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...I think you left off a third element, which is "immunity to consequences." There's lots of ways to get money and power. There are few ways to get or wield money and power that are protected from consequences deriving from the getting and the wielding, and almost all those ways involve "be an elite" among them. Include this element, and the hostility toward elites you correctly identify with gains a heaping helping of necessary context. Our elites have almost completely insulated themselves from negative consequences arising from their wielding of money and power, and the resentment this lack of accountability breeds is probably not something the present system can or should survive.
Do you believe elites have delivered wild material prosperity? Does the current generation understand that it is living amid wild material prosperity? If not, why not? Was Mangione mistaken? Are his fans in the public and the press and the justice system aware of that fact?
Like, the basic problem with the anti-populist defense of elites is that elites by definition are the people running things, and we can look at the world around us to assess how they're actually performing. So we repeatedly get, as you offer here, vague appeals to how wonderful things are in this best of all possible worlds, which die a death the moment you compare them to the PANIC PANIC PANIC elites themselves observably resort to in order to goad the populace down their preferred policy chute, into their preferred policy captive-bolt-gun.
The public at large believed that "police shooting unarmed black men" was a crisis, because Elites spent a decade intentionally generating the illusion of such a crisis. But the largest spike ever recorded in violent crime was actually real, and was very clearly a direct consequence of the public reaction to that elite-generated illusion.
And so for Education, and the Afghan war, and the GWOT generally, and the criminal justice system generally, and for offshoring manufacturing annd arguably for the economy generally, for the whole of the Trans Rights issue, for the LGBT movement in at least a large part, the COVID response, immigration and on and on and on.
I can't find the X.com link at the moment to the academic lady with a prestigious fellowship, arguing in an interview that reporting child abuse is racist. So instead, I'll note that I disagree that our present elites are in fact "our best", and that intelligence is very clearly orthogonal to goodness.
We straight-up cannot afford these people. They have to go, and if they do not go peacefully they will absolutely go violently, and much that we value will go with them, and that will still be preferable to the ruin of letting them continue to run things.
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