Three years ago, a picture of John Kerry from 1962 rapidly circulated among conservatives. In the photo sat an eighteen-year-old Kerry, sporting the number 18 on his school hockey uniform and wearing impossibly large leather protective gloves. Immediately to his right sat Robert Mueller III, number 12, with Kerry’s hockey stick resting at his feet.

The former head of the FBI — the man then responsible for investigating Donald Trump — was a childhood friend of a leading Democratic politician while they were both students at an elite prep school. They even played on the same team.

It was all the evidence Trump supporters needed to confirm what they already knew: there was an organized conspiracy among the liberal elite to take down the president. But the Right hardly has a monopoly on seeing the elite, or the “ruling class,” as an organized cabal. Six years before this picture of Kerry and Mueller was taken, the sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote of a vast “power elite” in postwar America. Mills proposed that the United States was run by a military-industrial complex — a set of corporations, political figures, and military men who, more than any democratic process, determined the direction of American life. Mills’s book was widely discussed by the intelligentsia of the late 1950s, who mostly dismissed his work as the stuff of conspiracy theory. But that was a misreading of it. That same intelligentsia were, after all, the kinds of men at whom Mills directed his not-so-quiet moral rage.