There’s a moment in last week’s farewell to the troops letter from media oligarch Rupert Murdoch that reads like it’s veering seriously into The Simpsons’ “Old Man Yells at Cloud” meme territory. It’s the bit where the billionaire rants about those dang elites with their “open contempt for those who are not members of their rarefied class”.
The not-Murdoch media didn’t really know what to do with it. Most — unless they printed the letter in full — passed over the paragraph in discreet silence, just as they have tried to do over the past 50 years in response to the right’s jiujitsu-style turning of “elite” against progressive thought.
Not so fast. Journalism needs to spend more time looking under the lexical hood of disinformation, particularly when it’s such self-evident gaslighting. Like much of the right’s combative culture wars phraseology, it’s a usage designed to discombobulate, to spike the guns of its critics with the unanswerability of schoolyard irony: “I’m not. You are.”
“Elite” has tracked a long history in the language of 20th-century political thought, while in a “medium is the message” way its journalistic short-hand attracted old-style headline writers constrained by the narrow width of hot-metal columns (with all those horizontal strokes of the “l” and the ”i” giving it just three-and-a-half characters in the old typesetting rule of thumb).
It draws on the same roots as the Calvinist notion of the “elect”, those predestined by God for old-style salvation — a theological concept embedded in the Presbyterianism passed down by the Scottish preachers so common in earlier generations of Murdochs.
It broke into political science as “elite theory” in pre-fascist Italy as an explainer for how otherwise chaotic democracy was (could be, should be) tamed by the ruling class, before being popularised in 1950s America as a safe Cold War synonym for “ruling class” by C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite where he identified an elite triumvirate of the 200 to 300 largest corporations, a strong federal political class and the military and its related bureaucracy.
Turned adjectival as “elitist”, it became a progressive character slur in the ’60s university battles over curriculum diversity. With the rise of the Reagan right, its inherent Frenchiness saw it flipped, to become less about power and more about culture, a stand-in for “educated” and then “snobbish”. ( “Snob” apparently followed a similar trajectory in the 19th century.)
In the culture wars that followed, it became the grammatically incongruous plural “elites” and dropped into its current noxious positioning alongside “woke” to mean someone who pushes back against traditional “commonsense” norms — you know, things like racism, misogyny and homophobia.
Certainly this is the way in which our own local Millsian power elite has been using the term in arguing against the Voice (as Bernard Keane wrote in Crikey in July.)
In Murdoch-world, “elites” has a more specific meaning. As Michael Wolff says in his latest book on the Murdochs, The Fall, it means: The New York Times. Or perhaps more broadly, media that hold to the journalistic values of the Times — and people who read them. (Frustratingly for Rupert, Wolff says, this seems to include a few too many of his own children and ex-wives — although not, apparently, Lachlan.)
There’s an easy way to dismiss chutzpah in this usage, particularly as it’s been hyped by the younger generation of the Ivy League-educated billionaire Murdoch boys as James did in an early-century interview with Geraldine Brooks and Lachlan in the 2002 Andrew Olle lecture.
For the Murdochs, it’s part easy go-to defence of bad journalism, part bullying for market share, and part attempt to discipline its competitors (particularly, in Australia, the ABC). It’s the non sequitur at the heart of capitalism: that commercial success (even in the constrained grumpy old man demographic where the Murdoch model works) must mean the product is simply better than the alternatives.
It’s a 21st-century take on the quality-popular split in 20th-century mass media positioning. (Although probably one at odds with the product differentiation thinking of Harvard’s founder of modern business strategy theory, Michael Porter. But pffft, elites — what do they know?)
Journalism is left in a tricky place, with the Millsian origins of “elite” used interchangeably with both its Reagan-ite and Murdoch-ian adaptations. As Rick Morton wrote in his Substack at the weekend, “elite” has become the equivalent of the Soviet era’s “bourgeois individualism” — and about as meaningful.
Back in 2008, the Occupy movement tried to rescue the concept’s radical power with the “1%” who dominate global wealth until Thomas Piketty’s “well actually” it’s the 0.01% made it simultaneously more shocking and less catchy.
The war in Ukraine is seeing “oligarch” make a play to capture the concept’s dimension of power, although it’s too etymologically Greek (too “elite”) for everyday journalese. And it’s too narrow. Take Lachlan: one of the “oligoi” or billionaire few, he’s yet to establish that he carries the clout of a ruling “archon”.
Language evolves. Words go out of fashion, lose their rhetorical oomph. Time and context sand off confusion. In the meantime, as words and phrases are corrupted by irony and gaslighting, journalists need to hear “elite” come packaged with a red light that reads: “Beware!”
