You know what my favorite example of this is Elon Musk on Twitter.

The guy is clearly brilliant and much of what he's done is astoundingly impressive.

Also the guy is a nut bar, a nut bar, and I'm like, whoa dude, like, are they all like this?

And if they are, like, we are so apt.

Hello and welcome to Wise Is Happening With Me, your host, Chris Hayes.

There's this phrase that I think is a really useful and powerful and potent explanatory phrase

that we don't really use anymore in analysis of politics.

And it'll become clear in a second why that is when I say the phrase.

And it's because the intellectual tradition comes out of and how much that intellectual

tradition doesn't really have a lot of sway on mainstream American discourse.

The phrase is ruling class.

When you hear someone talk about a ruling class, it generally makes marks them

in a certain part of the political spectrum, usually the left.

It's a phrase that comes out of the language of Marxism and marks specifically as he talks about

class structure and class power.

He analyzes basically everything that happens in politics through this one lens of class.

And the ruling class is the class that has all the power up at the top.

But it's really a useful analytical category abstracted from Marx to think about a class of people

that rule a society, people at the top.

And not just strictly in the way that Marx talked about in his environment in 19th century Europe,

but throughout all of history.

One of the things I think that's important to think about when you think about this concept

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