The Rise of a New Elite I

Pareto’s Theory

Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) was an Italian economist and sociologist. Economists still know his name from Pareto efficiency and the Pareto distribution. His political sociology is read less often, partly because his late political sympathies were close to Italian fascism. This post is concerned with one of his theories that, even though it was formulated more than 100 years ago, offers a useful framework for interpreting parts of the modern cultural struggle. This is not an argument for or against the process I describe. It is an attempt to understand it through a framework that I think is underused.

Pareto’s theory

In Pareto’s view, history is made by elites. Pareto used the word “aristocracy.” I will use “elite” here, because he did not mean only hereditary nobles. He meant a small set of people with unusual power, capacity, organization, wealth, office, or influence.

First, Pareto asserts that pure democracies, in which power is distributed evenly across people, do not exist. Instead, he sees all large societies as a form of aristocracy, ruled by a small elite. This is true for basically all large historical societies, including early democracies like the Roman Republic. The best exception I can think of is ancient Athens.

But his assessment also applies to modern liberal democracies. We have, of course, elections in which adult citizens can elect representatives. However, this does not imply that political power is distributed equally. In modern democracies, some people do have more say over political outcomes than others: judges, bureaucrats, journalists, professors, donors, NGO leaders, executives, and the very wealthy in general. Everyone has a vote, but a small group has much more than a vote and this additional influence does affect political outcomes.

There is empirical evidence consistent with this claim. Gilens and Page show that the policy preferences of affluent Americans and organized interest groups are much more strongly associated with policy change than the preferences of average citizens. In my own work I have shown the existence of large cultural representation gaps. Policymaking is much more culturally liberal than the median voter wants it to be such that it is only in line with the preferences of a very liberal small minority.

Pareto’s claim does not require us to deny that formal participation has widened. The elite today is probably larger, more permeable, and more constrained than a medieval aristocracy. But modern democracy is not equal rule. Hence, Pareto’s theory may still be applied.

Decadence

Pareto claims that ruling elites become decadent over time. They close themselves, lose vigor, absorb too few talented outsiders, and become less willing to defend their own rule by force. This decadence manifests itself in the old elite becoming sentimental and humanitarian. It reasons less from power, production, discipline, and self-defense, and more from suffering, vulnerability, compassion, and need.

This is not the same as becoming generous. Pareto’s old elite keeps the benefits of rule. It keeps offices, rents, prestige, and property. What changes is its capacity and willingness to defend the order from which these benefits come. It becomes softer without becoming less attached to what it owns. According to Pareto, that is the fatal combination.

From this perspective, an increase in humanitarian talk and action has a different meaning from the one usually provided by political commentators. For instance, Pareto does not read leniency toward criminals and moral language centered on vulnerability as evidence of social progress. Instead, he sees them as evidence that the ruling elite has become weak and decadent.

This does not mean compassion is good or bad. It means compassion in a ruling elite has political content. To a Paretian observer, a ruling class that mainly speaks the language of vulnerability is signaling weakness, thereby creating an opening for a new elite.

The rising elite

Being an elite has many advantages. Hence, a weak ruling elite attracts challengers. A challenger elite needs allies. Thus, it searches for constituencies that are unrepresented, status-losing, excluded from institutions, materially burdened, or ignored by the old elite. According to Pareto, the new elite mainly wants power, but it uses a different rhetoric to appeal to the unrepresented. It claims to fight for the oppressed, the people, the nation, democracy, justice, equality, sovereignty, or freedom.

This is why moral language appears on both sides. In the old elite, humanitarian language is the product of slow softening. In the rising elite, moral language functions as recruitment. To the naive observer, the result is a new era that is particularly humanitarian or moral. To Pareto, it is the byproduct of elite struggle.

