What Is an Elite Today?

James Burnham’s tract on political realism, The Machiavellians, finishes with a number of remarkable postulates. In the sixth, Burnham states, “Historical and political science is above all the study of the elite, its composition, its structure, and the mode of its relation to the non-elite.”

This axiom is remarkable because, in contemporary social science, research on elites is far from dominant and even remains controversial. When “the elite” is mentioned, the temperature in the room rises by ten degrees. Yet this dangerous and controversial notion never quite ceases to excite Western political discourse. The New York Times recently lamented the use of the phrase by Tucker Carlson, joining a number of outlets making similar criticisms.¹ These media controversies follow a long debate in the twentieth-century political sciences about whether an “elite” or a “ruling class” can be said to exist in any meaningful way. After all, for the New York Times, the use of such terms suggests a “conspiratorial” framing,² which merely obscures a racist worldview.

Yet while the words “elite” and “ruling class” are no doubt heavily charged with associations and connotations, they have long served as ammunition for political attacks from all ideological positions: the Right castigates “liberal elites” while left-wing discourse has made “capitalist elites” and “billionaires” the subject of its polemic. Targeting “the elite,” how­ever, hardly guarantees the formation of political alliances across ideological lines: the difficulty arises precisely because the term “elite” is purposefully vague and employed in an accusatory fashion.

At the most basic, what a term like “elite” evokes is a disharmony in the egalitarian imaginary of democratic politics. How can there be an elite when we believe in “one man, one vote”? This tension between democracy and the notion of an elite is manifest when those who are typically designated as elites are often purposefully reluctant to use such a term for themselves, at least in public. Today, they prefer more innocuous terms such as “stakeholders.”³ Yet such substitutions barely mask the explosive societal questions to which the term “elite” inevitably points. Thus it is worth taking a closer look at the trajectory and transformations of this dangerous, difficult, and historically subversive political vocabulary.

The Elite in Popular Imagination

The notion of an elite is powerful because it appears to be instinctively understood by everyone. As is often the case with political vocabulary, however, the interpretation of this “commonsense” term diverges widely. At its simplest, an “elite” in political discourse designates “those above,” often uttered with a sigh of resignation by those fulfilling working and service roles. Remarkable in its vagueness, everyone appears to be somebody else’s elite: the university-educated for the worker, the upper manager for the university-educated, the investor or shareholder for the manager. Yet the term also has a distinct contemporary political history. The sociologist Thomas Frank, for example, pointed out that attacks on “liberal elites” became a common Republican talking point around the millennium, and aimed to mobilize blue-collar voters against Democrats.⁴ Republicans thereby aptly reversed the status of the Democratic Party as the representative of the working class. But who are the liberal elites—those sophisticated, wealthy, materialistic urbanites of conservative polemics? Perhaps the term sociologically comes closest to what Alvin Gouldner in 1979 called the “New Class.” For Gouldner, the New Class was a historical accident of mass prosperity which allowed professions like scientists, lawyers, city planners, social workers, educators, criminologists, sociologists, public health doctors—the liberal professions—to congregate in urban centers. He saw the professions as being secular heirs to the caste of priests; after all, thought and the production of concepts necessitate a certain luxury of time and freedom from manual labor. And since they had become independent from traditional loyalties, such as the church, they were now “free” to sell their “Culture of Critical Discourse” to an anonymous opinion market. Today we can imagine that the New Class sociologically coincides with the readers and writers of the Washington Post or the New York Times, or with liberal academics, a pleonasm for all intents and purposes.

But despite the seeming influence of such commentators and cultural workers, do we imagine that these pundits decisively influence politics? After all, these “liberal professions” are subject to increasing precarity. Today journalists sell their contributions on the opinion market, but this market is largely owned and influenced by the advertisers: corporations, foundations, and—especially since Covid—the state, and the internet platforms that oversee the ad market. All fundamentally, and more or less subtly, restrict the content decisions of the editorial boards. Similar­ly, academics’ positions are becoming more fragile and are dependent on temporary funding pots provided by the state, foundations, and cor­porations. Thus the term “liberal elites” purposefully blends a variety of sociological strata, from the influential financier to the precarious academic and upper-middle-class New York Times reader.

