History

answer each of the following questions with a sentence or sentences (as appropriate). Wherever relevant, be sure to indicate the sources for your answers, ie, the relevant page number from the course textbook. Also, check spelling and grammar. Do not overthink or over-worry about your answers. At most, this component will require about four paragraphs of writing. Send your numbered and lettered answers to my course email address pasted into your email or as an attached file. In your message, use the subject heading “Final Exam Short Answer.” Be sure to send the short answer component no later than the end of the test-taking window late Thursday night. (And do not forget to take the multiple choice component of the exam.)

(1) a. According to the first chapter of the textbook, what is the irony of American democracy? b. Does the irony of American democracy lead one to expect that the continued survival of democracy in the United States depends upon the existence of “an active, informed and enlightened citizenry”? Yes or no. Explain. c. Can there be such a thing as “an active, informed and enlightened citizenry” according to elite theory? Why or why not?

(2) a. Which branch of the US national government (legislative, executive, bureaucratic, or judicial) is the most elitist, in your view? Explain. In answering, refer to at least two specific and relevant descriptions in the textbook of the elite nature of the branch you have chosen.

(3) Read the following description and then answer the questions that follow it:

Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, was the site of the police killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black man in 2014. At the time of the killing, black residents comprised about two thirds of the population while the police force was 94% white. A US Department of Justice report on Ferguson’s criminal justice policies found that the city’s budget “relied heavily on fines levied on its black residents for trivial infractions like jaywalking and parking tickets.” The fines per year collected from residents totaled between $2 – 3 million. Meanwhile, the Fortune 500 company Emerson Electric, which is based in Ferguson, does billions of dollars in annual business, and recently built a $50 million data center, has paid less than $70,000 a year in property taxes into the city’s budget. Emerson Electric’s CEO received over $15 million in compensation in 2018, about 425 times the median compensation of Emerson Electric’s total workforce. (Material drawn from Marina Bolotnikova, “From Lewis and Clark to Michael Brown,” Harvard Magazine, May-June 2020, and David Nicklaus, St Louis Post Dispatch, Dec 17, 2018)

3a. What is an elite? b. What are the masses? c. Citing at least two relevant details from the preceding excerpt, discuss whether the situation in Ferguson, MO is consistent with elite theory’s description of society and politics.

(4) a. What is the circulation of elites? (Chapter One) b. What are counter-elites? (Chapter Four) c. Read the excerpt below and referring specifically to at least two relevant points in it, discuss whether Donald Trump’s rise to become U.S. president is an example of the circulation of elites, the replacement of elites by a counter elite, or continuity of elite power.

“He alternately disparages elitism but also wants to be a member of the club. … He had every reason not to feel like an outsider … and yet he feels that in his bones all the time. And then he articulates it. And that’s why a good chunk of the electorate responds to him,” biographer Tim O’Brien said in an interview. “It is,” O’Brien added, “one of the very few authentic things about him.”

It has been said that nothing gave Trump more pleasure than accepting Clinton’s concession call on election night. Finally, he had irrefutable proof that he was better than all the gatekeepers who had ever found him lacking. As the 45th president, he is now a member of one of the most exclusive clubs in the world, and his daily occupation of the White House is a fundamental rebuke to the many people who view him as unfit for the job. The longer Trump holds it, the more his standards become norms of their own. He already has remade the Republican Party in his image, and he continues to turn campaign rhetoric into policy reality; in early October, headlines announced the replacement of the North American Free Trade Agreement with a rejiggered trade deal of Trump’s own naming. Is Trump, the master of reinvention, also now turning a lifelong grudge into a radical redefinition of what it means to be elite in American society? Now, though, Trump is doing something different from his predecessors. He has embraced the notion of a populist revolution without renouncing a single trapping of his gold-plated lifestyle. Can he really run as the elite instead of against the elite? Whether he believes it or not, Trump’s rhetoric actually taps into a deeply American idea: The promise of true democracy is that nobody is better than anyone else, that the power over the government should be broadly shared rather than commandeered by monied elites. Depression Era Louisiana governor Huey Long, maybe the most purely populist campaigner ever, distilled his anti-elite platform into four simple words: “Every man a king.” Even people who disagree with and fear Trump acknowledge that he’s getting at a painful truth: A lot of Americans really have been excluded. But Long’s phrase came with another, less-quoted clause: “But no one wears a crown.” No one thinks for a moment that Trump believes in Long’s socialist redistribution of wealth as a cure for income inequality. But they do fear that by channeling a legitimate economic grievance into a hatred of establishment elites he might be paving the way for a form of governmental power that is not democratic, but the opposite.

Excerpted from “Trump Reclaims the Word `Elite’ with Vengeful Pride” by Michael Kruse in Politico.com Nov 1, 2018