Pareto’s dialogue about 1789 in The Rise and Fall of the Elites makes the point well. One man says the doctrine of the French Revolution is nonsense: there will be no stable reign of reason, virtue, or the masses. Another man agrees, but says this misses the real point. Behind the doctrine, a new oligarchy is rising. Its victory is likely because energy and strength are on its side. The old elite loses because it disarms itself with humanitarian talk and repels the new men instead of absorbing them. The doctrine can be false as a final ideal and still succeed as a vehicle for a new elite.

The present case

How well does Pareto explain the current cultural struggle? To answer this question, we first need to define the current elite. I claim that, since 1945, most Western countries have been dominated by a liberal elite. By liberal I mean people who support liberal democracy: they think of societies as a set of individuals, support immigration, trade, minorities and women and constrain majority rule. The liberal elite is the subset of influential people who hold these values and use their influence to shape policy, language, law, education, media, and cultural prestige. Not everyone in an influential position belongs to it. But since 1945, many high-status cultural and institutional positions in Western democracies have mostly been held by people in this broad liberal tradition, even though this is now changing, especially in politics.

In recent posts I have discussed evidence that politicians and social scientists are much more pro-immigration than the general public. Jesse Frederik’s ESS occupation chart extends this analysis across occupations. He finds that, in pooled Europe, the most pro-immigration occupations include creative and performing artists, legal, social, and cultural professionals, social scientists, higher education teachers, authors, journalists, psychologists, graphic designers, and advertising and marketing professionals. Most of these groups are more pro-immigration than the average voter of Green parties.

This does not prove that every member of these professions belongs to the ruling elite. I also do not imagine the elite as a club in which everyone knows each other or works together. The point is more structural. Over the last decades, liberal politicians and administrators have shaped public institutions in ways that favor liberal norms. These institutions then trained, selected, funded, and promoted people who shared those norms, and adjacent fields followed.

Large parts of the liberal elite have moved toward the language Pareto had in mind. Modern political language is saturated with suffering, trauma, discrimination, vulnerability, inclusion, recognition, and harm. Didier Fassin calls this “humanitarian reason”: compassion and suffering become central categories of government. Wheeler, McGrath, and Haslam show that harm-based moral language rose sharply in English-language books after 1980. Haslam’s work on concept creep documents the expansion of harm-related categories such as abuse, bullying, trauma, and prejudice. Meyer, Bromley, and Ramirez show a parallel institutional shift in education: human-rights themes rose in social-science textbooks across 69 countries, especially after 1995.

These sources do not prove Pareto is correct. Liberal ideology is generally more humanitarian than many other ideologies. Liberals themselves may explain the increase in humanitarian language simply as liberalism becoming increasingly liberal over time, a trend I have described in Why Liberalism is failing. Pareto interprets this trend differently: as softening.

Second, Pareto says the declining elite remains extractive. Modern taxation is not a clean test, because taxes also finance pensions, health care, defense, and ordinary public goods. However, the size of the state is still one measurable channel through which a notable part of the liberal elite is funded and staffed. OECD Revenue Statistics 2025 reports that the average OECD tax-to-GDP ratio reached 34.1% in 2024, the highest level recorded in the series; the long-run OECD average was about a quarter of GDP in the mid-1960s, and 31 OECD countries had higher tax-to-GDP ratios in 2024 than in 2010.

Third, Pareto’s strong-old-elite counterfactual is absorption. A strong old elite would accommodate a strong rival early, accept capable people into its own ranks, and steal enough of the challenger’s issue to make an outside rebellion unnecessary. One example for this is Germany’s 1993 asylum compromise: the mainstream right and the center-left restricted constitutional asylum after pressure from the right, and the Republikaner opening largely disappeared.

The current pattern points in the other direction. The culturally liberal institutional layer largely refuses to accommodate right-wing populists and justifies this refusal in moral language: democracy, human rights, anti-racism, constitutional values, European values. In Pareto’s terms, that is repulsion of the new elite. In his framework, a strong elite absorbs; a weak elite moralizes exclusion while leaving the underlying representation gap open. This is also where my recent post on the liberal ratchet fits. There I argued that liberals have tied immigration and asylum to courts, conventions, constitutional clauses, and liberal democracy itself. That makes ordinary accommodation harder: a normal policy concession starts to look like betrayal of the regime. The old elite then blocks compromise, pushes the challenger toward regime conflict, and treats the resulting escalation as proof that exclusion was necessary.

