meninos de leite

I believe that one of the most serious difficulties of the political right in the country is that its leaders tend to belong to that class of people which has been called meninos de leite. Atlântico magazine had a number of them in its midst.

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These are people who, by the fortune of being born in privileged families, feel that they are superior to the rest of their fellow citizens. Their worst and mostly antiliberal sin is their exclusiveness. They erroneously feel they belong to an elite which is defined by birth and whose external distinctively characteristics are the affected way they talk and their pretentious manners.

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They tend to be discriminating, hate rational debate and are often simply malcriados. I wonder how they dream to become leaders of any democratic intellectual or political mouvement. Democracies hate aristocracies - specially, self-proclaimed ones.