I think you captured all the angles, Nick! You only now have to include foreigners in Turkey who can be seduced into the same system as they become honorary members of that same elite. My only two points would be a) what about the ‘Anatolian Tiger’ town middle classes, who seem to be a new upwardly mobile phenomenon despite the economic setbacks you rightly see. As for b) my other point would be that when I first started visiting and working in Turkey in the 1980s, I used to be struck by the egalitarianism in the country, outside the then rather small “do-you-know-who-I-am” elite. (People really did sometimes declaim that line, and of course we foreigners were treated with a terribly exaggerated respect, almost as a separate species.) Despite the political repression of that post-military-coup era, most Turks I met seemed to feel like cats who could look at kings and indeed speak their minds. Perhaps the white-collar class that you are mostly writing about is more of a post-2000s phenomenon?