[FiniteField]

This is the kind of dishonest motte-and-bailey framing that is all too common in academia, that my post was trying to highlight. There are many aspects and fields of academia that are very obviously ideologically captured, whether that's "studies" in economics and sociology that are obvious attempts to reify the modern consensus of human beings as identical, fungible, latently-liberal economic units. Or it could be well-known physicists being taken to task about how their research on cosmological inflation contributes to the cause of diversity [0].

When such things are rightly levied in criticisms of academic ideological capture, the discussion reverts to the idea that the entire industry is nothing more than "studying things", as you put it, for knowledge and knowledge alone.

>A PhD student earning $40k a year is not, in any sense, part of the elite.

You could say the same thing about a private-rank soldier, or a party secretary. The relatively low wages of one particular person is incidental to the main issue of the overall power structure, and who it serves.

[0] https://www.wmbriggs.com/post/39160/

[muglug]

I just think “elite” has no meaning if you’re just using it as a synonym for “people I don’t like”.

“Elite” is traditionally a synonym for rich white men educated at Ivy League universities working comfortable, high-earning jobs. Those people still exist! Trump is one of them, as is George W Bush, and his father before him.

[FiniteField]

The contradictions in that definition and its examples indicates to me how outdated it is. Connecting "white men" and Ivy League universities, despite those institutions adopting an ideology explicitly designed to dispossess white men from institutional power. Connecting universities and Trump, despite the Trump administration occupying an opposing faction of power to academia (hence the articles bemoaning this being posted on HN). Connecting Trump to Bush despite Trump existing outside and against the Bush dynasty (to the point that the Democrats took Liz Cheney onboard in their campaign against Trump).

The better definition is simply that the elites of a nation are the ones that hold the most outsized political power, often the kind of intangible power that they are loathe to admit having. Trump is more or less attempting a small-scale revolution in America, being the replacement of one class of elites with another. What the prospective replacement class of elites looks like is harder to say than who they're attempting to replace.