This essay, on Matthew Goodwin’s book on the “new elite”, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 16 April 2023, under the headline “This obsession with a ‘new elite’ hides the real roots of power”. In 1956, the radical American sociologist C Wright Mills wrote about what he called, in the title of a book, The Power Elite. America’s elite, he observed, forms a “compact social and psychological entity” that “towers over the underlying population of clerks and wage earners” […]

Categories: Britain, Class, Culture & Books • Tags: barbara ehrenreich, c wright mills, catherine liu, elite, liberal elite, liberalism, matthew goodwin, new elite, pmc, rwanda deportation scheme, virtue hoarders