Elites and Today's Politics

Everyone is railing against the elites, but those pointing figures are notably among the ... elite.  Where does this emanate and what does this mean for our politics.  

Transcript

Elites: What they Tell Us about Today’s Politics

July 2024

One of the things I have been preaching around the world is collecting taxes in an equitable manner, especially from the elites. 

Hillary Clinton – who possesses a reputed net worth of over nine figures

An elite has always run this country, and it’s an elitist democracy. And that’s not a radical concept. It’s an elitist democracy. When people talk about democracy, they don’t talk - really talk about participatory democracy, until the point that we get us at Election Day. 

Danny Glover

Rent-control laws disproportionately benefit the non-poor because the elite pull strings, work the system, and are better connected than the non-poor. 

Larry Elder

In looking up quotes, I love that I pulled one from actor Danny Glover and one from Talk Show host Larry Elder. Both are in the entertainment business and rail at the elites, but one is from the left and one from the right.  

If she commented on elites, a statement from Kamala Harris, newly anointed Democratic Nominee for President.

“Elitism is made up of elites, who are elitist in their being part of elitism and being part elitist. The word elite comes from the el and the leet, though it is spelled with an i. There are elite athletes and elite bankers, but if there are elite politicians, am I among them? Am I elitist in my elite elitism?”  

Okay, Harris did not say this, but she would have if she had commented on this subject. After all, she did not just fall out of the Coconut Tree (look it up if you do not get this reference).

The purpose of this podcast is to note the presence of elites throughout history though often by another name, and having achieved that status partially by birth, some by brains and others by brawn.  We will then look at the political take of elites today, and why they seem to be the bogey people-of both parties.  

The word aristocracy dates back to ancient Greece, where “aristoi” referred to the ruling class of free men. These aristocrats were typically wealthy landowners who held significant political power and influence. The concept of aristocracy then spread to ancient Rome, where the nobility was made up of the patrician class. These individuals held high office and were involved in the governance of the State. And in a precursor of the class warfare we see today, the patricians had the plebians. The precise origins of the group and the term are unclear but may be related to the Greek plēthos, meaning masses.  Yet consider SPQR, an initialism for Senatus Populusque Romanus, an emblematic phrase referring to the government of the Roman Republic. The Senate and the people. These differences represent different governmental aspects of how the Republic was managed.  However, If the Senate differs from the people, it is an automatic conferring of elite status to be a Senator.

Yet, though we use the Greek term aristocracy, the concept goes back to the beginnings of civilization.  Ancient Egypt built a ruling class to assist the Pharoah with the kingdom’s administration.  

According to Joshua J. Mark, ancient Egypt’s society was strictly divided into a hierarchy, with the king at the top and then his vizier, the members of his court, priests and scribes, regional governors (eventually called ‘nomarchs’), the generals of the military (after the period of the New Kingdom, c. 1570- c. 1069 BCE), artists and craftspeople, government overseers of worksites (supervisors), the peasant farmers, and slaves.

The Indian Mauryan Empire, founded in the 300s BCE, utilized a political structure that employed a large and well-run army administered by a war office with branches for a navy and raising horses and elephants for cavalry warfare. A civilian bureaucracy ran the ministries overseeing industries such as weaving, mining, and shipbuilding and organizing irrigation, road construction, and tax collection. Call them what you will, but today, they would be the elite.

The aristocratic class in ancient China was the first social class below the emperor and comprised a small, well-connected portion of the population. Aristocrats were landowners who collected rent from their tenants and paid tribute to the emperor as a sign of loyalty. They were also sometimes called “gentry scholars” because wealthy families could afford to send their sons to state schools, where they would take exams and eventually become state bureaucrats.  During the Sui Dynasty circa 500 CE, the codification of the civil service exam began.  Presumably, it was not just nobles, but eligibility was open to people of all classes demonstrating merit could ascend.  But the training for the exams needed to be extensive.  Hard for a family needing all hands in the fields.  

Whether in Europe, Africa, South Asia, or East Asia, there was a group granted, most commonly birthright but also by ability, that held the reins of power, designed the buildings, wrote the plays, and crafted the statues.  