On the other side of the political spectrum, things are not necessarily clearer. Where the political Right imagines “liberal elites,” the Left above all associates elites with wealth. Left-wing discourse is focused on inequalities and targets the “rich.” Yet it often does not specify who constitutes this category: Are we talking about the 1 percent or the 0.001 percent? Are we talking about the ultra-high-net-worth individuals at the top of the wealth pyramid⁵ or the upper-middle class? And what about the quality of this wealth? Are we talking about small entrepreneurs from middle-income households who have become multimillionaires in the course of a lifetime; are we talking about newly minted twenty-one-year‑old crypto multimillionaires? While they clearly may be designated as an elite of earners, lacking in national and global connections as well as political ambition, is money enough to make someone part of a country’s elite?

Elite as understood by the Left therefore often mirrors the similarly vague and outdated Marxist notion of “class”: of a bourgeoisie or a ruling class, a social analysis from the nineteenth century superimposed on the twenty-first. For a badly paid employee, the elite could equal the local dentist whose opinions are likely to be constituted by New Yorker pieces. This type of elite may well find its equivalent in what C. Wright Mills called the “local society” in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America: “an upper set of families stands above the middle classes and towers over the underlying population of clerks and wage workers.”⁶ Already in 1956, however, Mills observed that these traditional elites, the U.S. equivalent of a landed aristocracy in Europe, were being replaced by new upper classes who made a fortune after World War II. These elites prospered with U.S. global economic expansion as the country emerged from the conflict with the only unscathed industrial economy. At the same time, power shifted from a local to a new national “power elite,” which does not mean that the local elite lost its wealth. The point is rather that there are decisive qualitative differences between these social strata, distinctions which become lost in a term like “the bourgeoisie.”

Another problem which follows from defining an elite merely by its wealth is that wealth is fundamentally nontransparent. The perception of elite assets today is largely based on estimates and officially disclosed figures, whereas an entire industry is working on making wealth invisible by hiding it through legal and financial structures such as offshore tax havens and foundations. Consider the trillions in offshore wealth hidden through an elaborate system of shell corporations and transactions as described by Nicolas Shaxson in 2014.⁷ This wealth does not appear in the popular imagination, for example, when talking about billionaires on the Forbes list, which is calculated by adding shareholder value and visible assets of often newly minted billionaires.⁸ When the latter, such as the CEO of Moderna, Stéphane Bancel, reach the IPO or buyout phase, their shareholder wealth becomes a matter of public record and is thus difficult to hide. As a result, Bancel shot up to the twenty-third spot on the Forbes list in 2021. Yet discretion in matters of wealth drives a significant part of the financial services industry and is de rigueur for most established wealth.⁹ Only periodically does the reality of the secrecy of wealth come to the surface of public awareness: for example through the publishing of the “Panama Papers.” It is then quickly forgotten again due to the technical complexity of the subject matter and the lack of mass media interest, who, because of their ownership structures, are themselves often incentivized to not inquire too deeply into the matter. Thus it is understood that even if the definition of elites most certainly coincides with the accumulation of massive wealth, there are known unknowns making it difficult to determine a hierarchy based upon that wealth. The latter remains shrouded in mystery. Similarly, the term elite in both Right and Left popular perception remains painfully vague: an elite is more than a woke New York Times reader and more than a wealthy person. The matter is more complicated.

