Purchasing the Presidency?

    

The image above is a thumbnail from a youtube video entitled "The Bushes: When Your Family Uses Millions To Become Presidents." 

A flowing, vibrant portion of the American flag is visible behind the four busts that dominate the composition. Atop the flag flutters the greenery of one-hundred dollar bills—Franklin's head visible between the overlapping shoulders of the Bush family. Front and center is a smiling George H.W. Bush and his beaming son, George W. Bush. The pair don the attire of their professional lives: a white shirt, a black coat and a blue coat, each with a red tie. Laura Bush and Barbara Bush, the wives of W. and H.W. respectively, pose at their flanks, also smiling, also dressed for public professional life. The four look happy, amused, and relaxed, perhaps excited for their history to be honored, perhaps unprepared for the forthcoming indictment. Indeed, a title covers the bottom horizontal third, reading in smaller font "SECRETS OF THE," then, much larger, "BUSH FAMILY." Each white-yellow gradient letter of the title stands in stark contrast to the black bar that rests behind it, drawing the eye to the words condemning the family.

Mills' Power Elite thesis posits three criteria with which to study the most powerful people conspiratorially. First, we must consider the social milieux in which elites are raised and socialized. Since elites are wealthy and often famous, they socialize in esteemed private institutions that match their privilege. Elite boarding schools, social clubs, and wealthy neighborhoods bring powerful people into close proximity, developing common outlooks, opportunities, attitudes. Second, and crucial to Mills' wider definition of power elite, are the specific demands that management, coordination, and success in massive powerful institutions make on individuals. Running a multinational corporation, managing government entities, and directing military operations require a certain set of technical and psychological skills which are members of the elite milieux are trained in and selected for. These are not inborn traits common to a special sect of humanity, rather, they an outcome of the unique tasks that this group of people attend to. Finally, we must understand the overlapping interests that these groups share. Mills' big three institutions in modern America are the military, corporation, and government. The elites that manage these sectors often informally coordinate their activities toward similar goals. Such is most evident in attempts to assert American hegemony, when military, government, and economic leaders are united in their desires to overcome a foreign enemy. However, Mills' makes clear that this coordination is only one aspect the power elites' group dynamic: it is certainly not "the sole or the major basis of their unity, or [to say] that the power elite has emerged as the realization of a plan" (Mills 1956:20). Thus, the social, institutional, and interest-based contexts come together, mutually reinforcing each other, to explain the group dynamics of the power elite. 

The thumbnail image above offers a vague indictment of the Bush family on conspiratorial grounds. The aesthetics of flag (governance and military) merge with that of cash (economy), spinning together sectors which common sense (and President Eisenhower) warns against. If the smiling family is made fraudulent by what lays behind it, then the case is closed by the underlining notions of secrecy and nepotism. Though leaning into our instincts for conspiracy is a great click-bait strategy, Mills is probably not satisfied by this hand-waving explanation. Indeed, a deeper analysis of the image, the kind not intended for Youtube scrollers, might lend a more fruitful explanation. 

Family is at the center of the image: the two couples, the father and son, the prominent "BUSH FAMILY" title. Indeed, family is the domain wherein the Bush dynasty was born and raised. Imagining the Bush household points us back to Mills' questions of social environment and psychological training. Growing up the young George W. was surrounded by wealth, military prestige, and political power. With his father's military turned political career, George W. learned explicitly the ways that powerful institutional roles coincide. At his elite boarding school, he developed the skills and psychological outlook necessary to fight as a pilot, lead as a manager, and speak as a president. Coordination of interests became not necessarily a byproduct of many people interacting, but a mechanism through which military, governance, and business skills came together, mutually reinforcing, to produce a certain kind of individual. The combination of domains in a single family is perhaps the source of conspiracy, but an explanation for it is not so secret, at least not in the conspiratorial way the thumbnail and video title suggest. The Bushes' role in extreme institutional power are certainly due in part to their wealth, but they did not simply buy their way to power or muscle their way into government. The elite social environment, especially the familial context of multilateral power, alongside explicit training in boarding and military academies, prepared the Bushes to lobby, campaign, rally, and lead. 

Mills, C. Wright. 1956. The Power Elite. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Old Money Luxury, Thumbnail from: "The Bushes: When Your Family Uses Millions To Become Presidents," Nov. 29 2023. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0997tOkIKhc