As a young man in the nineteen-eighties, Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson set out to claim his stake in the establishment. His access to money and influence started at home. His stepmother, Patricia, was an heir to the Swanson frozen-food fortune. His father, Dick, was a California TV anchor who became a Washington fixture after a stint in the Reagan Administration. For fortunate clans like the Carlsons, it was “A Wonderful Time,” to borrow the title of a volume of contemporaneous portraits of “the life of America’s elite,” which included “the Cabots sailing off Boston’s North Shore, and Barry Goldwater on the range in Arizona.”
As a teen-ager, Carlson attended St. George’s School, beside the ocean in Rhode Island, one of sixteen American prep schools that the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell described as “differentiating the upper classes from the rest of the population.” Carlson dated (and later married) the headmaster’s daughter. His college applications were rejected, but the headmaster exerted influence at his own alma mater, Trinity College, and Carlson was admitted. He did not excel there; he went on to earn what he described as a “string of Ds.” After college, he applied to the C.I.A., and when he was rejected there, too, his father offered some rueful advice: “You should consider journalism. They’ll take anybody.” Soon, Carlson was writing for the Policy Review, a periodical published by the Heritage Foundation, followed by The Weekly Standard, Esquire, and New York, while also becoming the youngest anchor on CNN.
But, in 2005, Carlson’s CNN show was cancelled, and, after a period of wandering—including a failed program on MSNBC, a cha-cha on “Dancing with the Stars,” and an effort to build a right-wing answer to the Times—he found success at Fox News. There, he developed a dark new mantra. “American decline is the story of an incompetent ruling class,” he told his audience, in 2020. “They squandered all of it in exchange for short-term profits, bigger vacation homes, cheaper household help.” It was an audacious message from a man with homes in Maine and Florida, a reported income of ten million dollars a year, and Washington roots so deep that the Mayflower Hotel honored his standing order for a bespoke, off-menu salad. (Iceberg, heavy on the bacon.) But Carlson framed his advantages as proof of credibility; he told an interviewer, “I’ve always lived around people who are wielding authority, around the ruling class.” His origins helped give fringe ideas—such as the conspiracy theory that George Soros is trying to “replace” Americans with migrants—the ring of inside truth. His eventual firing from Fox only fortified his persona as a dissident member of the power élite.
In declaring war on the upper class that made him, Carlson joined a long, volatile lineage of combatants against the élite. 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. Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, grew up comfortably (his father was a bank president), graduated from Stanford and from Yale Law School, taught at a British school for “gifted boys,” and met his wife when they both clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts. But he ignores these credentials when he criticizes what he calls “the people at the top of our society.” As a religious conservative, he believes that his values leave him disadvantaged, writing in 2019, “Our cultural elites look down on the plain virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice.” The Florida congressman Matt Gaetz—the son of a wealthy health-care entrepreneur who for years served as the head of the state senate—called his rival Kevin McCarthy “the most elite fund-raiser in the history of the Republican caucus.” This was instantly understood to be an insult.
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.”
This idea prevailed for centuries. 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.” Hugo Drochon, a historian of political thought at the University of Nottingham, told me, “Pareto’s metaphor was the river. If it is not moving anymore, and it’s becoming crystallized, then you are more likely to have a revolt, because of forces rising up.”
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.
A century after Pareto laid down the concept, he is rarely read, but Branko Milanovic, a former economist at the World Bank, believes that this is a mistake. In his book “Visions of Inequality,” a history of thinking on the distribution of wealth, Milanovic notes that Pareto’s era “strongly resembles current capitalist societies.” Pareto was writing at a time when vast, entrenched inequality in Europe and America fuelled calls for radical upheaval. He was initially sympathetic to demands for change, but he came to see socialist leaders as a new élite and was courted by the Fascists. He ran unsuccessfully for office, his wife ran off with the cook, and, eventually, he lived as a hermit in a villa with dozens of cats.
His “disappointments may have darkened his frame of mind,” Milanovic writes, but they unlocked his insights. “History is the graveyard of élites,” Pareto wrote, in perhaps his most oft-quoted—and oft-misunderstood—observation. What he was predicting was not an end to the élite but, rather, its constant regeneration.
These days, the feuding hierarchies—of capital, authenticity, virtue, victimhood—generate separate corps of recruits for the ruling class. Who would fare better in the ongoing cultural contest of Who’s the Élite? John Fetterman or Ron DeSantis? Ibram X. Kendi or Britney Spears? Chris Rock or Kid Rock?
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.” But, in a feat of rhetorical gerrymandering, he excludes Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, arguing that, although Thomas occupies the “commanding heights of society,” he “rejects the group’s ideology, tastes, and attitudes.”
Thomas, for his part, focusses his ire on academia, lambasting “know-it-all elites” and declaring that he prefers “Walmart parking lots to the beaches”—though he evidently makes exceptions for certain beaches. Last year, ProPublica reported that for decades Thomas has taken undisclosed luxury vacations, paid for by the Republican donor Harlan Crow, including tropical sojourns on Crow’s superyacht and visits to the secretive California retreat Bohemian Grove, where Thomas befriended the Koch brothers. (Another tycoon helped fund the forty-foot R.V. in which Thomas visits those Walmart parking lots.)
