who are elites?
on the history of the term, agency amid elitism, and why industrialists and presidents shouldn't mix
Once the 2024 presidential elections concluded I heard from people around me that the Democratic Party was by and for elites. Bernie Sanders posted ‘Democrats… have abandoned the working class’. Is this true? I wondered.
Writer Junot Díaz wrote ‘Until we build a nation-level progressive movement led by poor folks (of color, committed to poor families), we're in trouble.’ Aren’t Democrats the ones who actually listen to representatives from poor white, black, and immigrant communities? I thought.
Like bile rising in my throat, I feel a bodily disgust for any political leader who deceives the public for their own gain, so you can imagine the acid reflux Trump’s success has caused me. But if not him or the Democrats, who is left that truly cares for the working class and the poor? Or, differently put, who is looking out for the majority?
The term ‘elites’ denotes individuals or groups with significant influence or expertise (e.g., intellectual elites, business elites), but it connotes those who are out-of-touch or self-serving. It seems inevitable that a political leader and their collaborators will be elites. So, to me the question is not are Democrats elites or how might they be less elite or even what process will ensure they are in-touch as opposed to out-of-touch. The question is, what does it take for each and every American to feel they have agency over their lives?
history of the term ‘elites’
The word is derived from the French term elité, used to describe goods of superior quality, and this is no coincidence. France can be well-understood through the lens of social hierarchy. Between 1815-1848 only those who paid a certain amount of tax could vote, conveniently giving all political power to 0.3% of the population:
…French mistrust comes from much further back: it starts with a centralised and over-inflated state, an all-powerful bureaucracy, the almost exclusive training of the elite in the same select institutions and a tendency to intellectualise problems which, sometimes, simple common sense would allow to be better addressed (Sorbonne University).
In the 19th century, Italian academic Vilfredo Pareto introduced the idea of ‘elites’ in his book The Mind and Society, proposing that societies are governed by a minority that holds power due to their ‘superior abilities or social influence’. His colleague, political scientist Gaetano Mosca, developed this idea further, arguing that ‘a small organized group would always dominate larger unorganized masses’.
These two men founded the Italian school of elitism and tried to define elites, both as people (e.g. they are highly accomplished) and as political classes (e.g. governing and non-governing elites).
In 1956 C. Wright Mills publishes The Power Elite where he argues that the holy trinity of power involves military, political, and corporate elites. Their decisions impact America, thus, the entire world. For example, think about the 2024 U.S. elections. What if Joe Biden had decided he would be a one-term president? This decision would have been made by him and a few others. In July 2024 he steps down; a decision, yet again, made by a few people. All these major political decisions, with huge ramifications for us all, made by a few.
Mills says elites are categorized as such: the Metropolitan 400 (i.e. members of historically-notable families), celebrities, chief executives of large corporations, major landowners and corporate shareholders, warlords, and the “fifty-odd men of the executive branch”. He writes, Who, after all, runs America? No one runs it altogether, but in so far as any group does, the power elite.
In 2023 sociologist and Fordam University professor Heather Gautney, who is also an advisor to Bernie Sanders, modernizes Mills in her book The New Power Elite. She writes about how the issue Mills articulated in 1956 has only exacerbated over time, as wealth and power have concentrated. Mills foreshadowed January 6th, Gautney argues. What other populist discontent awaits us?
so then, do none of us have any power?
Against all odds and political manuevers we are here, are we not? The flesh and blood children of globalization. As an Indian-American woman I have more rights and privileges than my predecessors. This agency has meaning, and at the very least, it has meaning to me and my community.
Are my chances unlimited? I am very privileged, but I am not Hunter Biden. I have an idea of how I need to live my life to go where I want to go and be who I want to be. I know there are gatekeepers, rules, and unfair advantages to play against, distractions and drags to avoid, and the unknown unknown over which I have no control.
But I also know that I am a thinking and learning being. I can craft hypotheses and test them, and I can ask for help and people give it. I know the more I seek, the more I find, and that my life is iterative, not linear. If I water my qualities of agility, resilience, patience, gratitude, and optimism, I know I will win.
This is the story we need to tell among ourselves. But there is also another story. One where there are no strategies for winning because the world is set up for collective victory. And yes this world can exist. Where my quality of life does not rest on my decisions alone because we have collectively ensured each other’s prosperity.
To give a specific example, what if it wasn’t my individual responsibility to reduce my sweetner intake and instead we lived in a country that regulated high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS)?
a system architected by one CEO and one president
In 1981 farm industrialist and CEO of Archer Daniels Midland Dwayne Andreas uses his relationship with President Ronald Reagan (who has promised to deliver economic prosperity to farmers) to create a sugar quota.
Under the pretense of protecting the domestic sugar industry, this quota would make it so that the U.S. could import only a specific and small amount of sugar thus raising sugar’s price.
But Andreas is in the business of selling HFCS which is cheaper than sugar. With sugar prices sky-high and HFCS being a convenient liquid, he makes deals with Coca-Cola and others manufacturers to incorporate it into drinks and foods. The market booms along with Andreas’ fortune, and two men make a policy decision that serves their self-interests while laying waste to American bodies and health.
So there you have it. Elitism demystified.
If intellectuals are to be, as Noam Chomsky states in his book Who Rules the World, “defenders of justice, confronting power with courage and integrity” then I see our role as one of simplification and translation.
We live at the intersection of so many systems— education, economic, technological— and these systems are architected by people, many of whom we call elites. Until these systems (e.g. healthcare) are made transparent and decipherable by every day Americans, until expertise is only required for the organically complex as opposed to the artificial, we cannot be rid of elitism. That is how we actually drain the swamp.
tension between the self and the collective
As you may be able to tell, I neither believe that individual responsibility trumps the responsibility of systems to serve the majority, nor that the needs of the individual supersede those of the collective.
But I am also a person vibrating with agency and discernment. Unless broken, I would not be an effective foot soldier for any force, revolutionary or state-sponsored. I am aware of our collective quest but sometimes I lose sight of it, and I never lose sight of my own.
I feel I occupy a queer interstitial political space and so I hope you find, in my writing, the tools I have used to rescue myself from the precarious situation in which one has possibly too many of the wrong freedoms and too few of the right.
the wisdom to know the difference
Some of us aspire to become elites but many more aim to undermine them. People have been unraveling concentrated power since the dawn of mankind and the moral arc of the universe bends towards flattening its vertical structure.
There is no silver bullet for dismantling elitism, but since I was a little girl in Catholic school I have, on and off, said this prayer:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
There is much out of my control and sometimes myself is included in the much. Then I look at someone like J.D. Vance or Vivek Ramaswamy, and I wonder if, after clawing, crawling, and climbing, they find that whoever gains power is subject to the same humiliation as the rest of us, when we realize we never had the wisdom to know the difference.