In any gathering of humans, whether in 14th century England with its nobles or 21st century America with its CEOs, Campus Presidents, Professors, or lifelong politicians, someone has to make certain societal-wide decisions.  Do we pass that federal budget of $5 trillion?  Do we send troops to Yemen?  What is the structure of healthcare? And this is just the government.  How are professorships conferred in the academy, or do we invest in a lab for the bio department or a cern like superconducting super collider for the physicists?  Even in our local environs, someone has to decide where to put up a spotlight or which roads must be repaired.  We have seen truly egalitarian societies tried and failed with murderous consequences.  They were and are called communist regimes.  And if you do not think there was a soviet group of elites or that membership in today’s National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China is not an elitist position, then you are delusional.  The question is not whether there will be elites but who they are, how they got there, and their relationship to the greater society.  

For most of the 4800 years of recorded history, elites achieved their positions through birth.  There were exceptions, but for every Thomas Cromwell who got near the top through merit, there was a Duke of Norfolk or Bishop of Winchester, bastard cousin to King Henry.  Even as late as World War I, Europe was dominated by the nobility, the aristocracy, and the elite by another name. The King of England, the Kaiser of Germany and the Tsar of Russia were all 1st cousins which maybe explains part of what happened.  As noted, the Chinese created a system to pry merit and ability from the general population. However, few could even try the exams, and many fewer got through the process to a coveted position within the imperial bureaucracy.  

For generations, the makeup of American elites could be summed in a pithy acronym, WASP or white Anglo-Saxon Protestant.  Missing from this acronym, of course, is male.  In the 1960s, this concept began to change with the advent of several civil rights movements. Logically, it would be replaced by one in which merit and achievement would be far more critical than one’s birth or social status.  So, with several catholic presidents, a black one, and 22% of the Supreme Court black, and most of it Catholic, have we achieved merit nirvana?  

In a piece from 2018 entitled, “The Case Against Meritocracy: An aristocracy that can’t Admit It,” New York Times columnist Russ Douthat writes of the nature of our WASP forebears and the new leadership style, “I think that same upper-class was unwise to abandon an aristocratic self-conception in favor of a meritocratic one. On the evidence we have, the meritocratic ideal ends up being just as undemocratic as the old emphasis on inheritance and tradition, and it forges an elite that has an aristocracy’s vices (privilege, insularity, arrogance) without the sense of duty, self-restraint, and noblesse oblige that WASPs at their best displayed.”

Douthat goes on to catalog two issues with meritocracy.  The first is the clustering of elites in specific locations of power, especially in certain coastal locations such as the Northeast, New York, Washington DC, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.  The second is to suggest that these elites, better educated, better connected, and overall wealthier, transfer this status onto their children, creating a quasi-aristocracy.  The meritocratic elite inevitably tends back toward aristocracy because any definition of “merit” you choose will be easier for the children of these self-segregated meritocrats to achieve. 

What makes Douthout’s argument especially compelling is the contention that the meritocracy believes they earned everything through merit.  Yet from Presidents HW Bush through Trump, all attended Ivy League schools with all the attended signaling and connections that entails.  Some might contend that this shows the WASPs are still in control, excepting that Barack Obama also attended an Ivy (Columbia) and upon completion of his presidency, he did not go back to the hinterlands of Illinois but remained living in DC, with a palatial vacation home on Martha Vineyard.  Prior to his presidency, Obama’s wife Michelle, with her Harvard Law degree, earned a quarter of a million per year in her practice.  Their children were educated in private schools, and one went to Harvard, which led to opportunities that the graduates of the University of Wyoming would not receive.  Two things are true at the same time: the Obamas are elite, and they are not quite WASPs.  

Douthat concludes, “I do want to raise the possibility that an aristocracy that knows itself to be one might be more clearsighted and effective than an aristocracy that doesn’t and that the WASPs had at least one clear advantage over their presently floundering successors: They knew who and what they were.”

I would take this one step further.  Our elites are unaware of how they got to their positions on high or even their placement as such.  Astonishingly, it is our most prominent elites who are anti-elite—two primary reasons for this oddity. First, egalitarianism is a critical part of the American fabric.  We correctly omitted formal nobility from our country.  No bowing and scraping to other Americans because of their parents.  The second is something I will address later; it is suitable for an individual politician if terrible for our politics as a whole.  

Before dropping out of the race, Joe Biden stated, “I’m getting so frustrated by the elites — now I’m not talking about you guys — the elites in the party, ‘Oh, they know so much more.’ Any of these guys that don’t think I should run, run against me. Announce for president, challenge me at the convention,”

Biden has been a US Senator for over 30 years, and at times, he has been a Committee Chair, including over the body that vets judges and justices for the federal judiciary. He has also been Vice President for eight years and President for the past four. His family, largely through his influence, has made itself millionaires several times over. But Joe is not an elite.  

