There is much talk and many words being spoken or written about elites, those who are destroying what was once good in the West and who have concentrated much wealth in their hands. These are the famous 1% or even 0.1% or still smaller groups of the ultra-wealthy and ultra-powerful.
Some serious thinkers in academia as well as some who might be labeled public intellectuals have made strong claims that most of the struggles in unstable periods such as the one which began in the West during the Cold War, after World War II, are between groups of the elite. I can’t say that I put it in those terms, but some six years ago, I looked at conspiracy theories as a whole and concluded that we’re seeing a general moral breakdown and the powerful and wealthy are engaged in gangster activities, including brutal fighting against competitors for power. These gangster activities aren’t so much different from what goes on in the inner-cities as youth gangs fight for control of drug distribution and protection rackets. It’s possible that one or more of those elite gangs will be destroyed.
For a general background on the questionable moral order of the American elite in the Northeast, you can read Gore Vidal’s series of novels typically labeled as the “American Empire” novels. (Start with Burr to get some background before that empire begins to emerge more truly.) Vidal, himself something of a self-marginalized “blue-blood,” reveals in a later novel in that series that marriages made the Paynes and Whitneys quietly more powerful than the Rockefellers and Fords and others by the early 1900s. This is similar to the Hapsburg’s, who conquered nothing but got control of major parts of Europe and then the New World and other regions of the world by, shall we say, prudent marriages.
Vidal also hints of the war between the so-called House of (JP) Morgan and the also so-called House of Rockefeller. Morgan’s highly centralized financial empire fell apart in the 1940s or so and the Rockefellers won with their looser system of alliances between powerful and independent kingdoms, the Harrimans and Walkers (including their in-laws and loyal servants—the Bushes) and the anonymous men who were the partners of Brown Brothers. The House of Rockefeller also `included’ such powerful law firms as Sullivan and Cromwell, the original globalists (including the brothers Dulles who were very close to the Walkers and Bushes). That House of Rockefeller also included, besides Allan Dulles, other men who structured the national intelligence agencies of the US (see John J. McCloy for one example besides the Dulles brothers) which have done so much damage to the West and to various countries (Iran and Pakistan and Iraq and many in Latin America and Vietnam and Indonesia and so on) which were targets of profit-takers.
It’s somewhat amazing to me that even most Americans with substantial historical knowledge, certainly most high school teachers of history and perhaps many college professors, can talk about battles between the elites in other countries (think of the Conquest of England by Duke William or the later English War of the Roses or the struggles between Julius Caesar and others seeking power over an emerging empire or even the struggle between the later Russian Tsars and various groups of reformers or revolutionaries) and then take the mainstream histories of the United States as the complete truth, though the battles for power in those mainstream American histories are but the above-ground battles between political parties as if American power-seekers honor the law more than foreign power-seekers. Maybe there is a Boss Tweed thrown in but there is no sophisticated discussion of the war that Thomas Jefferson waged against Aaron Burr or the goings-on of the Texas settlers (who sold their American citizenships for power and money and then reneged on the deal and expected American soldiers to be sent to teach Santa Ana a lesson) and the activities of those hungry for power in the oil industry (similar to what is seen with the water barons in “Chinatown”) and the Rockefeller Brothers’ theft of the largest pit mine in history, in Indonesia, and the sudden interest of the likes of the Bushes and the Dulles brothers in Vietnam. As a barrier to the Chinese?
There are various groups of men who have engaged in specific conspiracies to control the price of gold or the basic bank interest rates or to manipulate the stock market. There were and are men who engage in specific conspiracies to start wars for the expansion of the American Empire. On the whole, the so-called elites fight each other and take the common people as pawns for their wars and financial manipulations and their internal battles for power. We’re potential collateral and potential serfs or even potential slaves.
For reasons I don’t fully understand (see the website of Peter Turchin for some insight from a mathematically inclined evolutionary theorist) the power of the American financiers grew from 1850 to near World War II, but then the House of Morgan disappeared as a great power; the House of Rockefeller (perhaps because it wasn’t so centralized) survived but the common people did relatively quite well from the 1920s until 1970 or so.
We have switched back to concentrated wealth and an increasingly divisive war of individuals and groups in the class of so-called elites, a war for wealth and power.
