. Through a combination of these things, the elite set the criteria through which an individual will be permitted to acquire wealth. Employment regulations set the standards by which employers shall hire or fire their employees, under threat of government retaliation. Those employers or employees who fail to fit those standards can be excluded from the market altogether, and the shifting of those standards can be strategically leveraged for the benefit of the managerial elite. Likewise, taxation policy is a tool to regulate flows of wealth outside the corporate-government economy or to further refine the goals set by other institutions. Finally, through control of the mass institutions of state and corporation, the elite have more direct ways to manage and control society, as the vast majority of individuals in the modern state are employed either by the government or a major corporation.

Control over these institutions permit the elite to regulate entry into the comfortable middle class and more importantly, who are excluded. It permits the elite to offer hefty rewards to those who adhere to ideological or social standards and to punish those who dissent. Co-opting potential dissidents is a time-honored strategy, as the fall from luxury to poverty is not a price many are willing to pay, especially those with children to protect. For many a middle manager, compliance is the difference between keeping his children in prep-school and seeing them dumped into the American public school system.

The second element of control is cultural. The elite cannot control society purely on the basis of employment and wealth. Traditional institutions and belief systems are hindrances to the running of society via mass-institutions. Local loyalties, beliefs, and attitudes complicate the control mechanisms which rely on massive coordination of individuals dispersed across continents. The tools of control, government and corporations, operate inefficiently when applied to heterogeneous populations. Therefore, the interest of cultural control is expressed in the drive for homogenization of populations. One major element of this effort is the homogenization of the incentive structure of the average citizen. In order to accurately predict behavior, and therefore regulate it, the population must react to stimuli in predictable, identical ways. The easiest way to do this is to reduce the incentive structure to cater to the lowest common factor in the population.  For this reason, the elite promote consumerist hedonism and the culture of immediate gratification as the ideal value structure. This serves three basic functions.

First, it levels the distinctions between classes, thus homogenizing the population and making it easier to predict and regulate behaviors. Since the lumpenproletariat are not capable of much more than immediate gratification, it is more efficient to lower the rest of society to their level. Secondly, it strengthens the dependency of society on mass organizations of consumption, namely corporations which are controlled by the elite. By creating an incentive structure that favors consumption and then dictating the criteria behind that consumption, the elite gain another tool of control. Lastly, it is a wealth-creator which transfers resources from the bulk of society to the elite. By driving up consumption, the elite generate a high level of wealth stratification between the elites and the non-elite. Excess consumption drives corporate profits as well as prevents the accumulation of assets by non-elite actors.

Finally, none of this is functional without the elite’s ability to gatekeep their own membership through a combination of credentialism and networking. This requires control of the educational system as well as significant self-discipline on the part of the elite. First, the education system serves two purposes, which are at odds. First, it is necessary to educate a part of the population in the technical means to operate the ever-more complex machinery of state which depriving them of anything but the most rudimentary ideological explanation. Scientists and engineers with ideas about politics can only spell trouble for the regime. The skills necessary to regulate and run something as complex as a multinational corporation, much less a government, are tremendous.  These workers, which make up the educated upper-middle class, serve as the Outer Party who operate society and are highly privileged within, but are not meant to exercise real control.  Secondly, the educational system is also tasked with identifying potential members of the elite and providing them with an ideological education fitting a person who might one day become a decision-maker. Unlike the technocrat, the elite student has no need of specialized knowledge.  Their advancement is primarily on the basis of understanding and implementing the ideology of the elite. The student must be taught to love and hate the proper individuals, to seek the correct goods, and to act in the interests of the elite to which he aspires. This second form of education serves to create the beginnings of a young elite’s network of allies through fellow students and professors. The name of the university often signifies to other members of the elite as to the status of a newcomer.

From these three basic elements, one gets the organizational web of the managerial elite: corporations, the bureaucracy, mass media, academia, lobbyists, and politicians. Each of these nodes have a role to play in maintaining the power of the elites by addressing the three major threats and three objectives of control. The power of this network, however, is not vested in the individual nodes but in the web of connections between the nodes. A CEO has considerable influence over the assets and power of a single corporation. His power is enhanced, however, in his ability to get on the phone and pull in favors from senators, news editors, heads of government departments, and credentialed experts. Likewise, the power of each of these people is enhanced by the fact that they can later call in favors from the CEO. The professor who put our CEO in touch with a former student running for Congress might find that his research is funded by the corporation’s tax-deductible charitable wing.