The Elite in Academic Imagination

Can academic research clarify the conceptual confusion? After all, elites have been a focus of academic interest for more than a century. But even as the subjects of close academic study, elites have remained elusive. There is neither an agreement on definition nor on what constitutes basic qualities of an elite and how it could be determined numerically¹⁰ or in terms of quality. While such disagreement is not uncommon in academic study, the controversy has also been decidedly political in nature. The interest in elites dates to the early nineteenth century, the high period of the “positivist,” “heroic” social sciences, with the era’s Darwinian pretense to study society like a zoo and without suspecting that the conscious human object may interfere with the results of its observation. Yet despite the epistemologically dubious nature of this approach, Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto, the proponents of an ontologically elitist view of society—the belief that society is inexorably composed of an elite and a nonelite—were never decisively refuted in practice. Historically, the formation of elites in large societies has been persistent regardless of the ideology of a regime. The reason elite scholarship became deeply unpopular after World War II, then, was not its inaccuracy. Rather, it was that this vision of the political world contrasted starkly with both Warsaw Pact communism and Western liberal democracy. After all, both the systems that emerged victorious from the war stylized themselves as fundamentally egalitarian and anti-elitist in nature.

Consequently, the thought of Pareto was unwelcome in established political science departments. The latter instead developed an understanding of elites as meritocratic, distributed, and diversified in their power. For a while, in the era after World War II, this appeared plausi­ble: during the “trente glorieuses”—the thirty years of steady postwar economic growth—levels of wealth inequality in the West reached historical lows, a fact some scholars have attributed to the state having to make material concessions to the population for fighting wars.¹¹

In universities, the study of elites persisted within the social sciences, but the mainstream developed a view of “pluralist” elites¹² in the West as a decentralized power structure with a multitude of elites fulfilling a variety of social roles and functions. Thus, elitism was given a meritocratic spin and one that was compatible with the self-perception of the societies as fair and composed of multiple centers of power. Meanwhile, the study of power as hierarchical domination in general became deeply unfashionable at universities with poststructuralist accounts of social relations dominating social science departments. Following thinkers like Michel Foucault and Bruno Latour, social scientists became focused on the effects of power at the receiving end: “governmentality” and “capil­lary notions” of power drove the analysis away from macro accounts of power and toward its micropolitics. Only the Global Financial Crisis and its acceleration of a general trend of wealth inequality led to a renewed interest in the academic study of elites, though it remains far from dominant in social science departments.

With some notable exceptions, academics have thus remained in a largely naïve positivism, which studies elites with a respectful distance and takes them at their word by relying on surveys to find out about their object of study.¹³ Of course, this points to a general difficulty in the study of elites using the tools of the social sciences. Elites are difficult to approach, known to screen their interlocutors, and are thus unlikely to reveal a great deal to researchers. Similarly, bureaucracies and private companies—the places where elites act—are designed to guard information. In addition, it is known that elites are disproportionately media savvy and image conscious. Often trained in communications, they are smart enough to use researchers for their own spin and feed them information when they choose to interact with them.¹⁴ They also regularly hire gatekeepers and professionals for precisely this purpose: to launder their power and influence according to ethically and normatively acceptable narratives. Thus academic debate has been rife with the problem of a “non-identifiability of elites.” There are no clearly discernible and definite indicators of the big guiding questions in elite research: who sits, who decides, who benefits? Precisely these questions inquire into matters which are purposefully shielded from scrutiny.

The academic perspective thus reveals an important conundrum. Elites exist, yet they are an unpopular topic politically and pose an epistemological challenge to researchers. Elites are not willing and naïve objects of observation. In contrast to the masses or marginalized groups—the latter often preferred by the social sciences for their exoticism—they are reluctant to be surveyed, scrutinized, and analyzed.

Elite Organization

As demonstrated by the difficulties of social science investigation, clearly organizational capacity is one of the key strengths of elites. A number of political theorists have focused precisely on this aspect. Manuel Castells, the author of influential work on “Network Society,” for example, remarked that the fundamental domination of the elite is due to its capacity to organize itself and disorganize its enemies.¹⁵ Yet although Castells thereby anticipates the nature of an elite as a collective consciousness, his thought remains elusive and vague concerning elites themselves. While the author invokes the network as the fundamental form of power from the late twentieth century, he appears unable or unwilling to pursue how this power looks in the form of stable human networks. Instead, Castells is even eager to deny the existence of a coherent elite and explicitly distances himself from Mills’s concept of a unified “power elite.”

