The word 'elites' has come to mean a shorthand for 'the powers that be', which may include or be separate from and above one's elected representatives including international regulators that dictate to and restrict governments. This comprising an embryonic world government for whom and for which no one voted.
According to various conspiracy theories, powerful elites are secretly running the world from their hidden lairs, their identities differing according to the politics of their accusers. Usually super-rich, whether capitalists, socialists or just shadowy globalists, these puppet-masters are thought to engineer pandemics, wars and climate change for their own benefit. One would be forgiven for thinking so, given recent events and the apparent cultural direction of travel.
Maybe they do, maybe they don't, but the concept itself is a feature of the age in which we live. George Carlin said, "You don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge."
History
Among hunter gatherers the first elites were the hunters. The hunters gained the ascendant because they had the weapons that not only brought back food but defended the tribe from attack, so they became an elite, who to this day still pass out from Sandhurst, ride to hounds and go hunting if only for scent trails and are reviled for it.
Then came cereal production and animal husbandry and the hunting military elite assumed authority over food production through their landed estates. The more modern elites grew out of their sworn enemies, the merchants who lived off the farmers and the craftspeople. Then came the new elites who partnered with the merchants to destroy the martial elites and control the honest working people. The new elites wanted to destroy the nation state and the family unit as well along with all culture and religion so a great forgetting could take place and control over the minds, hearts and bodies of everyone apart from themselves could be completed.
At some point the advisors took over from governments and were in turn ruled as a globalist cult intent on evenness, straightness, roundness, but not individuality nor harmony.
So, personal responsibility and conscience were replaced by mass regulation, remote monitoring and control; duty by accountability. FW Hayek warned us about the role of central planners in the creep towards totalitarianism in his aptly titled book, The Road to Serfdom.
Enemies were invented and scapegoats found of a kind to be hated like Emmanuel Goldstein in 1984 and most usually they could be found among the politicians who were most popular among ordinary people, so easily derided as populist. Civil servants no longer served their own citizens, nor their elected governments, but were, in turn, regulated from above for their own good.
The supranational web has no identity but rules everything without mandate.
Those associated with the WHO, WEF, IPCC, IMF, EU, World Bank and the rest no doubt believe their motives benign and their organisations of benefit, even essential, to humanity, but the divided, guilt & blame-ridden societies around the world indicate either intent or failure.
In short, we may be stumbling into a catastrophic dystopian future as the result of the unfolding failure of the flawed utopia planned for us by our betters.
