A New Kind of Democracy? Political and Cultural Developments in the 1960s 395generation of activists. Perhaps foremost among them was a Sociologist named
C. Wright Mills. Mills was a professor at Columbia University, an Ivy League
school in New York. But he did not look the part of the nerdy prof with a
tweed jacket and glasses. He was a tall Texan, wore black, and rode his motor-
cycle all over campus. And he had one of the most astute minds of his gen-
eration. Among his many works, The Power Elite, written in 1956, was vital to
developing a criticism of American politics and life and led many college stu-
dents and younger activists to look at the U.S. quite differently.
In The Power Elite, Mills took an expanded view and looked at the eco-
nomic, political and military elite, government leaders, corporations, and the
armed forces—which shared a similar way of looking at the world, i.e. through
their power. These groups tended to be mobile so individuals could move
from the corporate group to the government, from the military to corpora-
tions, from universities to government, and so forth, and they recognized
themselves as superior to the people who lived in the U.S. but did not have
power. Elites got their place in society by their ability to fit in, to think and
act like the existing men [and, rarely, women] of power and by their relation-
ships with one another. All three, the government and big business and the
military, were part of a national commitment to create a strong central state
and a permanent war economy, or what Eisenhower and others called the
Military- Industrial Complex.
Many students and intellectuals heeded Mills’s words and would come to
establish a loosely-knit movement called the New Left. The “New” Left, unlike
the “Old” Left, wanted to move beyond the Cold War questions of the evils,
or sometimes virtues, of Communism, and talk about American life, and espe-
cially the role of institutional power like corporations and the state and the
military, as Mills had. Many of these young people formed a journal called
Studies on the Left and developed the idea of “corporate liberalism” to examine
the powerful institutions governing life in the U.S., an idea similar to the
“corporate state” or the “new Capitalism” of the 1920s. While the term “cor-
porate liberalism” may seem contradictory–after all, liberalism is supposed to
be an ideology of reform and change, while corporations represent the power-
ful status quo–the New Leftists had a clear and concise vision of the way that
big business and the state actually guided reform, hence “corporate” liberal-
ism, or change directed by big business. “Liberals,” generally mocked as soft
on Communism or “touchy-feely” about social issues like civil rights, became,