An influence of the power of the elite on citizens

According to Mills, society cannot be democratic most often because the power of the elite does not allow ordinary citizens to promote their requirements. It is possible to verify this statement by considering one of the most important for each citizen of the country action which consists in choosing the president because the votes of all its participants are equal. Aaron Blake (2018) argues that Trump’s victory could be the merit of fake news that people distributed before the election date. This assumption can be analyzed through Mills theory from which follows that the perpetrators of this influence can only be people who belong to the elite. The article by Blake (2018) also shows that this option is possible since most fake news was only about one of the candidates while their distribution might require many resources that were in the hands of the winning participant. In this way, if one does not look at the history of the recent US elections in detail, it is possible to argue that Trump and other members of the elite of the United States could influence the outcome of the election while the voters and citizens of the country were not able to use their opportunities.

At the same time, if the researcher examines the actions of not only the participants in the election but also the decisions that ordinary citizens take, he or she may find that their actions are more significant for the last election, although their role is not apparent. Sam Levin (2017) claims that although Facebook, which is one of the largest social networks in the world, tried to deal with fake news, it was impossible because their distribution depends on private users and not on corporations. Their research showed that people with a small number of subscribers who are not opinion makers are the leading distributors of deceitful stories. Based on this information, it is noticeable that the elite could use its powers to create fake news and try to spread them through possible channels.

Nevertheless, only the will of individual citizens created the necessary resonance for these articles to be disseminated by other people and used to choose the president. This perspective proves that although the role of voters is not apparent, it became the basis that influenced the opinion of Americans during the debate and voting because of which it is impossible to assert that the theory of Mills is valid for the modern United States.