In sum, from Pareto’s perspective, the old elite is humanitarian toward the weak minority, extractive toward the majority it depends on, and unwilling to absorb the counter-elite that is well-positioned to ally with the majority. That combination is what Pareto would read as evidence of elite decline.

The standard ideological model would describe this as a struggle between ideas: equality, inclusion, democracy, sovereignty, nation, and freedom. Pareto does not deny that people believe in such ideas. But in his framework, the decisive variable is not who has the better argument. It is which elite is losing strength, which challengers can recruit the excluded, and which institutions no longer protect the old elite from competition.

AI lowers the cost of elite replacement

The liberal elite is unusually text-based. Journalists and entertainment workers write stories. Political parties write manifestos and statements. Scientists write papers. Bureaucrats write down rules. Recent advances of Large Language Models make such writing very easy, which poses a major threat for the liberal elite.

For decades, two scarcities were important contributors to the influence of the liberal elite. First, the production of high-quality text was expensive. Newsrooms, universities, think tanks, publishing houses, studios, and bureaucracies required money and staff. Second, distribution was gatekept. One needed a newspaper, a broadcaster, a university press, a party, or a studio to reach a large audience. Two types of technologies now make it much easier to compete with the liberal elite. First, platforms weakened the distribution scarcity. Substack, YouTube, X, podcasts, newsletters, and direct payment systems made it possible to reach an audience without the old gatekeepers. Second, Large Language Models now weaken the production scarcity. Text, images, code, audio, video, research assistance, translation, and editing have become very cheap and easy to produce. A rival elite no longer needs to replicate the full institutional machinery of the old elite before it can produce high-quality cultural supply at scale.

If a political system has a large representation gap, a new party can fill it by producing manifestos, tweets, speeches, videos, and slogans that promise to address the issues voters care about. Right-wing populists learned to do this before Large Language Models became powerful. Now these models make it cheaper to produce more of it. If journalism has a representation gap, a new media entrepreneur can fill it by covering stories the mainstream does not cover. Some entrepreneurs have already done this, but many are constrained by staff and time. Large Language Models loosen that constraint. If entertainment and the social sciences have representation gaps, AI makes it cheaper to fill them too. Those who use recent technology to fill these gaps are plausible candidates for parts of a new elite.

The likely riser

While Pareto’s theory seems to predict that some new elite will rise, it is not certain who this new riser will be. However, the most likely candidates are right-wing populists and the men around them: sympathetic donors, podcasters, media entrepreneurs, lawyers, activists, and eventually AI cultural producers.

In politics, parts of this replacement process are already visible. Donald Trump can be seen as an early model for this new elite strategy, the one who showed how representation gaps could be exploited in practice. Following his rise, right-wing populists have surpassed mainstream parties in many Western democracies and are now, collectively, the most popular party family in Europe.

In journalism, the early form is already visible. The Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report says engagement with TV, print, and news websites is falling while social media, video platforms and podcasters, are gaining influence. In the United States, social and video networks reached 54% for news, ahead of TV news at 50% and news websites or apps at 48%. The same report found that Joe Rogan reached 22% of the U.S. sample with news or commentary in the week after Trump’s inauguration, disproportionately including young men, historically the key constituency for rising elites.

Similarly, Reuters reports that 54% of U.S. 18-24 year-olds and 50% of 25-34 year-olds now say social media or video networks are their main source of news. Pew’s 2025 social-media news fact sheet shows the same shift: among U.S. adults aged 18-29, 43% regularly get news from TikTok, 41% from YouTube, 40% from Instagram, and 21% from X.