Coming to his defense like a socialist superhero sans cape and tights, it was Alexandria Ocasio Cortez who said, “A huge amount of the donor class and a huge amount of these elites, and a huge amount of these folks in these rooms who are pushing for President Biden not to be the nominee.” Oi.  Her responses are just so huge!  Why does AOC often come across as that irritating 13-year-old in poly sci class who keeps raising their hand and answering all the questions incorrectly, to the frustration and consternation of the social studies teacher?  

Ocasio Cortez graced the cover of Time magazine and wore lavish gowns at the Met Gala, but she is not an elite, as proven by the painting Tax the Rich on the said gown.  Of course, her definition of rich is fungible as payments ran into the thousands for the rental of the dress, jewelry, shoes, and bag she wore to the event, as well as the costs of her makeup, hair, transportation, and about $5,000 for a share of rooms at the Carlyle Hotel, where she prepared for the gala. And of her pointed comment at the gala, if that gown was a rental, she is sure as heck lost the deposit.

Bernie Sanders is a bit more clever.  He inserts the term “corporate” so that there is no mistaking his subject or subjecting him to charges of hypocrisy. “The corporate elite seems to love the idea that billionaires have a lower effective tax rate than nurses or teachers and that, in a given year, there are dozens of profitable corporations that don’t pay a nickel in federal income tax,” Sanders wrote in an op-ed for Fox News.

Though Sanders is not a billionaire, his three properties certainly put him in the seven-figure category.  And Sanders entered Congress some 34 years ago. He has been one of 100 Senators (out of a population of 330 million) since 2006, But he is not an elite – oh sorry – not a corporate one.  I want to be clear, Bernie is not an elite like Elon Musk who has created hundreds of thousands of jobs.  Bernie has created just one and it is a part time gig for Larry David on Saturday Night Live.  

Hold on, not so fast; Sanders has claimed the Democratic Party Democratic Party is a “party of coastal elites.” Coastal? Thank god Vermont is about a 90-minute drive from the Atlantic Coast, lest Sanders be charged with false virtue.  Of course, he was born in Brooklyn, which is, you know, on the coast, but as noted, he had not lived there since before he went honeymooning in the Soviet Union, where there were no elites.  

This being of the elite but against the elite contortionism is not just a political stew of the left.  Since the advent of Donald Trump in 2015, the GOP is increasingly employing rhetoric against the vile elite.  

“The idea of selecting the Democrat party’s nominee, because George Soros and Barack Obama and a couple of elite Democrats got in a smoke-filled room and decided to throw Joe Biden overboard, that is not how it works,” stated GOP VP candidate JD Vance.

Born poor in Kentucky, Vance should be a good standard bearer for the anti-elite, and he knows what he sees. “I went to Yale to earn a law degree. But that first year at Yale taught me most of all that I didn’t know how the world of the American elite works.” 

Vance says, “We’re done, ladies and gentlemen, catering to Wall Street. We’ll commit to the working man. We need a leader who’s not in the pocket of big business but answers to the working man, union and nonunion alike.” Vance also blamed large financial institutions for the rising cost of housing.  “Wall Street barons crashed the economy, and American builders went out of business,” Vance said. In the case of Vance, if you took out his remarks and attributed them to socialist Bernie Sanders, who can tell the difference?   

And I love this bit of inanity, “A leader who won’t sell out to multinational corporations but will stand up for American companies and American industry.”  Amazon, Walmart, and Exxon are all American-based companies and multinationals.  So, what does he mean? 

Vance is a best-selling author, attended Yale, started a venture capital fund, and is currently a US Senator.  His wife is a prominent lawyer.  But nope, he is not an elite.

And, of course, there is the ultimate up from the bootstraps, down in the coal mines Horatio Alger story, working stiff himself, Donald J Trump.  Trump was raised by one of the wealthiest real estate investors in New York.  When Franklin Trump died, he left an estate worth more than $400 million.  Donald Trump attended the private Kew-Forest School from kindergarten through seventh grade, entered the New York Military Academy, a private boarding school, and matriculated at the Wharton School, part of the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania.  Trump has often said he began his career with “a small loan of a million dollars” from his father.  He has been married three times, twice to European supermodels.   

