Well, the Aspen Institute is a think tank funded by donations from billionaires and their foundations. They apparently try to be non-partisan. They claim to "drive change", but I cynically suspect that they don't make much of a difference on anything, ever.

Couple that with the "self-styled intellectual elites" comment, and I think the idea is that of a group of self-anointed bright people who are out to change the world by sitting around and talking on other peoples' dime, and feeling smug in the process, while actually doing nothing that matters.

But I'm not the author, and I'm just looking stuff up about the Aspen Institute, so this is just (slightly informed) guesswork.