ruling class

Etymology
. First use appears c. 1653.

Noun

 * 1)  The social class of a given society that controls that society's political agenda, whether as a formal aristocracy or a party leadership or as an informal unit within democracies.
 * 2) * 1947, Anonymous translation of & al. as "Feuerbach" in , International Publishers Co., §I.B:
 * The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.
 * 1) * 2010 July 16,, "America's Ruling Class", :
 * ...until our own time America's upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another... All that has changed. Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits... whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America's ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats.
 * 1) * 2010 July 16,, "America's Ruling Class", :
 * For our ruling class, identity always trumps. Much less does membership... depend on high academic achievement. To see something closer to an academic meritocracy consider France, where elected officials have little power, a vast bureaucracy explicitly controls details from how babies are raised to how to make cheese, and people get into and advance in that bureaucracy strictly by competitive exams... for good or ill, France's ruling class are bright people&mdash;certifiably. Not ours... while getting into the Ecole Nationale d'Administration or the Ecole Polytechnique... requires outperfoming others in blindly graded exams, and graduating from such places requires passing exams that many fail, getting into America's "top schools" is less a matter of passing exams than of showing up with acceptable grades and an attractive social profile.
 * 1) * 2021 Apr., Doug Henwood, "Take Me to Your Leader: The Rot of the American Ruling Class", :
 * We once had a coherent ruling class, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs), who more or less owned and ran the from its founding through the 1970s.
 * 1) * 2021 July 1, Lian Yizheng, "The Chinese Communist Party Is 100. It's Not Going Anywhere.", :
 * The C.C.P. is colossal, highly hierarchical and regimented. From its inception in 1921 with only 12 members, it has expanded to over 90 million, averaging almost 20 percent growth a year for 100 years... The C.C.P., like any of the more effective ancient Chinese ruling classes, diligently reads historical events for lessons. That has helped it navigate crises and, often, emerge stronger.
 * The C.C.P. is colossal, highly hierarchical and regimented. From its inception in 1921 with only 12 members, it has expanded to over 90 million, averaging almost 20 percent growth a year for 100 years... The C.C.P., like any of the more effective ancient Chinese ruling classes, diligently reads historical events for lessons. That has helped it navigate crises and, often, emerge stronger.

Translations

 * Chinese:
 * Mandarin: 統治階級
 * Finnish: hallitseva luokka
 * French:
 * Georgian: მმართველი კლასი
 * Greek: άρχουσα τάξη
 * Russian: пра́вящий класс
 * Spanish: clase dirigente
 * Swahili: tabaka tawala
 * Tagalog: naghaharing-uri