The Anatomy of an "Elite"

For all that we now talk about "elites", the concept is surprisingly slippery.

Ian Ogilvy from Ripping Yarns (1976-1979).

I once had a conversation with a writing colleague in which he described himself as “an elite.” He said it not in a boastful or arrogant way, but as a simple statement of fact. And I agreed. He was wealthy to the point of never needing to work a day in his life, held multiple college degrees, and carried himself with a bearing I associated with society’s upper crust. When he began using terms like “we” and “us”, I realized that he thought I too belonged to this rarified category of people. Was I an elite? I was skeptical, but he cited that I was college educated, of above-average financial means, and held a senior editorial position at a media publication. It appeared that we had very different conceptions of what qualified one as an “elite.”

After all, about half of US adults have a college degree at this point, and mine was from a middling university. True, my finances were above average, but we live in a country where 57 percent of people can’t afford an unexpected $1,000 expense and where 58 percent are living paycheck-to-paycheck — bars don’t get much lower than that. And the magazine I had begun working for punched above its weight class but was still undeniably niche. After that conversation, I started noticing with fasciation that every time I encountered the term “elite”, it was being used slightly differently. It seemed to have as many meanings as there were people. So I set out to explore the anatomy of an elite.

In the decade or so since populism’s ascendance in Western politics, the term “elite” — not as an adjective, as in an “elite athlete”; but as a noun, as in “an elite” or “global elites” — has entered into everyday use. Surveying half a dozen popular media outlets — The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Fox News, CNN, and New York Post — the use of “elites” skyrocketed between 2012 and 2022. The term’s prevalence in books shows a similar and longer-term rise. We aren’t all populists, of course, but aspects of the populist worldview and its obsession with “the people” versus “the elites” has permeated the way we all think and speak. And yet, nobody really knows what an elite is. Sure, everyone has their own definition, but they not only vary from person to person, they also cover people most of us wouldn’t consider elites, and exclude others we would.

Here are a few definitions:

Merriam-Webster: “A group of persons who by virtue of position or education exercise much power or influence.”

Oxford: “A group or class of people seen as having the greatest power and influence within a society, especially because of their wealth or privilege.”

Cambridge: “The richest, most powerful, best-educated, or best-trained group in a society.”

Britannica: “Small groups of persons who exercise disproportionate power and influence.” [broken down by categories, e.g. political elites, cultural elites, etc.]

Oxford Bibliographies: “Those who have vastly disproportionate access to or control over a social resource” [e.g. economic, political, cultural, etc.]

Peter Turchin (who developed the concept of “elite overproduction”): “A small segment of the society who concentrate social power in their hands.”

None of these definitions seem terrible. They all at least appear to be on the right track, if not exactly correct. The problem is that nearly every definition of elites relies upon — sometimes explicitly, other times implied — some combination of six attributes that are meant to be signifiers of this phenomenon we all recognize. These are wealth, influence, fame, education, family/social pedigree, and direct power in realms such as business, finance, NGOs, government, or politics. People may not be able to agree on a definition, but just as the US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once defined pornography, we know it when we see it. But when we begin to tease them out, these six attributes are not the reliable proxies of that ineffable elite “it” they might at first seem.

Take wealth. Time was, being a millionaire was an elite club. Today, it’s eight percent of society. Solidly middle-class people can now expect to become millionaires in their golden years simply from saving, managing, and investing their money, and from the property values of their homes growing over time. Nobody considers them “elite”, nor should they. And even if we raise the bar to those worth 10s or 100s of millions, or even billions, gaps still remain. If a 350-pound woman in a trailer park with multiple first names wins a lottery jackpot and becomes a billionaire, it doesn’t matter how big her bank balance is, MaryJoLouAnn ain’t getting an invite to Davos. If a 30-something schlub just coasting through life inherits an unexpected fortune from a distant relation, or wins a giant lawsuit settlement, no one will consider him an “elite” because he spends his days lounging about in a $900 bathrobe instead of a $40 one. He will not be seen as a member of the ruling class because he scratches his balls on a $19,000 sofa instead of a $300 couch while watching The Price is Right on a television that’s 97-inches instead of a 32.

