Long read: Rules for the ruling class

“From the beginning, the United States has had a vexed relationship to distinctions of status—a by-product of what Trollope called our “fable of equality.” Americans tend to root for the adjective (“élite Navy seals”) and resent the noun (“the Georgetown élite”).

What’s different these days is that so many of the attacks come from inside the palace walls.

….Nobody in American public life has a more unsettled relationship to status than Donald Trump. For years, as he elbowed his way into Manhattan and Palm Beach, he touted the exclusivity of his golf courses (“the most elite in the country”) and hotels (“the city’s most elite property”), and he promoted Trump University with the message “I want you to become part of an elite wealth building team that works under my direction.” (He later agreed to a twenty-five-million-dollar settlement with former students who described Trump U. as a scam.) None of his élite talk endeared him to what he called “the tastemakers,” who dismissed him as a boorish trespasser. Even after he turned his Mar-a-Lago estate into a private club, he still resented those who had sniffed at him, telling an interviewer, in a tone rarely employed after the age of twelve, “I have a better club than them.”

When Trump ran for President, he adopted the expected criticism of “media élites,” “political élites,” and “élites who only want to raise more money for global corporations.” But, after he took office, he didn’t seem to want to do away with the idea of an élite; he just wanted his own people to be on top. During a 2017 speech in Arizona, he told the crowd, “You know what? I think we’re the élites.””
As the article delves into the history of the ‘elite’, we learn that the term was popularised by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto (whose 80:20 rule we all know as Pareto principle).

“…he adopted élite, a French word derived from the Latin eligere, which means “to choose.” Pareto intended it to be neither a pejorative nor a compliment; he believed that there were élite scholars, élite shoe shiners, and élite thieves. Under capitalism, they would tend to be plutocrats; under socialism, they would be bureaucrats.

His formulation suggests several varieties of élite influence. There is the cultural power wielded by scholars, think tanks, and talkers; the administrative power radiating from the White House and the politburo; the coercive power resident in the police and the military. (Security forces constitute the strongest branch of élites in much of the world but the weakest in America.) Looming over them is economic power, which has occupied a fluctuating position in the West—worshipped, except when it is scorned.”

The power of the elite also came with responsibility:

“During the American bank crisis of 1907, a group of tycoons that included John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan put up personal funds to bail out the financial markets. But that crisis also marked the end of an era: it spurred the creation of the Federal Reserve, which relieved the economic élite of an “onus they had carried since medieval times,” according to Guido Alfani, the author of “As Gods Among Men,” a new history of wealth in the West. Freed of that responsibility, the rich of the early twentieth century became both more entrenched and more extraneous, attracting criticism from regulators, muckrakers, and the growing ranks of organized labor. Alfani notes a pattern that unfolds “repeatedly and systematically across history”: when economic élites become ingrown, impenetrable, and “insensitive to the plight of the masses,” societies tend to become unstable.

To prevent that kind of instability, Pareto believed, the upper echelons of power must stay open to new contestants, in a process that he called the “circulation of élites.””

The author’s literature survey brings out different perspectives:

“That risk—of a stagnant, crystallized ruling class—inspired the sociologist C. Wright Mills, who explored the American implications in his 1956 book, “The Power Elite.” (As the term gained currency in English, many publications, though not all, dropped the accent from the “e.”) The élites “accept one another, understand one another, marry one another, tend to work and to think if not together at least alike,” he wrote. Once ensconced, they rarely lost power, he warned; they simply swapped seats, moving among industry, academia, media, and public office. Mills laid the foundation for the idea of a “military-industrial complex,” which Dwight Eisenhower popularized in a 1961 speech. (According to some historians, Eisenhower wanted to add “scientific” or “congressional” to that complex, but it was nixed.)

An invective was born. Scholars on the left used it against conservatives who opposed the rise of Black and women’s studies. Conservatives, tapping into the decline of public trust in authority since Vietnam and Watergate, turned the government, the media, Wall Street, and the Ivy League into the swamp, the fake news, the globalists, and the ivory tower. The élite became whoever is peering down on us, judging us, manipulating us.”

And how has this changed now?

“Even identifying who is eligible for the élite has grown more complicated. Conservatives venerate the building of wealth and political power but see themselves as persecuted by intellectuals and bureaucrats. DeSantis, in his memoir, “The Courage to Be Free,” defines élites as those who “control the federal bureaucracy, lobby shops on K Street, big business, corporate media, Big Tech companies, and universities.”

Some of the combatants’ definitions of “élite” are almost perfectly opposed. In recent writings, Bernie Sanders blasted the “billionaire class, the corporate elites, and the wealthy campaign donors”; Marc Andreesen, the billionaire venture capitalist and campaign donor, enumerated “enemy” ideas that block the advance of technology, including “the nihilistic wish, so trendy among our elites, for fewer people, less energy, and more suffering and death.”

As the rich grew richer than ever, they sought to turn their money into political power; spending on politics soared. The 2016 Republican Presidential primary involved seventeen contestants, the largest field in modern history. Turchin calls it a “bizarre spectacle of an elite aspirant game reaching its logical culmination.” It was a lineup of former governors, sitting senators, a former C.E.O., a neurosurgeon, the offspring of political and real-estate dynasties—all competing to convince voters that they despised the élite. Their performances of solidarity with the masses would have impressed the Castros.”

Whilst this might be in the American context, we could draw parallels to the situation back home here in India as well.