It’s funny but when I hear the word “elite”, I think pretty much what my Oxford dictionary says, “a group or class of people seen as having the most power and influence in a society, especially on account of their wealth or privilege”.
I know Christopher is saying it’s been twisted to mean other things in a derogatory way but seriously, Rupert Murdoch? disparaging the elite? when he would have to be one of the best examples of it in the whole world??
To my 20-something son and teenage daughter ‘elite’ not only retains its positive adjectival meaning but is about the highest term of praise for any cultural product, sporting event, social occasion etc. Its worth remembering that language is much bigger than grubs like Murdoch and Howard, who I think was the first Australian pollie to use the word as a criticism. Long may this continue.
I agree: I think that “elite” in the context of sport, military, musical and social occasions still has its positive meaning. Perhaps that’s because anyone and everyone can understand the measure of the quality that makes up these groups. A specific skill set and a record of success, for example. Elite business people? Those probably still rate too, as again, the measure is fairly clear. But elite economists, or scientists or authors?
In the words of the culture-war right, there’s a strong sense of what I can only understand as “vice signalling”. Especially in the discourse of Tony Abbott, who clearly makes an excellent fit for the News board.
Another interpretation of ‘elite’ is simply the broad middle class needed for improving a functioning and civil society; many of the upper elites do not want this.
While I appreciate the selective distinction for elite as it pertains to, say, sporting performance, having just checked a few of the big-name dictionaries, they’re holding fairly firm that “elite” means a group of people with wealth, power, status, privilege – a small-ish group which holds or wields disproportionate control over the rest.
An elitist is someone supportive of the view these rich, powerful elites should be regarded as superior and deserve to wield control.
How dishonestly cunning is it therefore for the true, by definition, elites to turn upside down and inside out this potentially pejorative descriptor of themselves, some (or most?) with wildly excessive wealth and power usually ruthlessly obtained, clung to and relentlessly sought and built upon, against pretty much anyone who does not hold an elitist view and certainly those who may dare to challenge their position.
By definition, Murdoch is an elite. By definition, I am not. And even the sum total of all my arguably progressive beliefs – my social democratic leanings toward a preference for wealth redistribution by a properly progressive taxation system with teeth and few exemptions and single system universal (public) education and health services, for capitalism to be appropriately-regulated in a way that prevents monopolistic behaviour and the attendant rampant profiteering and degradation of standards of product and customer service, my belief First Nations peoples should be recognised in and a Voice for them enshrined in our Constitution etc etc etc – do not, cannot render me an elite. Even the grouping of me with likeminded others so that we may form a sizeable, likeminded group does not, cannot make me or that group elites or a collective elite. Purely and simply because we lack the necessary defining accoutrements of wealth, power, status, privilege, control.
No surprises though that journalism is failing utterly to reject the true elites’ self-serving distortion of the word/term. After all, members of the true elite, like Murdoch, own most of the MSM and have set about, in the past decade, weeding or driving out every single employee who ever exhibited any anti-elitist sentiment and who may, therefore, have at least questioned the word’s appropriation for the nefarious purposes of their employer. This under cover of shedding staff in the wake of the internet drying the rivers of advertising gold but also while bullishly shrugging off the last vestiges of any camouflage concealing that they have always been in the business of driving a narcissistic socioeconomic agenda shared with the true elite Right,
And don’t get me started on the perfidiously named, elite-funded, elite Right fronts, Advance (formerly Advance Australia) and Fair Australia the reactionary bulldust, justice offending crap and outright lies emanating from which are being gifted daily, screaming, unquestioned headlines and acres of print, online and airspace aimed at demolishing the Yes campaign and elite-smearing those who support it.
Apologies Christopher but I don’t think it’s worth wasting any time urging those choosing to work for the (true elite) MSM these days to beware of being duped. They’re the ones writing, apparently happily duped and without shame, the elite-smearing, elite-sneering copy and the headlines and reading out the news bulletin scripts containing all the reactionary bulldust, justice offending crap and outright lies.
Disclosure: I’m a former journo. But I now look at the industry I once believed in and preferred to call a profession, with disgust.
Striving for excellence – that’s the type of elitism I appreciate. And, accounting for your individual efforts within a community and by furthering that community’s good values, attributes and character.
A current practical definition of ‘elite’ would seem to be ‘ people with influence who I do not like’. As opposed to the people with influence who I like, who are something like ‘responsible leaders’.
In reality there are many many different elites at different levels – from elite footballer to elite billionaire presidential condidate (I meant candidate, but the word seemed so appropriate!).
Just about everyone is part of an elite at some point. However the real exclusive group is the wealthiest 0.01% of the population who own and control much of what everyone else experiences.
And of course Citizen Murdoch sits in that refined group.