What should we hear when we hear the word ‘elite’?

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!”