More than any other group, elites take the initiative and reap the benefits of political fear. By elites, I mean those figures of influence who own or control the lion’s share of power and resources, who are well positioned to act politically on their own—and society’s—behalf.

Elites who create and sustain fear comprise neither a conspiracy nor a cabal. In fact, they often have surprisingly little in common, in terms of their interests, affiliations, and worldviews. The elites who spearheaded political fear during the McCarthy years, for instance, included anti-modern, pro-big business, and often racist officials like J. Edgar Hoover and Mississippi congressman John Rankin; liberals like Harry Truman, Hubert Humphrey, and Herbert Lehman; industrial magnates; Hollywood moguls; university presidents; and newspaper columnists. Each of them had their own, often conflicting agendas. But creating or sustaining fear requires elites to share neither unity of purpose nor identity of interest. It merely requires that they cooperate—despite their differences, or because of them. After all, elites possess particular kinds of power, housed in particular institutions, and they lead different constituencies. These particularities and differences make their power local and limited. To be truly effective, they must combine their power, doing together what each cannot do alone.

This cooperation in fear takes the form of most cooperation in the United States: It arises from bargaining and exchange, where one set of elites gives to the other what the other lacks, and vice versa. Hoover, for instance, was an empire builder of the first order, but his empire required the cooperation of Congress, which pays the bills. So Hoover put pluralism in the service of repression. He strategically leaked information to key congressmen, and he had FBI agents chauffeur individual representatives around Washington and do odd jobs for them. Hoover, claimed Truman’s attorney general Tom Clark, was “rather meticulous about his relationships with Congress.” And it paid off. After the war, when Truman submitted to Congress his budgets for the FBI and the OSS, the precursor to the CIA, Congress cut the latter budget by $4 million and increased the former by seven million. Of the last twenty-two budgets that Hoover proposed, only two were ever revised by Congress—both upwards.

When bargaining and exchange do not work, elites can always turn the weapons of coercion they ordinarily use on their victims upon their fellow elites. One of Truman’s most fateful decisions, for example, was his March 1947 issuance of Executive Order 9835, which launched investigations of every federal employee for signs of political subversion and authorized the firing and refusal to hire of anyone suspected of communist sympathies. More than any single government policy, EO 9835 chilled the political air, making it difficult to sustain leftist views without fear of sanction. But Truman was reluctant to issue EO 9835. Convinced that the threat of communist infiltration had been overstated and could easily be contained by less repressive measures, he worried that EO 9835 would only empower the FBI, which he likened to the Gestapo and the Soviet secret police. Though historians still disagree about why he issued it, one of his motivations was his fear of retribution—to himself, his party, and the executive branch—from Hoover and congressional Republicans.

Inequality, in the eyes of elites, is not simply a ladder of inequities but a form of rule.

Elites who organize these coalitions of fear—like Hoover and congressional conservatives, as opposed to the liberal Democrats who reluctantly joined them—anticipate not just an immediate loss of privileges, but a threat to their power and standing, which allow them to enjoy those privileges in the future. Such situations elicit a combination of rational concern and moral revulsion, which is the hallmark of political fear. Elites cherish the material components of privilege but also believe that they are entitled to privilege. That belief is sustained by their larger image of the political cosmos, in which their high standing is equated with the well-being and survival of society. Inequality, in their eyes, is not simply a ladder of inequities but a form of rule, in which those above expect and receive deference from those below. It is that rule, in the minds of these elites, that makes for social cohesion and civic vitality. Without it, all would be lost.