But where Castells reaches his limits, some of the most interesting definitions of elites have emphasized precisely this interrelational factor. Accordingly, it makes little sense to look at individual qualities like wealth or education to determine whether someone is an elite or not. Rather, it is precisely a superindividual and interrelational factor which constitutes an elite as a collective actor. This collective actor needs to be defined not only in its relationship to the rest of society—one of superiority, domination, control, influence, etc.—but also in the elite collective’s internal relations.

An often-quoted fragment from James Meisel¹⁶ points in the same direction. It credits all elites with the three Cs: (group) consciousness, coherence, and conspiracy. While Meisel, an avid scholar of Gaetano Mosca, never explicitly elaborated on these qualities, the popularity of his definition points toward it being a particularly useful qualification which significantly focuses the debate.

Group consciousness appears as a necessary qualifier to circumscribe an elite. This quality, however, is not necessarily visible from the outside precisely because it does not always coincide with any official institution. In some of the most promising research in the field, Janine Wedel finds that a peculiarity of contemporary elites is that they cannot simply be identified with institutions which usually dominate the popular imag­ination of the state: the State Department, the Pentagon, the Supreme Court, etc. Elites, rather, succeed precisely because they have no alle­giance to any particular institution and instead only work for their own network, a set of private relations which exist prior to and outside of institutions. In this way, a network may collaborate for decades with or without occupying the command posts of the state and the economy. In the networks studied by Wedel, which range from Warsaw Pact elites to U.S. neoconservatives, the organizational principle is based on informal relationships and meetings.¹⁷

The second c in Meisel’s typology, the element of coherence, is intimately related. It may be defined as a group maintaining its consciousness and mutual assistance under stress. Some of the most percep­tive elite research, like that of G. William Domhoff, who investigated the Bohemian Grove elite retreat (later popularized by an Alex Jones documentary), focuses on elucidating this element. His book, subtitled “A Study in Elite Cohesiveness,” points to the importance of the question of how loyal members of an elite are to each other. It implicitly also raises the question of how such loyalty, beyond mere elective affinity, can be guaranteed. It is no coincidence that today journalists are becoming aware that one of the most powerful ways to guarantee compliance is by virtue of blackmail, as illustrated by the Epstein affair.

The most serious journalistic investigations¹⁸ of the affair thus far have inquired into Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell as paid handlers entangling a network of businessmen, celebrities, politicians, and scientists in “honeytrap” sexual blackmail. Whitney Webb’s work, in particular, illustrates that such operations may involve the formation of networks where mutual blackmail and engagement in criminal activi­ty act to cement cohesion between security services and other social “violence entrepreneurs” like mafias. It is here that we find the structures between organized crime, parapolitics, and government, which originally inspired the notion of a “deep state” before the latter was recently popularized and whitewashed by the media to signify a type of inert and ideologized bureaucracy.¹⁹

The third c, the term conspiracy, needs to be qualified. It must be noted that Meisel wrote prior to the modern understanding of the term, which became a catch-all phrase to cast doubt on anyone and anything. Arguably, what Meisel meant by the term is simply the existence of collective and concerted action among elites. This is precisely what can be observed when studying elite politics: Wedel, for example, uses the term “flex nets” to describe individuals working together in long-standing groups while “crafting their coincidences of interests.” Al­though this type of elite research is promising, it is also rare to encounter. As a rule, university researchers are unlikely to approach investigative journalism too closely, which is considered vulgar to most academics.²⁰ Similarly, there are few motivated to investigate political relationships when a whole academic-industrial complex is explicitly working on debunking “fake news” and eager to distance itself from anything which could remotely be associated with the wrong side of the giant and well-funded crusade against “conspiracy theory.”

