The late Robert Dahl famously posed what should be the central question for the discipline of political science: Who governs in a society where nearly everyone can vote, yet wealth, knowledge, and social position are unequally distributed? While in previous decades this question sparked debates among political scientists and sociologists, in recent years it has receded to the margins of the our discipline—notwithstanding a recent acknowledgment that the American political system is characterized by inequalities of all sorts.

For almost 50 years, G. William Domhoff has tirelessly engaged the question of who rules. Domhoff, who has never shied away from challenging the accepted wisdom or dominant paradigm of the day, has offered detailed accounts of policymaking framed by a keen attention to changing theoretical battles among scholars.

First, he challenged the empirical foundations of the early Dahl’s pluralist conclusions by uncovering the hidden role of business in shaping local decision making (Who Really Rules? New Haven and Community Power Reexamined, 1978). Later, when pluralism lost its luster, some sought a safe haven with a “new” emphasis on state-centered theory. Led by Theda Skocpol, state-centered scholars emphasized the role of state actors and neutral policy experts, instead of class forces, as the key to understanding policy change. Domhoff subsequently turned his attention to these empirical claims and, once again, was able to show that these so-called neutral policy experts were members of corporate-sponsored think tanks, policy-planning organizations, and discussion groups (The Power Elite and the State: How Policy Is Made in America, 1990, and State Autonomy or Class Dominance? Case Studies on Policy Making in America, 1996).

Many readers will be familiar, at least by title, with Domhoff’s introductory text Who Rules America?—first written in 1967 and now in its seventh edition. In this, and in 15 other books on the question of power, he has argued for a class dominance model of power in the United States, in which corporate-based owners and managers dominate. He has maintained the centrality of the role of class, but has rejected the Marxist claim that the ruling class is always the economic elite. He contends, to the contrary, that while his empirical evidence points to this conclusion for the United States, such has not always historically been the case as there are numerous examples of military or religious dominance. He also holds out the possibility of effective challenges to class dominance. To anchor this argument, Domhoff draws upon Michael Mann’s theoretical work developed in his multivolume opus The Sources of Social Power, with its four networks of power (economic, political, military, ideological).

In his new book, Domhoff challenges what he labels the fairy tale of liberal dominance that lasted from the New Deal until the conservative ascendency of the 1970s or 1980s. Throughout, he distinguishes between the factions within the corporate community, with a moderate wing led by the Committee for Economic Development versus a conservative wing dominated by the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufactures. His new work is a detailed scholarly account of the role of corporate moderates in shaping public policy that shows that they were rarely far from the centers of power and rarely defeated. The few defeats were more likely due to corporate conservatives, not the liberal—labor alliance typically seen as its main adversary. Thus, he argues as directly as possible that since 1939 there has been increasing corporate dominance in American politics.

In doing so, Domhoff challenges, yet again, the more popular accounts within political science that there was a period of liberal dominance from the New Deal until the Reagan era, at which point the corporate community, stinging from its 1970s defeats from environmentalists, among others, mobilized to retake power in Washington. For Domhoff, this claim, epitomized by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson in their book Winner Take All Politics, is wrong on all of its factual assertions. It is not that Domhoff disagrees with their analysis of the dynamics of corporate power in today’s politics; he simply rejects the view, which he describes as wistful romanticism, that there was a period of liberal dominance that lasted from the New Deal until the 1980s. He is well aware in making this argument that many will immediately respond by noting “liberal” victories concerning Civil Rights, women’s rights, and, more recently, issues of gender identity. He stresses that none of these were of concern to the corporate community because none challenged their economic power; many corporate leaders, in fact, supported each of these movements.

To demonstrate his thesis of corporate dominance, Domhoff focuses on three measures as key indicators of power: income inequality, the effective tax rate, and union density. In each case, he argues, the pattern is clear: for example, union density reached a high point in 1945, a product of wartime mobilization, declining ever since; taxes on top earners repeatedly have been cut; and inequality, as is well known, has been steeply increasing since the 1970s. Domhoff notes that many have missed the fact of corporate dominance due to the claims made by corporate lobbyists that American capitalism was under siege in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the likes of Ralph Nader. While the nation’s automakers, for example, opposed Nader and resisted the installation of seatbelts, such regulatory standards never posed a meaningful challenge to the industry. American capitalism was never about to be destroyed. At the same time, Domhoff notes, it took decades to undercut the victories of the New Deal and World War II; consequently, the resurgence of corporate power was not obvious. Once these early victories were undone, it was easy picking, he argues, for the Reagan administration to deliver the goods to its corporate sponsors.

Throughout the book, Domhoff examines scores of policy documents from the Committee for Economic Development (CED) from the 1940s until the 1980s, as well as the role that CED trustees and staff members played during this time in the national government. Thus, he is able to marshal the case that the moderate corporate community was well represented in the higher circles of government and that its policy positions provided pivotal thinking on key economic policy questions during this time. In this way, he is able to show that those who focus on the most conservative members of the corporate community, as represented by the Chamber of Commerce, miss the fact that while ultraconservatives may have been losing, the moderate conservatives were not.

Domhoff contends that power, that is, unfettered corporate control, has been more important to the corporate community than profits for those officials engaged in national politics. Thus, corporate moderates never fully embraced Keynesian economics and came to abandon it.

While no one book can answer the perennial question of power in America, The Myth of Liberal Ascendancy stands as an essential contribution to the debate about the role of the corporate community in American democracy, and it is an invaluable corrective to the view that the corporate community was politically weak and unorganized until the 1970s.