“What will it take for me to get you beneath the wheels of this car today?”
Cartoon by J. C. Duffy
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.”
Amid the competing accusations, you may find yourself quietly wondering: Am I in the ruling class? For Americans, that tends to be a touchy question. When Paul Fussell, a historian and a social critic, was writing his 1983 satire, “Class: A Guide Through the American Status System,” he noticed that people he mentioned it to responded as if he had said, “I am working on a book urging the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals.”
Fussell, undeterred, catalogued the markers of the upper class: frequent house guests (“implying as it does plenty of spare bedrooms to lodge them in and no anxiety about making them happy”); tardiness (“proles arrive punctually”); and, as in the case of the young Tucker Carlson, rumpled bow ties. (“If neatly tied, centered, and balanced, the effect is middle-class,” Fussell wrote.) He composed lists, including one that delineated the “only six things” that can be made of black leather without causing “class damage to the owner.” (Belts, shoes, handbags, gloves, camera cases, and dog leashes.) He ended the book with a system for evaluating the class valence of the goods on display in your house: “New Oriental rug or carpet: subtract 2 (each). Worn Oriental rug or carpet: add 5 (each).’’
Forty years after Fussell’s “Class,” its most striking feature is its prescience. Before we could see the full contours of our new Gilded Age, Fussell sensed that the middle class was “sinking,” pulled down by “unemployment, a static economy, and lowered productivity.” A generation whose parents had clambered out of the working class was amusing itself to distraction in a world of proliferating screens and cheap consumption—“prole drift,” Fussell called it. The class divide was widening once more, and the greatest gap was the one separating Americans who could protect themselves with money from those who could not. Fussell quoted the working-class father of a man killed in Vietnam: “You bet your goddam dollar I’m bitter. It’s people like us who give up our sons for the country.”
These days, some of the signifiers have changed; there are fewer takers for a tastefully worn rug. In New York City, the press has documented the rise of private kitchen staff, rotating teams of nannies, and in-home laundresses who will devote half an hour to ironing a single shirt. For those days when a foray outside the home becomes unavoidable, the Aman hotel offers the private refuge of a members-only club, which charges a two-hundred-thousand-dollar initiation fee and fifteen thousand dollars in annual dues.
Yet the deepest drive is not for stuff but for the social rank that stuff conveys. The musician Moby, who sold twelve million copies of his album “Play,” once said that he kept courting success in the music business not to make more money but to “keep being invited to parties.” In the 2022 book “Status and Culture,” the journalist W. David Marx argues that we are hardwired to pursue status, because it delivers a steady accretion of esteem, benefit, and deference. In ancient Rome, élites were permitted to recline at dinner, while children sat and slaves stood. More recently, the champion golfer Lee Trevino remarked, “When I was a rookie, I told jokes, and no one laughed. After I began winning tournaments, I told the same jokes, and all of a sudden, people thought they were funny.”
Status can be frustratingly ephemeral. As you get closer to the top of a pyramid, the steps get crowded. Just ask the senators who peer longingly down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Oval Office, knowing that they are contestants in a zero-sum game. “For every person who goes up,” Marx writes, “someone must go down.”
Jockeying in a hierarchy, no matter how lofty, occasionally swerves toward the physical. Not long before becoming President, Joe Biden offered to take Trump out “behind the gym” and beat him senseless; Trump, asserting that he had a “much better body,” insisted he’d win. In a Senate hearing last fall, Markwayne Mullin, of Oklahoma, told an invited witness, the president of the Teamsters union, “If you want to run your mouth, we can be two consenting adults—we can finish it here.”
Their taunts barely registered above the din of other élite standoffs in recent years: Kanye West vs. Taylor Swift, Chrissy Teigen vs. Alison Roman, Lauren Boebert vs. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Each dispute has its own esoteric stakes, but, taken together, they make up a perpetual American undercard, feeding our cravings for entertainment. Peter Turchin, an emeritus professor at the University of Connecticut, calls this an age of “intraelite conflict.”
He explains it as a game of musical chairs: each year, we get fresh graduates from Stanford and the Ivy League, bored hedge-fund executives, restless tycoons—all angling for seats. Year by year, their numbers accumulate, but the chairs do not, and the losers become “frustrated elite aspirants.” Eventually, one of them will cheat—by faking a kid’s college résumé, trading on an inside tip, or trying to overthrow an election. Others will catch on and begin to wonder if they’re the last suckers in the bunch. Things fall apart.
That’s the pattern that Turchin explores in “End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration.” Trained as a theoretical biologist, he now mines a vast historical data set, called CrisisDB, for insights into how societies encounter chaos. The crux of his findings: a nation that funnels too much money and opportunity upward gets so top-heavy that it can tip over. In the dispassionate tone of a scientist assessing an ant colony, Turchin writes, “In one-sixth of the cases, elite groups were targeted for extermination. The probability of ruler assassination was 40 percent.”