Similarly, a lack of wealth is no impediment to being considered an elite. Michael Jackson died deeply in debt and on the verge of bankruptcy. President Harry S. Truman moved from the White House to an old dump in Missouri because it was all he could afford. Nobody thinks for a second that these men weren’t elites.

What about education? As stated, nearly half of society has a degree. If that renders one an elite, the word has no meaning. But surely a degree from a prestigious university? Not by itself. Was Breaking Bad’s Walter White an elite because he graduated from CalTech only to teach high school chemistry for a salary so low he turned to a life of crime to pay his medical bills? What about an advanced degree? Like a masters in intersectional Merlin studies? How about a law degree from the University of American Samoa’s night school (go Land Crabs!)?

We could go on down the list. Fame is no reliable indicator, unless we're to admit one-hit wonders from the 1980s, notorious serial killers, or viral randos to the ranks of the elite. Or to bar from the club those DC power brokers whose names we’ll never know but who can pull strings to make damn near anything happen. We run into these same issues with famous family names or fancy upbringings.

Influence, it seems, must be a stronger metric — except the most “influential” intellectuals and thought-leaders we routinely name as elites command fewer eyeballs in a given year than PewdiePie or Mr. Beast do with a single YouTube video. There are anonymous internet accounts that have a greater influence on public discourse than most politicians, columnists, scientists, executives, and professors.

We arrive, at last, at power. Real, direct power. The CEO of a large company, the governor of a state, a US Senator, a board member of a large nonprofit, a hedge fund manager, a major investor, or a high-ranking member of the intelligence, security, or defense apparatus. Many of these people are wealthy, but not all. Many of these people are highly-educated, but not all. Most are not famous. Many are not pedigreed members of old-money high society. All are influential in their own field, but have overall levels of influence that are far exceeded by others whom none of us would consider elites.

The problem with figuring out who the “elites” are is that any coherent definition requires us to exclude people who must surely qualify in that “we know it when we see it” sort of way, while including others who meet the technical definition but simply feel out of place. One way around it is by requiring a sufficient degree of overlap between the categories. If one can check, say, at least three of the six boxes, or can halfway check five of them, they probably qualify. This method reduces the wrongful snubs and false positives, but it still doesn’t eliminate them. And, needless to say, this is not the consensus view on what being “an elite” means.

So am I an elite? I don’t think so. But I also don’t care. We have allowed a populist framing of culture, politics, and socioeconomics to infect our thinking, and its effect has fostered a heightened sense of simplistic “us vs them” antagonisms. This is not to say that the concept of elites was only invented a decade ago, nor to say that it has no utility as a category. For as long as organized human civilization has existed, there have been labels corresponding to the ruling class. But for most of human history, those lines were clearly drawn, usually in terms of heredity, official rank, or religion.

The past several hundred years have been an experiment in distributed power, individual autonomy, and comparatively fantastical social mobility. Centuries may seem like a very long time, but on the timescale of humanity, it’s just a little while. It makes sense that our minds are still set in modes of thought from the before-times — from the age of kings, castes, and static feudal hierarchies. As power and influence become more fluid and amorphous, perhaps the way we think about class should become more tentative and less rigid. Maybe the fact that elites are so difficult to define is a sign that it’s a concept that has mostly, though not entirely, outlived its usefulness. Maybe it’s time to recognize that for all its flaws, modernity is far more dynamic than what came before. Maybe it’s time to update our thinking for the 21st century, where being an “elite” is a loose and ever-changing thing whose parameters shift by the year and which in any event tells us little about the individual. Just maybe.

See also: “Luck All the Way Down: The Problem With Meritocracy”

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