Aside from his international business interests, which have led him to meet presidents and kings, he has also hosted a highly-rated TV reality show called The Apprentice. This show was on NBC, which Comcast owned at the time. So, in effect, Trump was working for one of the largest media companies in the world and the largest single cable provider.  

But Trump is not an elite either.  

This rich guy for the little guy is not exactly new.  FDR was a squire of the vaunted Hudson Valley River Dutch going back generations.  He never had to work a day in his life but was the champion of the Forgotten Man.  Yet even Roosevelt felt he had to help the downtrodden because he was born to do it.  Because he was an elite, he was the right man for the job.  As HW Brands tagged him in a biography, Roosevelt may have been a traitor to his class, but FDR was under no delusions.  He saw himself as a member of the ruling class.  

So, this begs the question. Who are the political elite of today if not for these people? Elites are not like pornography, where it is tough to define, but you know it where you see it.  Jeff Bezos may have started in the middle class, but he is now part of the elite.  Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Condoleezza Rice, and Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Reilly are all African Americans but are all elites.  Every member of the judiciary, and especially the SCOTUS, is an elite.  And so is everyone cited earlier.  

But what is up with the “I rail against the elite” thing? When I hear obvious elites condemning elites, the end goal is clear.  They are hoping to tap into grievance, envy, and resentment on the part of their constituents against any groups for which they target who are charged with taking something away from the favored group.  It is all a kind of excuse for redistribution, government redistribution at the behest of the politician. So, it is also about power.  

Roger Scruton, the great, and unfortunately recently late, conservative British commentator, had a word he used to describe how totalitarians amass power.  I will quote at length because Scruton so accurately gets to know what the country’s left and right are trying to achieve. 

Scruton argues that totalitarian revolutions are built on resentment: 

Totalitarian systems of government and totalitarian ideologies have a single source, which is resentment. I see resentment as an emotion that arises in all societies, being a natural offshoot of the competition for advantage. Totalitarian ideologies are adopted because they rationalize resentment, and also unite the resentful around a common cause. Totalitarian systems arise when the resentful, having seized power, proceed to abolish the institutions that have conferred power on others: institutions like law, property, and religion, which create hierarchies, authorities, and privileges and which enable individuals to assert sovereignty over their own lives. To the resentful, these institutions are the cause of inequality and, therefore, of their own humiliations and failures. In fact, they are the channels through which resentment is drained away. Once institutions of law, property, and religion are destroyed — and their destruction is the normal result of totalitarian government — resentment takes up its place immovably as the ruling principle of the State.

In their pursuit of power, I would argue that the left has not done away with institutions such as education or judicial systems.  But note how they fan resentment in ways such as the claim of systemic racism or corruption on the Supreme Court to justify the vast alteration of institutions.  Defunding the police and packing the court are just two ways to enact these changes, but before they must come, charges of racism or the conservative justices are on the take.  

And yet, it was one thing for grifters such as Ibram X Kendi or politicians like Sanders or Warren to traffic in grievance and resentment. They are all socialist leftists, and that is their stock in trade. However, to hear Vance, Mike Lee, Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump sing from the same resentment songbook is both disheartening and quite irritating.  

There was a time, not long ago, when Republicans would talk of opportunity, not lack thereof, in this, the greatest of nations.  The goal was to grow the pie or give someone a chance to bake their own, not redivide the existing pie.  Ronald Reagan once said, “There are no great limits to growth because there are no limits to human intelligence, imagination, and wonder.” Reagan contended not with people in the form of elites, but the idea of government.  

And another quote: When I think of the new reliance that government voters have on the likes of Vance and Trump to “make their lives better,” I think of this from Reagan: “To sit back hoping that someday, some way, someone else will make things right is to go on feeding the crocodile, hoping he will eat you last—but eat you he will.”

Before Biden, Reagan was the last president not to attend an Ivy League school.  He grew up in the Midwest.  But he ascended to the elite as a notable Hollywood movie actor, well-paid spokesperson for the multination GE, governor of California, and later President.  But his ascension was not due to, nor did he traffic in, the politics of resentment.  For him, America was not about resenting the elites and imagining them torn down, as in the French Revolution, but his America, our America, unlike France in 1789, was about the opportunity to become one.  And his work was to that end.  

There is nothing wrong with legally and morally being so successful that you become what some may term an elite.  There is a severe problem with the politics of envy. grievance and victimhood.  We are not the land of resentment; we are the land of opportunity.