Are you elite?

Are you elite?

I have a good friend who is very wealthy yet rants about the elites who are running (and ruining) America. I say to myself “If this guy isn’t an elite, then who is?”. Several years ago a local billionaire approached me to go to the superintendent of schools to advocate for a change in instruction that had proven successful in raising the proficiency of children from poor households. I said to him, why me? You are rich and influential in this town, so why me? He said that he was ignored because he was white and most of the kids affected were black. Does this mean that he wasn’t elite either? So apparently “elite” is not defined by wealth or race. Then how do you define it?

Are politicians elite? Do you consider Maxine Walters, Jasmine Crockett, Jaime Raskin, Chuck Schumer and AOC elite? What about Donald Trump? What about entertainers? Are Ophrah, Robert DeNiro, Tom Cruise and Samuel L. Jackson elite? Or Lebron James? Or Fifty Cent? Or Shaq? What about businessmen Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Steve Forbes or Jeff Bezos? What about grifters like Al Sharpton, Ibram X. Kendi, or Robin DiAngelo? Or intellectuals like Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Andrea Ghez or Gene Fama? Or religious elites like the Dalai Lama and the Pope. What about Franklin Graham or Joel Osteen? Does being a Nobel Laureate qualify – with the exception of Ben Bernanke, Paul Klugman and Al Gore?  If any of them are elite then what makes them so?

Do you define elite by wealth? By fame? By notoriety? Is it power? By race? Is it prestige?  Some may say it’s the haves versus the have nots. But that is clearly false. It seems to be more the haves versus the haves. Do you have to be in power to be elite? That can’t be the case, because aren’t there elites who are currently out of power or do you fall from elite status when you are out of power?

It seems to me that the division of elite versus the nonelite is a Marxist concept. Recall the workers versus the capitalists? The bourgeoisie versus the proletariat? The elite versus the nonelite? One writer says “Elites, loosely defined, are anyone who is in the small minority of wealth, power, and prestige in the nation, who have influence or control over the structures that govern a country.” Well that definition is so riddled with holes to make it almost useless. Obviously, elite status changes and one can be elite today and not elite tomorrow. See Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. Does this mean that a political elite ceases eliteness when out of office? What about the economic elites? Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are clearly elites. But why? Is it their wealth? Then are the Waltons, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Mike Bloomberg elite? What about the cultural elites like DeNiro, Taylor Swift, Kanye West, Jay-Z and Usher? Is Snoop Dogg elite? Then there are the sports elites like Lebron, Tiger, Messi, Ronaldo, Nadal, Kipchoge and Ohtani. What about the environmental elites like Al Gore and Greta Thunberg? Are they elites?

Is eliteness defined by who you are or what you do or who you were? Are you elite by birth (like King Charles) or by achievement like Jonny Kim. Who? Jonny Kim is an American NASA astronaut, who has an MD from Harvard’s medical school, a PhD from MIT, a member of SEAL team 3 with a Silver and a Bronze star, a naval officer with the rank of lieutenant colonel, a combat medic and sniper. Very few people have heard of him. So do you have to be famous to be elite? Are Russian oligarchs elite? Those who attend the World Economic Forum at Davos are called elites. But even at Davos, the elites are classified by the color of their badges. The most elites get a white badge with a hologram on it, giving them access to everywhere. I don’t know if anything of substance has ever come from Davos. I think that the global “elites” just like the lavish parties and seeing who has the spiffiest private jet or helicopter. And what about the Bilderberg group meeting in St. Moritz with 100 of the world’s most powerful “elites” who have been denounced as engaging in “sopra-national and non-transparent governance” – whatever that means. One observer said “this kind of gathering of powerful people of the globalized world goes against our principles of sovereignty.” Does this mean that these 100 have been running the world and we just didn’t know it? These meetings began in 1954 and are more exclusive than Davos. So is the Davos crowd really elite?

Yet clearly there are elites in the world. But how do you define it? I think a workable definition is akin to Justice Potter Stewart who in describing obscenity said “I know it when I see it.”