There are peculiarities of eliteness in America that matter here. Because Americans maintain the fiction of a classless society and don't have the legal framework of a caste system, what counts as elite in America affects how the world views American elites, and how Americans view elites in other cultures. We don't for example, care how many cows in a bride's dowry.
The number of cows in a bride’s dowry is just a straightforward proxy for wealth, and that’s pretty universal.
Sure, in some cultures they use the number of cows as the reference point, in others they use the jewelry worn or the car driven by the individual. I know that some people compete in who can afford to spend the most money on their wedding too.
All of these are literally just another way of quantifying wealth through displays of it (regardless of whether it is real wealth or they just decided to spend all their savings on a $100k wedding). And I dont see how this is somehow unique to the US at all.
Can you imagine a judge in the US letting someone convicted of sexual assault off with a light sentence because he has a lot of cows? The point is that the elitism is not just relative to other Americans, but to the rest of the world.
> Because Americans maintain the fiction of a classless society
There is nobody in the US that believes US society is classless. Talk about fictions.
Everyone knows upper class, middle class, lower class segmentation. So how is it you reconcile your premise of Americans not thinking there are classes when everyone in the country defines themselves by such structures? Americans are taught the class structures all throughout school. Americans are informed about the class structures 24/7 by popular media and news, from the NYTimes to CNBC and everything inbetween.
The hyper rich and the poor have been an always part of US society. There are no exceptions in terms of grasping the distinction, nobody fails to get it. The US has had hyper rich and poor since its founding and everyone here has always been aware of the divisions. It's in our history books, it's in our earliest literature. It's omnipresent as a thing.
Before there was the industrial wealthy and working poor, there were the land barons and British lords, farmers, agrarian workers and the slaves that were brought to the US by the conquering European empires. The class systems here quite pre-date the country, so yes, Americans are fully aware of it all. It has never not been part of US society.
The fiction is that there's class mobility. That's part of why others commenting here have tilted towards minimizing the eliteness of a criminal convicted of sexual assault: they want to think that his "hard work" landed him where he is and that they, too, might accomplish as much once they grasp their own bootstraps.
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