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elitism, elites

Wednesday 21st of January 2026

1%ers say I had this nightmare that somehow in Davos, all of us who went there got it [COVID-19]. And then we all left and spread it. The only good news from that is that it might just have killed the elite. Jaime Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorganChase, on postponing the 2021 Davos meeting of the world's leaders © 2020 Kwiple.com
Abortion To women like myself, they [abortion rights] are the bare minimum of human rights. To working-class women, who often see motherhood, not work, as the key source of social honor, obsession with abortion rights among well-off women is selfish, exemplifying lack of an adequate devotion to family. Seen in this light, opposition to abortion rights becomes, for high-school educated women, a way of claiming social honor. Joan C. Williams, The Guardian, August 23, 2017 © 2016 Kwiple.com
Aging It’s also true, of course, that younger politicians can suffer debilitating illnesses. … True, too, that older people with access to good health care can now lead productive public lives well past the ages at which their political forebears would have died or become incapable. But in other democracies where healthy  life spans are just as long as those in the US, the governing class is nonetheless much younger. Fintan O'Toole, New York Review of Books, January 18, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Cities Our great, global cities are turning into vast gated citadels where the elite reproduces itself. Simon Kuper, Financial Times, June 14, 2103 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Cocks of the walk say I always hear about the elite. You know, the elite. They're elite? I went to better schools than they did. I was a better student than they were. I live in a bigger, more beautiful apartment, and I live in the White House, too, which is really great. Donald Trump, Phoenix rally, August 22, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Cocks of the walk say I was an elite person. When I graduated, [from New York Military Academy] I was a very elite person. Donald Trump © 2016 Kwiple.com
COVID-19 coronavirus It turns out that liberalism does not by definition breed egoism and irresolution. A lot of the easy calumnies against it (“We could never fight a war now”) appear less certain. And if the “horizontal” bond among citizens is a bit stronger than assumed, so is their “vertical” cord with government. Anti-elitism – the spirit of the age, we thought – is broad but it can also be shallow, or at least selective. The speed with which people deferred to the medical and bureaucratic establishment was telling. The crisis has found nothing more wanting than our cynicism. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, May 13, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Democracy Democracy is under siege because its elites have allowed unfettered markets to run roughshod over the postwar social contract, leaving voters trapped in a lethal equilibrium of low growth and rising inequality. Philip Stephens, Financial Times, April 8, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Education According to one Harvard study, more students attended America's elite universities from the top 1 per cent of income backgrounds than from the bottom 60 per cent. Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism  © 2017 Kwiple.com
Elites America's elites have stored  more wealth than they can consume. Edward Luce, Financial Times, February 8, 2018 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Elites If Rome’s oligarchs could have travelled to the future, they might have learned a trick or two from the US Ivy League. It is hard to think of a better system of elite perpetuation than that practiced by America's top universities. … Of the 31mn Americans aged between 18 and 24, just 68,000 are Ivy League schools  undergraduates — about a fifth of a per cent. Of these, a varying ratio are non-white beneficiaries of affirmative action. Many of those are from privileged black or His[anic backgrounds, as opposed to Chicago's South Side or the wastelands of Detroit. This is the basis on which the Ivy League lays claim to being a deliverer of social change. Edward Luce, Financial Times, July 5, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Elites It is hard for even an engaged citizen to visualise the crisis that wasn't, the agonies that might have been. The result is that otherwise smart people fall for the populist fork: elites are held to be omnipotent when things go wrong and irrelevant in normal times. The Crash?  Their fault. The preceding boom? It fell from  a tree. The Iraq war? Elite hubris. Decades  on end of peace? Would have happened any-  way. A pandemic? Dereliction in high office. No pandemic? The natural order of things. This is what happens when your best and most important work is largely invisible. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, July 29, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Elites The most important social tensions are within the elite — not, as a decade of populism has pretended, between the elite and the people.  The person likeliest to tear down a nation's establishment is a half-member of it. He or she is close enough to have felt its condescension (which must be largely theoretical for a total outsider) and to know its weak points. Donald Trump, disdained as a bridge-and-  tunnel vulgarian for all his material privilege, is the most famous example. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, February 16, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Elites Of the elite corporate professions — law, finance, consultancy — the first two are vilified as ruthless. But only the third is seen as outright bullshit. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, February 24, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Elites Social inclusion may be a growing public mantra of the far upper class. But economic extraction remains among its core operating principles. David Callahan © 2017 Kwiple.com
