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"We have probably the most organized opinion-molding and influence-mongering elites of the world," says political analyst Kevin Phillips. "The principal business in Washington is not so much decision making as influencing decision making." It's not the urge to hold power but the desire to nuzzle it--to whisper in the right ear or lead "the conversation" that the powerful attend to--that gives Washington its distinctive social landscape, where Arianna Huffingtons bloom along the edges of Gucci Gulch.
What about Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board? As the man most responsible for adjusting interest rates, the magic numbers that underlie the whole world of getting and spending, he can certainly be said to influence events. Refrigerator sales and presidential approval ratings move when he moves. But Paul Krugman, a professor of economics at Stanford, argues that because Greenspan has not translated his thinking into the published theorizing that directs further thinking among other economists, he has no following, no Greenspanians. "There are people [at the Fed] who have enormous power," says Krugman. "But they probably have almost no ability to change the way the world thinks."
To enjoy the spectacle of power in its full amplitude these days, you have to go outside Washington altogether. It is in the globe-spanning fields of entertainment and communications, where mere governments are just so many obstacles to the corporate game plan, that you see power with all its cellular phones blazing. When Rupert Murdoch wants something--the Times of London, a fourth network, broadcast rights to N.F.L. games, his own 24-hour cable-news operation--he gets it with a panache that is as entertaining, and as chilling, as anything in Citizen Kane. If Machiavelli were alive today, he would be reading Murdoch.
One of the unfair advantages of influence is that it's generally more popular than power. When influence is in the right hands, its effects can seem agreeable in a subtle sense of the word, as something we assent to, even when any such agreement may be partly a matter of being stupefied into submission. (This is what we mean by the influence of pop culture.) "When I exercise power, I immediately generate resentment and opposition," says Amitai Etzioni, chief promoter of the sometimes influential idea of communitarianism. "When I influence you, you love what I ask you to do."
So power is clout, like the thud of an iron heel. Influence is sway, like being rocked in a hammock. But like the grass in Carl Sandburg's poem, influence has a way of spreading until it overwhelms every bump in its path. Leonid Brezhnev had power. Andrei Sakharov had influence. Power: the FCC. Influence: Howard Stern. What this means is that influence generally gets the last laugh. Alexander Hamilton never attained the presidency. His philosophical antagonist Thomas Jefferson did. But the world has gone Hamilton's way. By most measures, the country we live in today more closely resembles the model he prescribed, with a powerful federal government and a national economy, than it does the decentralized republic of small farmers recommended by Jefferson.