The coordination of the elite, therefore, is not due to a centralized command structure but an informal coalition who find their interests better served by maintaining this network of connections than by pursuing their narrow institutional interests alone. The group interests are often dictated by socioeconomic forces beyond the individual desires of the actors. The managerial elite have no choice but to support globalization, for example, as the homogenization of the populace and hedonistic consumerism are necessary to the maintenance of the system. While it is true that some of the elite are true believers in the ideological justification du joir, especially those who rose through the educational program, it is not necessary for the elites to personally believe in managerial ideology in order to promote its tenets for practical reasons.

In addition to this, the various elite managers have another reason for privileging the network’s interests over the interests of their particular institution. One key element of the managerial elite is the degree to which movement between the various nodes is lubricated. A CEO may not remain a CEO over the course of his career, but seamlessly move between the corporate, media, political, or bureaucratic nodes. If a CEO is primarily interested in securing a Senate seat for himself, his primary interest will not be the health of the corporation but the degree to which he can earn favors which will permit him to slip across into the other node of control. Likewise, after a term in the Senate, he may choose to join a lobbying firm or being a media career. The network is not merely made up of favors and influence but also the literal movement of individuals across and through the various elements of the web.

There are two major objections to this model, from Power Elite theorists and Democratic Pluralists respectively. Power Elite theorists claim that this model does not go back far enough and neglects a super-elite above the managerial elite. This super-elite is composed of the billionaires and ultra-wealthy who own stock and fund elections. Power Elite theorists argue that CEOs can be replaced by stockholders, senators removed by a well-funded opponent, and lobbyists defunded. Ultimately, whatever the interests of the managers, they are subject to the interests and demands of the “1%”. To this charge, there are numerous responses. First, the proportion of wealth that is held by private individuals is minuscule compared to the wealth controlled by institutions, both corporate and government. As Peter Thiel has pointed out numerous times, if the government were to liquidate every billionaire in America, it would close the budget deficit for six months. In terms of potential resources, the managers of institutions have far more at their disposal than the bourgeoisie. Secondly, in the modern corporation the stockholder is a largely passive actor.  Stockholders collect rents but play little or no role in corporate governance. The much touted “stockholders’ revolts” are the exception to the rule, wherein appointed directors largely control the membership of their own boards and thereby the control of the corporation. Lastly, the greatest source of funds for campaigns, lobbyist firms, and academia have been demonstrated to come from corporations and government departments, not private individuals. A simple search of SuperPAC funding demonstrates that it is not billionaires that fund political campaigns but corporations.

The Democratic Pluralists on the other hand point to the increasing technical character of modern government and object to the idea that a unified elite interest is possible. Authors like Robert Dahl argue that the skills necessary to be a good CEO are not the skills necessary to be a Lobbyist or a Senator. The rise of technical education and the years required to be certified make it nearly impossible for the elites to flow between nodes as the managerial model presumes. To this argument, there are also several responses. First, is the distinction made between executives and skilled technical labor. A CEO is not an accountant, nor is he a research scientist, nor is he a marketing guru. Each of those area require significant technical training and skill, as well as years of experience. These people, however, are employed by the CEO to handle the technical problems for which their training is appropriate. Likewise, senators hire advisers and staff to deal with the technical problems of their fields. They have campaign managers as employees, and are not campaign managers themselves. This argument rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of the two types of education. Secondly, this argument is false because it assumes that the interest of the manager is identical to the interest of his institution. Given that there is nothing preventing a CEO from becoming a politician or lobbyist, he doesn’t need to be a good CEO, he needs to be a good member of the elite network. If he runs his corporation into the ground in order to provide favors to other elite actors, and he is able to cash in on those favors, then his behavior is a net positive. Ownership and management are distinct concepts. Our CEO might wreck one corporation, but nothing prevents him from moving on to the next one. Lastly, actual observation proves the position of Democratic Pluralism wrong. Look at the careers of men like Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. These men spent their lives bouncing back and forth between the various nodes of the managerial network.

In conclusion, it should not be assumed that the managerial elite are a monolithic bloc. As mentioned, intra-elite competition is a normal part of elite behavior as well as a potential source of institutional entropy. Nevertheless, the shape of modern society and the incentive structures which surround the institutions of mass organization do compel a kind of cooperation which mimics coordination. Most of the time and influence of the managerial elite will be absorbed in the attempt to squelch the three major threats to their power: the bourgeois remnants, authoritarian populism, and intra-elite competition. The need to secure themselves against these forces places strong limits on the scope of their potential actions. Many people acting within a set system of incentives with constraints on their choice of actions might look like a conspiracy, but ultimately Burnham and Francis are correct.

There really isn’t anyone in the driver’s seat.