Even as the ruling class has become a preoccupation of the right, it remains a concern on the left. Senator Bernie Sanders had such an abundant audience for his latest book, “It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism,” that his royalties nearly matched his salary for representing Vermont. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who entered Congress denouncing the “tippy-top of the one per cent,” has become a target of activists further to the left, who accuse her of turning into an “Establishment liberal.” Critiques of the élite now emanate from so many angles that it’s difficult to know who remains to be critiqued.
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.”
“Now, let’s get out there and walk really fast to places we don’t want to be.”Cartoon by Teresa Burns Parkhurst
The term is now invoked so ubiquitously that it can seem to crumble through our fingers. As George Orwell wrote, about a frequent accusation of the nineteen-forties, “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’ ” But, if our élites are undesirable, what would a better élite look like? What, exactly, are élites for?
At the turn of the twentieth century, the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, living as a wealthy recluse in Switzerland, was at work on some of the earliest statistical research into what we now call income inequality. By his count, twenty per cent of the population of Italy owned about eighty per cent of the land. He found a similar ratio in another, more eccentric area: twenty per cent of the pea pods in his garden yielded eighty per cent of the peas. Pareto took to describing these imbalances as a “natural law,” known as the “80/20 rule.”
Pareto wanted a pithy term for his concept, but “ruling class” was out—it had been popularized by his archrival, the scholar Gaetano Mosca. Instead, 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.
In ancient Athens, wealthy citizens supported choruses, schools, and temples, on pain of being sentenced to exile or death. From the late Middle Ages, philosophers proposed that, instead of banishing the rich, society should exploit their bounty. The Tuscan humanist Poggio Bracciolini argued, in “On Avarice,” that in times of public need the prosperous élite could be made to serve as a “private barn of money.”