The difference in the 19th century the “elite” mostly left the 99% alone to live their lives as they saw fit.
Today they want to control how much pop we drink.
The problem isn’t that there is a small elite or how people get into that group. The problem is the elite is try to enslave us all. This is new since 50 years ago.
Actually, more like 100 years ago, with the ascendancy of Woodrow Wilson.
Read some of the material that Wilson had written as a big name political science professor at Princeton and you can see his big government biases - and disdain for the Constitution - before he became President.