This is an opinion column.

Alabama Gov. James “Big Jim” Folsom once beckoned crowds to his inaugural festivities with a hearty two-word invitation.

“Y’all come!”

In contrast, President Donald Trump is more selective and he saves the open invitations for when he’s being pushed out of office.

On Monday, Trump will take the oath of office again, this time beneath the capitol rotunda after a winter storm pushed the ceremony indoors. Seating will be limited.

Pay close attention to who gets past the velvet ropes.

Pay closer attention later to who dances at the balls.

And then pay the most attention to who picks up the check.

Because something is happening in Washington, D.C., this week. Not just a new presidential administration, but a new elite is taking charge of America with a new attitude — a billionaire class who are sick of making concessions for people who push back at them.

In Alabama, Folsom once called such special interests the “Big Mules,” and the name stuck.

And this week, a new group of elites, very much like them — only bigger, and much more powerful — are pulling their wagons into Washington.

The Irony of the elites

Thirty years ago, a political science professor assigned my PS 101 class a textbook — the Irony of Democracy. The book was a primer on elite political theory.

I hated it.

The authors argued that there was a class of people in this country who owned everything, who controlled everything, and who called the shots, especially for what happened in government. Everyone else, the authors categorized as masses — folks who were along for the ride but not allowed near the steering wheel.

The irony, the authors argued, was that it was the elites, not the masses, who upheld democratic values. And they brought their research to back them up.

For instance, when you survey whether people support freedom of speech, nearly everyone says, “Of course!” But ask whether flag burning should be legal, and the two groups diverge — masses behind the flag and elites behind civil liberties. The irony of democracy, they said, was that the folks who stood to benefit the least from democracy and personal liberty were the ones protecting it.

To me then, the idea seemed icky and un-American. But in the years after, I’ve come to realize something else.

The elites might be on the masses’ side in America, but that’s not how things worked in Alabama.

In Alabama, we had the Big Mules.

The Big Mules

Folsom named the mules Big Mules in the 1940s, but their hold on power in Alabama began with the end of Reconstruction. When plantation owners and transplant industrialists in Birmingham got tired of funding public education, they came together to wrest control from poor white farmers and recently freed Black people.

When those folks went into revolt, the Mules struck a bargain: A new class system that privileged white commoners over the recently freed Black citizens. In short, they said: “We won’t treat you like one of us, but we won’t treat you like one of them.”

This contract is at the heart of what many outside of Alabama think of when they consider the state — Jim Crow, school segregation, voter disenfranchisement, and the preservation of a working underclass. The Big Mules hard-coded their political bargain into the state’s cumbersome, longest-in-the-world, racist 1901 Constitution, Alabama’s foundational document which still holds the state back to this day.

In Alabama, it wasn’t elites who fought for liberty, due process or the right to vote. It wasn’t the state’s business interests pushing to open access to adequately funded education. It was civil rights protestors and organizers, their attorneys, federal judges and on occasion a federalized National Guard.

The Mules largely ignored, downplayed or actively resisted such efforts.

Cotton plantations and Birmingham steel mills might be a force of the past, but utility companies, corporate farmers and the timber industry quickly picked up where the old guard left off. Little happens in Montgomery without their approval, which those special interests are stingy to give.

The bargain poisons Alabama to this day.

Putting the special in interest

A reasonable question to ask when the word “elite” comes up is who exactly are we talking about? The only time “elite” is a positive description anymore is when it’s applied to athletes.

In Alabama — and now the American — parlance, the term is a pejorative for college professors, scientists, journalists, bureaucrats and various credentialed experts who have the rotten job of telling people what they don’t want to hear. George Wallace preferred “pointy-headed intellectuals.”

As though any of those folks ever had power. If they ever did, they lost it a long time ago.

Who wields power? A new class of business titans, the likes of which we haven’t seen since railroads were a new thing.

Of course, rich people having access to power is nothing new in politics, but Elon Musk having a desk in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building is something we haven’t seen before. At last count, Trump had named 13 billionaires to serve in his administration.

It might have been the case once that elites upheld classical liberal democratic values in America, but today the new irony of the elites is that they don’t recognize themselves as elites.

Appearing on the Joe Rogan podcast, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called for a “repopulation” of the cultural elites but didn’t seem to be talking about himself. Likewise, Musk frequently rants against elites, despite being richer than every other person on the planet and owning his own social media company.

In this context, “elites” has more to do with DEI, Covid pandemic protocols deployed under the Trump Administration that Joe Biden somehow gets blamed for, and also, queer people.

You know — them.

And that’s the thing we must pay the most attention to. That bargain the Big Mules made 150 years ago, to appease and swindle the Alabama dirt farmers — something very much like it is happening again.

We won’t treat you like one of us, but we won’t treat you like one of them.

They’ll loosen the algorithms so you can say mean hateful things about those people on their websites.

They’ll put those people back in their place.

They’ll protect you from the elites.

Just not the people standing today around the president, partying with him at the balls or paying for this whole affair — people with real power.

They’re not the elephants in the room.

They are the Biggest Mules of all.