Social Darwinism
In the midst of a wonderful article on Saving the Net in Linux Journal, Doc Searls makes this tangential observation:

“Liberals often are flummoxed by the way conservatives seem to love big business (including, of course, big media). Yet the reason is simple: they love winners, literally. They like to reward strength and achievement...As George Lakoff explained in Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don't (University of Chicago, 1995), conservatives consider strength a "moral value". Strong is good. Weak is bad.”

Put another way, Success=Morality. This is what some of the Calvinists believed. There's a name for this point of view when it's taken to a certain extreme. It's called Social Darwinism. The last great heyday of Social Darwinism was in late 19th-Century Great Britian. Thanks to Herbert Spencer, English imperialists found a philosophical justification in their drive for empire. Some historians have made the argument that the abandonment of what had made England great - trade, commerce, and a grand strategy dedicated to maintaining the balance of power - in favor of hegemony and expansion is what led to the eventual decline of the British Empire. There's also direct connection between Spencer and the National Socialists in Germany less than a century later. In his Survival Guide to the New Renaissance, W.R. Clement posits that the current rise of Social Darwinism among Western elites is both a reaction to the rising tide of change in human society and a justification for establishing an dominant oligarchy. He also derides Social Darwinism as a dangerous, stupid, and short-sighted world view doomed to failure.

I am not equating mainstream conservatism with Social Darwinism. That's as absurd as equating mainstream liberalism with communism, or libertarianism with anarchy. My point is that Social Darwinism is a pernicious trap that elites, particularly conservative elites, are prone to fall into.