On the matter of conspiracy, it also seems important to mention two extreme scenarios of concerted action, which often form straw men in public debate. According to one, the notion of elite networks automatically implies a complete synchronization of all elite politics and interests based on formal interconnection. This conspiracy theory fails to perceive the nuances of interest and intrigue which striate the field of elites and make it unstable. Rather than speaking of an elite in the singular, it is probably more appropriate to perceive politics as an unstable field of elites in the plural—of more or less conscious, cohesive, and conspiring collective actors. At the same time, the highly mediatized mirror image of this excessive cognitive mapping appears equally naïve: that no concerted action at all exists among political elites. According to this view, high-level politics merely revolves around a number of complete accidents of “complexity” and “incompetence.”²¹ It must be pointed out that this view cannot be supported by scientific research, which when taken seriously has to sheepishly admit that it is methodologically incapable of close enough insight into the milieu of elites. In the case of total “coincidence theory,” researchers and pundits appear to merely project their own harmlessness onto those in power.

Elites and Strategic Capacity

Thus we could, as a working definition, describe an elite as a disproportionately powerful, and more or less conscious, cohesive, and conspiring collective actor in society, characterized by its ability to avoid scrutiny. Yet this only supplies a general and generic answer to what an elite is. As C. Wright Mills demonstrated in his account of elites transforming from local to national elites, the concept of an elite also has a specific historical quality. Throughout the ages, elites have been associated with the command posts of society, which change and differ over time. Henri de Saint-Simon, one of the founding fathers of modern sociology, already remarked on the impact of the industrial revolution on the social order by announcing it would see the rise of a new class of industrialists, engineers, and entrepreneurs who would replace priests, warriors, and feudal lords. This thought became refined in the twentieth century, when James Burnham foresaw a “managerial revolution” with a class of experts and bureaucrats taking the place of the classical bourgeoisie. It could thus be argued that a fourth c should be added to Meisel’s typology, which might be called capacity.

Capacity is not merely an unspecified productive or knowledge capacity but rather encompasses a particular strategic quality.²² It has been argued that it was precisely the history of twentieth-century aerial warfare, with its civilian bombardments, that birthed a new type of state which could be characterized as “strategic.” Its core economic and industrial infrastructures became defined in the process. Military plan­ners had to weigh how to cause maximum damage with a minimum of investment while also determining defense priorities. It is here that we might find the origins of core strategic state functions (termed “vital systems” by some authors), such as the Office of Defense Mobilization (ODM) under the Executive Office of the President during the Cold War.

After the Cold War, priorities shifted away from strategic defense and key state structures increasingly concentrated in private hands; this trajectory of neoliberal rule has been described as the “raiding of the commons.” Privatization has profoundly affected the relationship be­tween elites and the public. Whereas the state is based on the principle of accountability to the citizens (however limited such accountability may be in practice), the private corporation is above all beholden to its shareholders. Public interests play a secondary, and often grotesquely mediated, role for those defined as “stakeholders,”²³ while checks and balances through legislative bodies are diminished.

Following the short holiday from history after the collapse of the Soviet Union, peer-to-peer military competition came back into view in the 2010s and has only grown more pronounced. In international politics, the focus has shifted to what makes free trade and outsourced production possible in the first place: the infrastructures which guarantee military superiority and thereby the protection of trade routes and the capacity to disrupt, damage, and pressure competitors.²⁴ We may call these infrastructures “mortal systems.” This return of military, technological, and economic competition has been theorized as “Strate­gic Capitalism.”²⁵ Strategic Capitalism defines industries and technologies as assets to be prioritized and protected, rather than simply left to market dynamics (which are in turn often manipulated by competitors). Contemporary strategic capacity can thus be defined as biopolitics at the geopolitical scale, the power over life and death.²⁶

While this assessment is valid for most of history, it also has a more contemporary quality which impacts the social structure and composition of contemporary elites. Today, this power is progressively con­centrated due to centralized internet platforms and communications networks, industrial automation, and the elimination of redundancies in production and supply chains—which has been termed the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”—and which dras­tically reduces the importance of mass armies or unskilled labor.²⁷ In military affairs, this decline of the importance of human capital has been described as a series of “offsets.”²⁸ For an elite to capture and constitute a state,²⁹ and to become a ruling elite, it must disproportionately concentrate productive and destructive capacity. We can thus expect an unprecedented concentration³⁰ of con­trol over critical infrastructures—financially, logistically and personally (directly or via intermediaries)—to constitute the specifically contemporary element of elite power.

