The word “elite” is, these days, a staple of populist politics. As a piece of political framing, it is a very effective concept because it invariably casts the speaker and his or her audience as the excluded, and the oppressed, and most importantly of all, the majority. Definitionally, the word “elite” implies a small and limited number of people at the very top of their society or chosen profession: In sport for example there are tens of thousands of professional footballers, but only a few dozen elite ones.
The opposite of populism, in some ways, is elitism, which is an exceptionally curious phenomenon because it is based on the perception that elite status can be transferred to a perfectly ordinary person based on their opinions and actions. Elitism is in effect another word for virtue signalling: A person who expresses certain sentiments or beliefs because doing so associates them with a particular social status.
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