“The 1952 presidential election represented the triumph of ‘the power elite,’ in the phrase coined by sociologist C. Wright Mills, academia’s most trenchant observer of Cold War America.…

“Mills wrote in his 1956 masterpiece The Power Elite, America was ruled by those who control the ‘strategic command posts’ of society—the big corporations, the machinery of the state, and the military establishment. These dominant cliques were drawn together by their deep mutual stake in the ‘permanent war economy’ that had emerged during the Cold War. Though political tensions could flare within the power elite, Mills wrote, there was a remarkable unity of purpose among these ruling groups. The top corporate executives, government leaders, and highranking military officers moved fluidly in and out of one another’s worlds, exchanging official roles, socializing in the same clubs, and educating their children at the same exclusive schools. Mills called this professional and social synchronicity ‘the fraternity of the successful.’

“Within this system of American power, Mills saw corporate chiefs as the first among equals. Long interlocked with the federal government, corporate leaders came to dominate the ‘political directorate’ during World War II.…

“The crucial task of unifying the power elite, according to Mills, fell to a special subset of the corporate hierarchy—top Wall Street lawyers and investment bankers. These men were the ‘in-between types’ who shuttled smoothly between Manhattan corporate suites and Washington command posts. Little known to the general public, these skilled executors of power constituted in Mills’s words America’s ‘invisible elite.’ They were the men who forged the consensus on key decisions of national significance and who made certain that these decisions were properly implemented. Their work was largely unseen and vaguely understood, but it had enormous impact on the lives of ordinary men and women.”

—David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, & the Rise of America’s Secret Government

David Talbot is right about C. Wright Mills and his masterpiece The Power Elite, which is on my required reading list for all of humanity.

What Mills calls The Power Elite, I call the cruelites, a term I introduced in my Apocaloptimist Manifesto in 2024. I defined it as follows:

cruelites: members of a group of narcissistic abusers who by virtue of their wealth, privilege, or power claim the right to rule over ordinary people, often making cruel decisions, which they justify with manufactured crises, propaganda, and fraud

Example: Typically psychopaths, the cruelites comprise philanthropaths, tyrants, kapos, and other colluders who view themselves as our rightful rulers.

Pronunciation: crueleats (rhymes with “elites”)

Margaret Anna Alice