In fifteenth-century England, he notes, a long spell of prosperity minted more nobles than society could absorb, and they took to brawling over land and power. The losers were beheaded on muddy battlefields. During the three grisly decades of the Wars of the Roses, three-quarters of England’s élites were killed or driven out by “downward social mobility”—an estimate that scholars reached by studying the declining imports of French wine. Eventually, Turchin writes, “the most violent were killed off, while the rest realized the futility of prolonging the struggles and settled down to peaceful, if not glamorous, lives.”
In America’s case, history holds two examples with wildly different outcomes. In the early nineteenth century, old-line Southern élites, who profited from slavery and from exports of cotton, faced competition from Northern élites, who made their money in mining, railroads, and steel. They battled first in politics—some ran for office, others funded candidates—but the élites proliferated faster than politics could accommodate them. Between 1800 and 1850, the number of America’s millionaires soared from half a dozen to roughly a hundred. During the Civil War, the North’s tycoons prospered, the South’s went into decline, and the country suffered incalculable damage.
Half a century later, America was riven once more. In the nineteen-twenties, suspected anarchists bombed Wall Street, killing thirty people; coal miners in West Virginia mounted the largest insurrection since the Civil War. But this time American élites, some of whom feared a Bolshevik revolution, consented to reform—to allow, in effect, greater public reliance on those “private barns of money.” Under Franklin D. Roosevelt (Groton, Harvard), the U.S. raised taxes, took steps to protect unions, and established a minimum wage. The costs, Turchin writes, “were borne by the American ruling class.” Between 1925 and 1950, the number of American millionaires fell—from sixteen hundred to fewer than nine hundred. Between the nineteen-thirties and the nineteen-seventies, a period that scholars call the Great Compression, economic inequality narrowed, except among Black Americans, who were largely excluded from those gains.
Cartoon by Liana Finck
But by the nineteen-eighties the Great Compression was over. 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.
When Trump reached the White House, he ushered in allies with similar credentials: Wilbur Ross (Yale), Steven Mnuchin (Yale), Steve Bannon (Harvard Business), Mike Pompeo (Harvard Law), Jared Kushner (Harvard). Though Bannon, the chief strategist, had earned his fortune at Goldman Sachs and in Hollywood, he billed himself as an outsider and sounded every bit the dishevelled count from the Middle Ages. “I want to bring everything crashing down,” he liked to say, “and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
Turchin ends his book with a sobering vision. Using data to model scenarios for the future, he concludes, “At some point during the 2020s, the model predicts, instability becomes so high that it starts cutting down the elite numbers.” He likens the present time to the run-up to the Civil War. America could still relearn the lessons of the Great Compression—“one of the exceptional, hopeful cases”—and act to prevent a top-heavy society from toppling. When that has happened in history, “elites eventually became alarmed by incessant violence and disorder,” he writes. “And we are not there—yet.”
In the summer of 2023, the tussling between two noted American élites entered the realm of burlesque. For years, Elon Musk and the Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg had privately grumbled about each other. Zuckerberg yearned for the innovator’s cred that Musk enjoyed, and Musk lamented (initially) that he was not as wealthy as Zuckerberg. In public, Musk has mocked Zuckerberg’s understanding of A.I. as “limited” and said that Facebook “gives me the willies.” Last June, after Musk, the owner of Twitter, purged its staff and plunged it into turmoil, Zuckerberg’s company announced plans for a “sanely run” alternative. Musk responded by proposing a “cage match,” and Zuckerberg, who had been training in Brazilian jujitsu, replied on Instagram, “Send Me Location.” Soon, Musk and Zuck—worth a combined three hundred and thirty-five billion dollars—were posing for sweaty gym photos. The Italian government discussed hosting the fight at the Colosseum, and tech bros divided into rival fandoms.
Eventually, Musk put off the fight—he acknowledged that he was out of shape—and Zuck declared that it was “time to move on.” But, even interrupted, the billionaire cage match showcased some of the rivalries and insecurities already at work in the next 80/20 society. The gentry of new technologies have displaced the industrial and media barons of an earlier age, but the new hierarchies are still in flux. In Silicon Valley, it’s common to hear the prediction that artificial intelligence will yield a world of two broad classes: those who tell the A.I. what to do and those whom the A.I. tells what to do.
Technology won’t spare us a ruling class—and, in any case, it’s hard to envision a thriving society in which no one is allowed to aspire to status. But, instead of continuing to exhaust the meaning of “the élite,” we would be better off targeting what we really resent—inequality, immobility, intolerance—and attacking the barriers that block the “circulation of élites.” Left undisturbed, the most powerful among us will take steps to stay in place, a pattern that sociologists call the “iron law of oligarchy.” Near the end of the Roman Empire, in the fourth century A.D., inequality had become so entrenched that a Roman senator could earn a hundred and twenty thousand pieces of gold a year, while a farmer earned five. The fall of Rome took five hundred years, but, as the distinguished historian Ramsay MacMullen wrote, it could be “compressed into three words: fewer have more.”