Two hundred years ago, this kind of behavior led to the French Revolution, and the end of many of those elites at the guillotine. Now they just get an election result they don't like (at least so far). That's genuine progress.
There are absolutely no parallels to the french revolution. So yeah, progress for sure.
EDIT: I'm not ignoring this narrative about the elites but I don't think it's actually true. Trump golfed with the Clintons. They came to his wedding. He was a TV persona. During the elections he intentionally took an adversarial position towards the media to support this narrative (esp. taking on Fox News). From where I'm sitting they are all elite in the same way.
The same mainstream opinion making elites hurt the Clinton campaign by endlessly talking about the re-opening of the e-mail investigation.
Media is definitely opinionated and doesn't offer a diversity of views (which I sometimes see as annoying) but there's some points where it's almost like you'd say that the mainstream elite in education teaches evolution while ignoring the non-mainstream view of creationism.
No, they weren't able to "make" opinions in that way. They sure were able to make more than 50% of the opinions aired on radio, TV, and in print though...
The people with the microphones control the discussion. It can happen that at least half the country plugs their ears and stops listening. But it still is very difficult to have a different discussion from the one that the people with the microphones want to have.
In this day and age every person at their computer have a microphone and a keyboard and potentially an audience. For good or bad. You can have any discussion you like.
Reminds me of this interview with Julian Assange a few days before the elections (in "mainstream media") where he said the "powers, bankers etc." would never let Trump win so Trump would lose. I'd like to hear his comments on that not happening. But maybe he can be forgiven for being paranoid since people are actually after him for real.
> The indisputable fact is that prevailing institutions of authority in the West, for decades, have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the economic welfare and social security of hundreds of millions of people. While elite circles gorged themselves on globalism, free trade, Wall Street casino gambling, and endless wars (wars that enriched the perpetrators and sent the poorest and most marginalized to bear all their burdens), they completely ignored the victims of their gluttony, except when those victims piped up a bit too much — when they caused a ruckus — and were then scornfully condemned as troglodytes who were the deserved losers in the glorious, global game of meritocracy.
Also:
> opinion-making elites were so clustered, so incestuous, so far removed from the people who would decide this election — so contemptuous of them — that they were not only incapable of seeing the trends toward Trump but were unwittingly accelerating those trends with their own condescending, self-glorifying behavior.
https://theintercept.com/2016/11/09/democrats-trump-and-the-...
Worth a read for anyone who's still confused about how/why Brexit and Trump happened. The filter bubbles created by sites like Facebook, Google and Reddit seem to be much stronger than most people realize, and many still don't understand that they're trapped in a bubble at all.
Or if you prefer a video, Russell Brand did a great job of explaining it as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3Ou5uFFn8Q
To no one's surprise, neither of these items made it anywhere near the front page of Reddit.