The Story of Power

Still, the bleak Germanic view has suffused elements of modern life. Resentment of those in charge of the industrialized state in an age of mass media is on vivid display in the work of C. Wright Mills, who published "The Power Elite" in 1956. Mills's vision was one of not-so-quiet desperation: "The powers of ordinary men are circumscribed by the everyday worlds in which they live, yet even in these rounds of job, family, and neighborhood they often seem driven by forces they can neither understand nor govern … But not all men are in this sense ordinary. As the means of information and power are centralized, some men come to occupy positions in American society from which they can look down upon, so to speak, and by their decisions mightily affect, the everyday worlds of ordinary men and women." Sarah Palin would probably agree with Mills, at least on the looking-down part.

But power in America and elsewhere is undergoing directional changes that complicate Mills's argument. Yes, there are still cultural arbiters, and yes, presidents and lawmakers and executives obviously exert enormous influence. It is arguable, though, that technology has given us a more democratic culture (if not politics) than the world has seen since perhaps the founding of Athenian democracy. In ways that we are still only beginning to understand, the Internet is changing how power is accumulated and exercised.

This is a subject that Al Gore—who knows a lot about the vicissitudes of fortune—understands well. In Gore's thinking, we are now in the midst of a great turning point in the history of power, a moment akin to the introduction of the printing press in Europe in the mid-15th century. The proliferation of printed information helped fuel the rise of democracy until, in Gore's view, television replaced print as the central political medium. Now the Internet has, like Gutenberg, lowered barriers to information and has given virtually anyone with something to say the means to say it. The Web is not only a source but a stage on which we can engage in the life of the nation and of the world armed with facts we have weighed in the light of reason. "Knowledge is now once again connected to power," says Gore—and that is a kind of power which means all of us belong on a list like this.

The other new factor in the global power game of 2009 is Obama himself. Well read, technologically savvy, politically astute, he comes to the White House in grim times but with high expectations. Whether he succeeds or fails, it will be a close-run thing. "It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things," said Machiavelli. If Immanuel Kant is to be believed, even Obama's cool intellectualism is risky: "It is not to be expected that kings philosophize or that philosophers become kings, nor is it to be desired, because possession of power corrupts the free judgment of reason inevitably." So much for Plato.

Characteristically, Obama would reject the Kantian formulation as a false choice—one can be a king who rules with the benefit of philosophy. And what, exactly, is Obama's philosophy of power? He is a man with a tragic vision of the world: he knows that while progress is possible, perfection is not, and he comes to the office, it seems, with an appreciation of the limits of politics and the fleeting nature of power. As his story about Gore's old supporter suggests, Obama is a student of such things.

The account of the conversation about Gore's fall from power included Obama's own musings about how Gore may have felt now that his coming by, once an honor, seemed a "chore." "Sitting there … trying to make the best of a bad situation, he might have thought how ridiculous were the circumstances in which he found himself; how after a lifetime of work he could have lost it all because of a butterfly ballot that didn't align, while his friend the executive, sitting across from him with a condescending smile, could afford to come in second in his business year after year and yet still be considered successful, still enjoy the exercise of power," Obama wrote. "It wasn't fair, but that wouldn't change the facts for the former vice president." It is a fact, too, that one day Obama's power will fade, as will that wielded by the others on our list. What they do with it in the meantime will determine how their own story is told.