Many people have remarked that the image of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage posing by the former’s golden elevator doors epitomises the hypocrisy over populists attacking the ‘elites’. Likewise the Guildhall dinner in which Theresa May told an audience dressed in dinner jackets about globalisation and its discontents. These are the ‘anti-elitists’ who now stand up for the people, they sneer. This is to confuse money with status.
As any nouveau riche parvenu has learned, wealth and status are not the same thing, something which has been the subject of some of the most famous novels in the English language. Membership of the ‘elite’, and many will argue about the definition, is not just about income but a number of markers; chief among these is belief. In all societies throughout history membership of the elite required adherence to the prestige faith.
Plenty of 17th and 18th century Nonconformists were fantastically rich – they founded such enterprises as Cadburys and the Guardian (which, being run by Unitarians, was in the 19th century vehemently Zionist).
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