Niall Ferguson wrote a book called The Square and the Tower which is basically "of course the Bavarian Illuminati existed, the tragedy is they weren't more effective." Ferguson has a point: if you get a bunch of smart elites together to try and make the world a better place, they should end up with a positive impact just because that's what they're trying for. Of course, he also makes the point that Henry Kissinger is a hand print on the ass of history because he just frickin' knows everyone so... li'l of Column A, li'l of Column B. Malcolm Harris' Palo Alto actually gets into Bohemian Grove in a studiously non-fiction way, including quoting Nixon on it ("the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine"). He paints a portrait of Herbert Hoover and his hangers on, camping fishing and deciding who among the anointed they would back for this that or the other board position. Fundamentally, it's a country club cookout for the white Republicans who run California and, by extension, vast swaths of the world's economy. I think we fundamentally accept this: rich, powerful people have buddies, too, and we're never truly surprised when we find out that Al Gore and Tommy Lee Jones shared a dorm room freshman year. We grumble and gripe but our gears don't grind until they start fucking us over. The United States veered towards socialism in the '30s because it had been leaving poor people in the dust for 70 years previously... and the powers-that-be were primarily interested in protecting the rich after the collapse of Wall Street. Russia ended up the USSR because the venal power structure of the Czars didn't make any attempts to modernize the middle class. We look at Clarence Thomas being the opposite of impartial and we see them rubbing our fucking noses in it. Marie Antoinette never actually said "let them eat cake" but she lived it.