We live in an America where those who control the levers of power potentially have knowledge of almost everything about the ordinary citizen while they operate clandestinely with little or no public scrutiny. In contrast, they have access not only to information such as our social media, but also our voting records, our medical histories and our financial records. In the world of power holders, what C. Wright Mills calls the “Higher Immorality” — the institutionally grounded moral corruption of those in power – is not an aberration. Rather, it is inherent in the institutional structures of power. The Jeffrey Epstein scandal is a perfect example of how the norms of this corruption are shielded behind a false veil of competence and moral superiority.

That someone like Epstein, whose ties to presidents, big finance, high tech billionaires, elite academics and Hollywood celebrities shielded him from legal responsibility speaks to “the higher immorality.” So do the duplicities and lies that Epstein regularly deployed to make those connections. Consider the relationship between Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein through the lens of this higher immorality. Donald and Jeffrey were pals. They partied together, traveled together, ogled girls and young women together. But Trump now labels public outrage over Epstein’s crimes a distraction. It’s all a charade, he says, pumped up by Democrats to make us forget Trump’s vast accomplishments. Some leftist critics might agree with Trump, in that Epstein talk is a distraction from Trump’s extra-legal wars against immigrants and Venezuela, his corrupt business deals with crypto-currency billionaires, weaponization of government against universities, law firms, and his political enemies, and his mindless destruction of federal support for science. But exposure of immorality in the ruling class is more than a distraction. It points to the fundamental illegitimacy of ruling class claims to superiority of mind and ability, what conservative thinkers like to call “virtue.”

In his classic work, The Power Elite, published almost seventy-five years ago, Mills described how attenuation of morality at the top was a key feature of America’s irresponsible system of concentrated power. Though Mills tried to distance himself from Marx, in fact he elaborated on Marx’s condemnation of ruling class moral hypocrisy. The old German knew that economic, political and moral critique were inseparable because the defects of class rule were inseparable. Marx was not distracted when he observed that the bourgeoisie scorned communism as a system of mass prostitution, the communal appropriation of women. He insisted the opposite was true. It was the high and mighty who regularly traded wives, purchased the sexual labor of prostitutes, gathered mistresses, and trafficked in opium. For Marx, ruling class immorality was no distraction. It was a defining feature of ruling class life. Moral abominations in the bedroom were of a piece with its callous indifference to brutalities of slavery, the factory floor, child labor, the whole crushing impoverishment of daily life for the mass of the population.

Mills’ concept of the “the higher immorality” recaptured Marx’s sense that the higher immorality was not a matter of bad men caught in bad behavior. It was a matter of “corrupting institutions,” a “structural immorality” of corporate and governmental institutions whose class-based positions of command were as insulated from public view as their bedrooms. As Mills’ put it, “Within the corporate worlds of business, war-making and politics, the private conscience is attenuated – and the higher immorality is institutionalized” (The Power Elite, p. 343). Living atop what Thorstein Veblen described as the sheltered institutions of absentee ownership and power, the ruling class can ignore limits and disciplines imposed by scarcities of material life. Rulers enjoy a freedom to play by rules of their own, or by no rules at all. Long before the Trump-Epstein link, there were John Kennedy’s call girls followed by the lies and fabrications of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, not to mention the lies and fabrications of Enron, Lehman Brothers, Bernie Madoff, and Sam-Bankman Fried.

But today this sense of entitled invisibility is even more dramatically at odds with life below. For that entitled invisibility is structurally reversed for the mass of the population. Our every decision and choice is subject through social media to private surveillance, capture and control by the corporate titans of high tech. Today’s contradictions of visibility and invisibility mark the acute polarities of differential freedom and power that are the hallmarks of American society. While everything we do on the internet and social media is recorded by corporations, the leaders of those corporations enjoy a higher immunity from surveillance and responsibility. Theirs is the power to  know. For the rest of us there is the utter inescapability from being known.

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