In the case of the United States, there is an additional factor, one being used by some groups of elites to increase their power and wealth while putting on a show of compassion and charity: immigration. The periods when the ordinary American citizen did relatively well and the elites relatively badly were periods when immigration was ongoing but low and not always encouraged. The decades in the middle of the 19th century were the beginning of a long period of high-volume of immigration and an increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of the elite, ending in the early 1920s with laws restricting immigration and a period of increasing prosperity for the American working class and middle class. The immigration floodgates were famously reopened in 1964 and wealth once again flowed from the American working class and middle class into the hands of an elite in which the managers of giant corporations and national security officials joined bankers and politicians and rentiers in the elite.
All of this raises a question. Why are these individuals and groups of peoples, families and property-owning classes, called the `elite’? The 1913 Webster’s defines elite as: “A choice or select body; the flower; as, the [‘e]lite of society.” The implication is that this elite has higher levels of talent as well—probably—higher levels of education and training. While there is much truth in this, it ignores the fact that Henry Ford in his non-elite days actually made useful things and generated wealth and a tremendous number of pretty good jobs for laborers as well as very good jobs for skilled workers and college-educated engineers. JP Morgan was a man who inherited some substantial money and became very rich indeed by taking over control of wealth created by other men and squeezing out the wealth into his own treasure vaults. John D Rockefeller was involved in the creation of wealth as a wholesaler as well as a founder of companies including some oil companies; he “went bad” when he decided to go the banker route and moved from Cleveland to NYC, to be followed before long by allies auch as the Harrimans and George Herbert Walker.
The American elite seems now to be made up of the most greedy and most ambitious rather than the most talented. Moreover, in Vidal’s plausible depiction, they are non-ideological. They might play lip-service to the modern liberal faith in free-markets, but only for the purpose of manipulating markets for their own profit. They might make a pretense of supporting `compassionate’ programs such as the immigration programs mentioned above, but make sure those programs work to their own benefit, maybe accidentally helping the immigrants but certainly hurting the existing population of American workers and small business-owners. There have been Northeastern blue-bloods, such as some of the Lowell’s, who were interested in making things and creating wealth, though they also tried to create a company town in the city named after them. Mostly, the American blue-bloods have aimed to become an established class of rentiers and, for at least a few decades or so at a time, they can succeed in gaining control of large percentages of American wealth.
The Russells and their business partners, including FDR’s maternal grandfather—Warren Delano—and source of most of his wealth, were a group of mixed accomplishments. Like many other adventurous young blue-blood men, they made their initial money in the slave-trade or in the Chinese opium-trade—the second in the case of the Russells and Warren Delano. Many brought back fortunes which they then devoted to manufacturing enterprises in the US or development of agricultural regions or of mines. In The China Mirage by James Bradley, we can read a summary history of the exploitation of China and some of its citizens by opium-dealing Americans, most seemingly blue-blood. In The Great Chinese Revolution, 1800-1985 by John K. Fairbank, we can learn that the Russells weren’t committed to, or limited to, criminal activities: when they could get higher rates of return by manufacturing farm machinery for developing the great American plains, they liquidated their opium smuggling operations in China and built factories in the US. We can also learn in Lincoln by David Herbert Donald that Lincoln knew that it was northeasterners who made the big profits in the slave-trade and then used those profits to develop the Northeast and Midwest, having abandoned slaves and Southern slaveowners to their respective fates. Some of those slavetraders and many of their relatives and friends and fellow college alumni jumped on the bandwagon to destroy the competing elites of the South while pretending to be morally opposed to the slavery system they’d help to create. Having destroyed a major opposing class of elites, the Northerners went on to half a century of peaceful looting and general mayhem.
The American elite is `select’ as Webster’s put it, but the criteria seems to be greed and ambition, only accidentally tied to higher ability. They are manipulators lacking the warrior virtues and (almost certainly) the high levels of social intelligence of some of those who founded the West. (See Are Warlords and Their Top Warriors Responsible for Our `Smart’ Genes?.)
Why do we mis-use the term `elite’ for them? Or do we wish to define `elite’ by those lacking scruples but possessing plenty of ambition and greed? (To be fair, the elite who swarmed over England to their own profit but the purposes of Henry VIII, a highly intelligent and capable brute to be sure, seem to have been as low in moral character as the current American elite.) We could better define them as parasites, as does the controversial and insightful economist, Michael Hudson—his website contains information on a book about the so-called elite with the interesting title: Killing the Host.
[Shortly after I finished the above essay and had not yet posted it, I saw that Peter Turchin had felt a need to address the same question: Who Are the Elites?. Since I have a tendency to digress, I’ll delay reading Turchin’s article until after I post mine, but I suspect we have different but very similar views on this issue.]