The Shadow Elite: The New Agents of Power and Influence Who Are Undermining Government, Free Enterprise, and Democracy

How the nation is really run, and how decisions are really made, keep changing. Today, with the border between government functions and private consultants and lobbyists more porous and indistinct than ever before, new kinds of cliques and networks are assuming power. This is a transformation that, until now, we have lacked the concepts to understand. In Shadow Elite, anthropologist Janine Wedel charts, for the first time, the new system of power and influence that arose with the twenty-first century. At its apex are players and networks loyal only to their own. They relax government rules of accountability as well as business codes of competition, undermining government, free markets, and democracy itself. The drive to privatize and deregulate, and the proliferation of complex technologies, have created an environment for players who redefine themselves as state or private, depending on the opportunities. From the manipulators who merged state and private power in the ruins of the Soviet empire to those who pushed us into a misguided war in Iraq, to those now playing at the margins of America's increasingly privatized foreign policy, Shadow Elite explains the spread of a new species in the ecosystem of public policy. Profoundly original, it speaks to theories of democracy, international relations, and the state, and will no doubt spark controversy.Wedel, Janine R. is the author of 'The Shadow Elite: The New Agents of Power and Influence Who Are Undermining Government, Free Enterprise, and Democracy', published 2008 under ISBN 9780465091065 and ISBN 0465091067.