Elites That Elon Musk has been able to dominate the world’s space-based satellite systems — and global communications infrastructure — with little pushback from nation-states speaks to extraordinary capture of our political possibilities by microscopically small elites. Danielle Allen, The New Republic, July/August 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Elites Those searching for one-line lessons from history should take note: apparently, it is not the people who decide to be done with democracy; it is elites. Jan-Werner Müller, Democracy Rules © 2021 Kwiple.com
Elites We got more money, we got more brains, we got better houses and apartments, we got nicer boats, we're smarter than they are and they say they're the elite. You're the elite, we're the elite. Donald Trump, comparing his supporters to his critics © 2018 Kwiple.com
Elites When elites leave their homelands, they typically go to stable countries with long-term horizons. In good times, the rich want a weak state with low tax and little regulation, but in bad times they prefer strong states. That's why the countries with the highest influx of foreign brains per capita are Aus- tralia, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland and Canada, according to the Fund for Peace. The safe haven of the American super- -rich in case the US collapses is social democratic New Zealand. Simon Kuper, Financial Times, July 29, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Elites say Export factories, import workers © 2017 Kwiple.com
Elites say Why'd they ever vote for Trump? © 2018 Kwiple.com
Higher education The purpose of higher ed, after all, is the exact opposite of solidarity: it is to define hierarchy and prestige. To separate the talented from the ordinary. To accept only the kids with good SAT scores and reject the others. It is not by coincidence that the towns that host universities and colleges have prospered so enormously in this age of inequality: they are playgrounds for the elite – and everyone knows it. Thomas Frank, The Guardian, September 9, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
History  History is the graveyard of aristocracies. Vilfredo Pareto © 2023 Kwiple.com
Kwiple dictionary plutocrat (plū'tə krat'), n. A person who spends millions or billions furthering his interests by creating “grass roots” front organizations to do his bidding in courts of law and the court of public opinion, often by inciting outrage against alleged “elites.” © 2015 Kwiple.com
Liars say I didn't realize it was the global elite. Steven Mnuchin, former Goldman Sachs executive, hedge fund manager and national finance chairman of Trump's election campaign; currently Secretary of the Treasury and leader – until Trump said he's going – of the 2018 American delegation to “it” – the World Economic Forum, the annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, of the world's richest and most powerful people from all walks of life © 2018 Kwiple.com
Liberty [I]n the end, a democratic society cannot depend on its constitutional systems for the preservation of its liberties. It can depend only on the beliefs and cultures shared by its political, legal, and cultural elites and by the citizens to whom these elites are responsive.  Robert A. Dahl, How Democratic Is the American Constitution?  © 2018 Kwiple.com
Money in politics This is an impressive crowd: the haves and have-mores. Some people call you elites: I call you my base. George W. Bush © 2017 Kwiple.com
Power In today's unequal digital society, power accrues to those who already have too much of it,  fuelling popular discontent with the elites and giving rise to conspiracy theories about the omnipotence of Silicon Valley. Evgeny Morozov, Financial Times, September 1, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Public discourse America's least-trusted institutions — Congress, television news and big business, says Gallup — are remorselessly heard-from. The most trusted are the military (a closed box to most citizens) and small business (too poor to advertise at scale). … The feeling of your pain, the stakeholder-flattery: ingratiation has been the way of public and private elites during the exact era that trust in them has dropped. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, February 26, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Republicans say Scientific consensus about global warming is an elitist conspiracy to impose a world government on freedom-loving people © 2017 Kwiple.com
Right-wing populists say Elites and the poor can't keep mooching off us © 2017 Kwiple.com
Russia  In Soviet days most of us were really quite  happy with a  dacha, a colour TV and access  to special shops with some western goods, and holidays in Sochi. We were perfectly comfortable, and we only compared ourselves with the rest of  the population, not with the western elites. … It used to be that official rank gave you top status. Now you have to have huge amounts of money too. That is what the 1990s did to Russian society. A “senior former Soviet official” quoted by Anatol Lieven, Financial Times, Nov. 30, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Teachers Second-rate teachers, a second-rate élite: the meritocracy can never be better than its teachers. Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy  © 2021 Kwiple.com
Vietnam War Vietnam was a place where the elite went as reporters, not as soldiers. Almost as many people from Harvard won Pulitzer Prizes in Vietnam as died there. David Halberstam © 2017 Kwiple.com
 
Wealth inequality American elites have stored more wealth than they can consume. This creates three problems for everyone else. First, elites invest their surpluses in replicating their advantages. … The second response to having such vast wealth is to create other kinds of scarcity [especially of nonmaterial goods like Ivy League acceptances]. … The third challenge is the hardest to fix. … Kids must study harder and for longer than their parents to find jobs that do not often repay the effort. Edward Luce, Financial Times, February 8, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com