Who Governs?

Over 40 years ago as a college sophomore, I read with pleasure some of Robert Dahl’s works on the functioning of American democracy. The books themselves have left my possession long ago, but I have warm recollections of the precision and elegance of Dahl’s arguments. They were an antidote to the SDS/Marxist theory of a corporate oligarchy which controlled America, a notion of American society then still influential on elite campuses, but one which, as the revolutionary ’60s burned out and gave way to the ’70s, had begun to seem jejune if not actually apologetic for communist brutality.
Essentially—and I am relying on Wikipedia and not memory—Dahl contended that the United States was a polyarchy, a plural society where discrete formal and informal power structures competed and compromised over political outcomes. It wasn’t perfect democracy, but it was more than decent by historical and comparative standards. Today left-wing analyses are better remembered, C. Wright Mill’s interlocking Power Elite, and William Domhoff’s series of works, depicting American society in the iron grip of a mostly malevolent and self-serving WASP ruling establishment. I’m sure those works have been superseded, and am not certain that anyone even talks about Robert Dahl anymore, though he was president of the American Political Science Association and a highly regarded figure at Yale.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/who-governs/