Sociology - PowerElite - Essay Example

Gil Broochian Your 24 April Response Essay In The Power Elite, C. Wright Mills points out that the modern democracy, or as it is in the United States, holds that a free flow of discussion is not only allowed but encouraged in the public to form opinion. However, he rightly points out that this is the ideal view, whereby it is held that the public opinion is what sways policy matters in the echelons of power; the representatives of the people are actually representing the public opinion. The ground reality is different.

Just how much information is given to the public and what exactly the public is to infer from the information to be able to have and hold opinions is a different matter altogether. There is a huge gap between the public and the political will as represented by the elected officials. The truth of the matter is that information is so controlled and the political will so organized that the public actually do not have a say in what goes on when it comes to policy matters. As Mills rightly points out, often the information comes to the public after a policy matter has been long decided by those in power – those our public has elected to represent their interests are quite removed from what the public actually needs.

This idea is quite strange to us as we believe that it is only in the politically subversive states that policies are made without considering the public opinion. However, upon closer inspection it becomes quite clear that even in a country like ours, which holds high democratic values, public opinion is not only disregarded in a lot of policy matters, but is often influenced and tampered with by a host of ways. We have only to look at the War on Terror that America has waged as an instance of this.

Mass hysteria was created using myriads of methods: mass media was constantly being fed stories of constant and ever present threats by the terrorists, and a nationalistic fervor was created by feeding the public the idea that the terrorists were against the American Way of Life. The public, therefore, wholeheartedly supported the invasion of Afghanistan (we were told Al-Qaeda was responsible for the attacks on the Twin Towers, and Al-Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden, operated from Afghanistan).

However, what makes the episode take a totalitarian twist is when our own President lied to us about there being Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq – we were told that that the FBI had confirmed this – and the wily dictator of Iraq was just short of using them against us, so we had no choice but to invade Iraq as well. It was much later that we learnt that not only had the invasion in Iraq been decided by the political regime much before they floated the idea to “help” form a public opinion in its favor, but that the information given to the public was misleading, bordering on outright lies.

By using terror as a “weapon,” so to speak, those in power used intimidation to coerce the public into supporting a war that did not have enough public opinion as it stood. This clearly supports the point of view held by Mills that with the ever changing and ever new means of manipulation available to the Power Elite, as Mills terms them, public opinion is not the force it was once reckoned to be by those who founded the principles of American democracy.