Distribution is no longer controlled only by editors, commissioning desks, and broadcasters. This lowers entry barriers, especially for right-leaning creators who were often discriminated against by the old media system. Reuters reports that U.S. use of X for news rose by eight points to 23% after Musk’s takeover and Trump’s return, that the right-leaning share of X’s U.S. audience tripled after Musk took over, and that in the UK right-leaning audiences almost doubled while left-leaning audiences halved.

The entertainment version is still primitive. Uwe Boll’s Citizen Vigilante, a low-budget vigilante film about a native taking revenge for immigrant crime, reportedly promoted by Musk on X, is a useful example. The film-review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes suggests a huge representation gap. At the time of writing, July 5, 2026, it classified only 7% of 15 approved critic reviews as positive. In contrast, 94% of more than 2,500 self-selected audience raters gave the film a positive rating. This critic-audience gap is suggestive but not a clean measure of mass demand, because viewers and raters are selected.

Citizen Vigilante was not AI-generated. The relevant point is that it shows the demand side. The supply side will likely follow. Musk has already shared an AI-generated Iliad trailer produced with Grok Imagine after Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey cast a black actress as portraying the Greek, hence white, Helen of Troy. Since the Homeric epics are foundational texts of European and Western civilization, critics like Musk saw the casting as a racial rewriting of European antiquity, and therefore as an attack on their identity. Musk has also said that xAI aims to produce a watchable AI movie by the end of 2026. The recipe is simple: use AI to produce cultural content that looks like what Hollywood produces, but remove the liberal coding that most viewers, I guess, dislike. A platform owner with a right-leaning audience, AI video tools, and a large unserved demand for non-liberal stories can bypass the studio system in the same way podcasts bypassed television and populist parties bypassed mainstream parties.

This is not yet a strong test

The analysis above is not a rigorous test of Pareto’s theory. It is a first-pass mapping. The examples show that the pieces Pareto would look for are present: a culturally liberal elite, large representation gaps, humanitarian language, moralized refusal to absorb challengers, weakening gatekeepers, and new actors using the gaps to recruit followers.

A real test would have to go further. It would have to compare cases in which old elites absorbed challengers with cases in which they excluded them. It would have to measure whether humanitarian language rises before elite decline, whether representation gaps predict challenger recruitment, and whether new communication technologies lower the cost of elite replacement.

This is now much more feasible than it used to be. With modern AI tools, one could measure these variables in newspapers, parliamentary speeches, party programs, court decisions, academic writing, and cultural products across many decades and countries. One could also apply the same framework to earlier episodes of elite replacement. That is beyond the scope of this post. Here I only wanted to show that Pareto’s framework could be useful for making sense of the modern cultural struggle.

The implication

If Pareto is right, the modern left is making an interpretive mistake. It reads humanitarian language as evidence that history is moving toward inclusion. Pareto reads the same language as a symptom of old-elite decline. The more the old elite speaks of vulnerability, the more one should ask whether it has lost the capacity to defend itself.

According to Pareto, right-wing populists are also unlikely to be full champions of the people. Rather, he sees them as a coalition of excluded voters and ambitious counter-elites. The voters supply numbers. The counter-elite turns numbers into offices. If it wins, it will deliver some of what its coalition wants: lower immigration, stronger punishment of criminals, stricter enforcement against illegal immigrants, more national identity language, and a reversal of some symbolic humiliations. But it will also create a new hierarchy, new offices, new gatekeepers, and new reasons to ignore its own followers.

Pareto shifts attention away from doctrine and toward the structure of the conflict. Who is weak? Who is strong? Who recruits whom? Which offices are being defended with humanitarian language? Which institutions are losing their scarcity value? Which people are learning how to replace the old elite?

The rest of the series “The Rise of a New Elite” follows from this framework. First, whether the current liberal-minority coalition is held together by liberal values or by group interests. Second, what happens if the left wins the immigration fight. Third, more on how AI makes it possible to fill cultural representation gaps across politics, journalism, science, education, and entertainment.