Quotes About Elites

Welch insisted on personal loyalty and top-down control. Birch Society chapters were rigidly organized. Members were directed in secret to pursue political office. Birchers were drawn not only to Welch's anti-Communist message but also to his description of a world where sinister elites were behind everything that had gone wrong in the country.

They resented meritocratic elites, experts, and professional classes, who had celebrated market-driven globalization, reaped the benefits, consigned working people to the discipline of foreign competition, and who seemed to identify more with global elites than with their fellow citizens.

Construing populist protest as either malevolent or misdirected absolves governing elites of responsibility for creating the conditions that have eroded the dignity of work and left many feeling disrespected and disempowered. The diminished economic and cultural status of working people in recent decades is not the result of inexorable forces; it is the result of the way mainstream political parties and elites have governed.

Among the winners, it generates hubris; among the losers, humiliation and resentment. These moral sentiments are at the heart of the populist uprising against elites. More than a protest against immigrants and outsourcing, the populist complaint is about the tyranny of merit. And the complaint is justified.

Gamergate was an important moment in proving the existence of the Cathedral, the idea that what is being presented as fact is actually a carefully coordinated movement by elites to establish and impose their view of what reality is and how it should be.

As demonstrated in Russia and numerous other countries, when faced with a choice between democracy without capitalism or capitalism without democracy, Western elites unhesitatingly embrace the latter.

History teaches us that all ruling elites try to portray themselves as the natural and durable social order, even ones that are in serious crisis, that threaten to devour their environmental base in order to continually recreate their hierarchical structure of power and privilege. And all ruling elites are scornful and intolerant of alternative viewpoints.

I see a drift toward authoritarian capitalism that is shared in [the United States], Russia and China," Klein told an audience in New York. "Not to say that we're all at the same stage—but I see a trend toward a very disturbing mix of big corporate power and big state power cooperating in the interests of the elites."31

Power to the people' can only be put into practice when the power exercised by social elites is dissolved into the people. Each individual can then take control of his daily life. If 'Power to the people' means nothing more than power to the 'leaders' of the people, then the people remain an undifferentiated, manipulatable mass, as powerless after the revolution as they were before. In the last analysis, the people can never have power until they disappear as a 'people.

Deceit, fraud and corruption can emerge anywhere within the nation and most of the times it comes from the top, the ruling elites.

What the dominant classes hold as true tends to shape social and political practice. If the elites hold a materialism that reduces humans to computers, then they will treat people like computers. Thinking will be reduced to computing: the neuroelectrophysiology of the brain. People will be judged solely by how well they perform their assigned functions. And when they stop functioning, they will be tossed in the garbage heap with the other electronic trash.

Slavery wasn't a crisis for British and American elites until abolitionism turned it into one. Racial discrimination wasn't a crisis until the civil rights movement turned it into one. Sex discrimination wasn't a crisis until feminism turned it into one. Apartheid wasn't a crisis until the anti-apartheid movement turned it into one.

every new "danger" pointed out to them by the elites, which, of course, each needed "regulation." The politicians who made and imposed the rules considered themselves

The secular elites are so terrified of telling the truth about radical Islam. When you talk about the radical Islamists, we have got to get straight and get serious and talk about it in the right way.

Only the elites despise earning money.

The lesson of history is that, in the long run, super-elites have two ways to survive: by suppressing dissent or by sharing their wealth.

Die Aristokraten sind die normalen; die Demokraten die Fehlgeburten der Geschichte.

The modern world is highly secular in certain parts, and nowhere more than in the world of the educated elites. Such people are notoriously "tone deaf" and their natural habitat is "a world without windows," as Weber and Berger have described them.

Low-intensity authoritarianism corrodes pluralism; new economic and political elites emerge, and their agendas take precedence over the best interests and the needs of their people.

If Americans are the most efficient workers on earth and work longer hours than almost any other advanced nation, why are we getting our clocks cleaned? Answer: While American workers are world-class, our elites are mentally challenged. So rhapsodic are they about the Global Economy they have forgotten their own country. Europeans, Japanese, Canadians and Chinese sell us so much more than they buy from us because they have rigged the rules of world trade.

Despite long-standing claims by elites that Blacks, women, Latinos, and other similarly derogated groups in the United States remain incapable of producing the type of interpretive, analytical thought that is labeled theory in the West, powerful knowledges of resistance that toppled former social structures of social inequality repudiate this view. Members of these groups do in fact theorize, and our critical social theory has been central to our political empowerment and search for justice.

what did we expect when, even in so-called democratic countries, we have become so selfish and passive, letting factions of tiny, powerful and unaccountable elites dominate both politics and economics? That applies to most leading political parties, even in democracies, whose overriding concerns usually seem to be getting re-elected and protecting big business.

The rich are different from you and me: they have more influence.

One of the methods of manipulation is to inoculate individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success. This manipulation is sometimes carried out directly by the elites and sometimes indirectly, through populist leaders. As Weffert points out, these leaders serve as intermediaries between the oligarchical elites and the people. The emergence of populism as a style of political action thus coincides causally with the emergence of the oppressed.