Elites in the X-Ray Century

What is an elite today? To answer this question is also to interrogate why it is asked in the first place. Why engage in a largely theoretical exercise in an age which can offer us far more detailed accounts of really existing power? Arguably, the persistent value of political theory lies in its capacity to condense and conceptualize history to ultimately find prescriptions for political action in moments of crisis.

Today’s ruling elites in the West are faced with an increasingly brutal contradiction: on the one hand, they concentrate strategic capacity to an unprecedented degree; on the other hand, they are confronted with a crisis of legitimacy arising from their inability or unwillingness to meet the demands of populations whose core quality of life measures (hous­ing, education, financial precarity, social capital, even food quality and health outcomes in many places) are in prolonged (and more recently rapid) decline. As a result, there is a widespread loss of faith in the myths and political formulas of the ruling elite whose formal commitment to equality or equity never produced meaningful material gains for the majority of the population.

At the same time, elites find it increasingly difficult to rely on the mechanisms of crypsis, be they legal, financial, or political, which are continuously undermined by the internet as a communications, research, and transparency infrastructure. In the internet age, elites are faced with a persistent effort of counter-mapping and an exotericization of intimate political knowledge and histories. These efforts disrupt the defenses which have long shielded elites from scrutiny, and have the capacity to fundamentally disrupt political identities across the spectrum. This subversive information continues to diffuse throughout the population despite the capture of communications platforms by highly politicized stakeholders and the institutionalization of what is by now an industrial‑scale censorship apparatus. An organic opposition is becoming in­creasingly sophisticated in its inquiries into individual political players, while it also seeks to understand the interconnections and modus op­erandi of elite networks.

The ensuing crisis of legitimacy has resulted in a radicalization of the ruling elite, which is increasingly reliant on overt authoritarianism, as in the case of emergency powers implemented during Covid-19. At the same time, cracks are appearing³¹ which threaten the coherence of the ruling elite and open the way for an aspirant counter-elite to disrupt, co-opt, and take power. The latter has already developed and distributed what are arguably intellectually superior counternarratives and histories against the dominant myths, and is forcing transparency through relentless scrutiny.³² Counter-elites are increasingly replacing and dou­bling the infrastructures of information distribution.³³ There is a common suspicion that the ruling elite is isolated from the general population and works for itself only. From this perspective, what parades as “national values” or “global norms” are unveiled as the self-interested and short-sighted schemes of an interpersonal network having appropriated the means of political coercion (including violence). The erosion of elite legitimacy as a result of such scrutiny jeopardizes the effectiveness of elite sanctions against their competitors, whose ranks grow by the day. Momentum is on the side of the latter but challenges remain.

An aspirant elite lacks the ruling elite’s almost inexhaustible resource of financial capital. It may, however, count on an increasingly obstinate “excess population.” This population, which has been disenfranchised but whose productive potential has also been liberated by the Fourth Industrial Revolution, is increasingly impenetrable to regime propaganda. Arguably, a twenty-first-century counter-elite is therefore populist by default. Its success may well depend on its ability to harness this social force by helping the “excess population” organize and using it to replace some of the hollowed out strategic industries whose control grants the ruling elite its unprecedented power. Beyond the doubling of media infrastructures, an aspirant elite needs to consider the pursuit of ownership and the politicization of strategic capacity, including of housing, energy, medicine, agriculture, and security infrastructures, which also act as havens for disenchanted talent to defect to.

To succeed, an aspirant elite must be willing to engage in increasingly overt confrontation—to trade the short-term financial advantages of compliance for a long-term vision of a more legitimate power. This legitimacy also depends on aspirant elites’ ability to move beyond reactive oppositional quarrelsomeness and to develop a genuine political vision and discipline. Just as Burnham observed nearly a century ago, the success of an elite is to be found, above all, in its capacity to organize and synchronize a new and superior combination of social forces.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VI, Number 4 (Winter 2022): 203–17.

Notes