Who Are the Real Elite?

William Deresiewicz on who holds power when the center fails to hold

In a few weeks, UT Austin’s College of Liberal Arts will host our annual spring symposium, where we gather authors, scholars, and scientists from around the country for a day of discussion and debate. This year the theme is Discourse: In Action, Theory, and Democracy, and the goal is to model how to have conversations that matter.

One of our guests will be writer and critic William Deresiewicz in conversation with Kristen Soltis Anderson and Michael Lind about the “real elite.” Who are they? Where can they be found? Why don’t we agree on who they are? Ahead of the discussion — which you’re invited to attend, by the way — we asked Deresiewicz to preview his position.

Photo by Sam Burke via Unsplash

Who Are the Real Elite?

By William Deresiewicz

Who are the real elite? It's an interesting question, and the most interesting thing about it is that we feel the need to ask it in the first place. Why don't we just know?

We used to. In the Middle Ages, for example, everybody knew that the elite consisted of the aristocracy, which united wealth, status, political authority, and military force, and, secondarily, the Church, a sometimes rival elite, which possessed its own forms of power. With the rise of capitalism (mercantile, then industrial), the emergence of mass politics (democratic and otherwise), and the growth of a public sphere (culture, in the broadest sense), the picture got more complicated. Elites multiplied, which is to say, the elite divided. Wealth, position, voice, political power: these strings no longer rested in a single set of hands. Still, you knew whose hands were pulling them. Rockefeller and Morgan, McKinley and Wilson, the editors of The Atlantic and The New York Times, the presidents of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

It was across the first half of the 20th century that the question got murky. The elite bureaucratized, and those bureaucracies vastly expanded. Family firms became public corporations. Colleges became research universities. The New Deal arrived, with its dozens of "alphabet agencies," multiplying the size and scope of government. After World War II, the process gained momentum with the erection of the national security state, the growth of the media, the emergence of the nonprofit sector, the higher ed and culture booms. Power and status diffused. Org charts ramified. The elite became opaque.

It also had new reasons for opacity. I take as significant the publication in 1956 of C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite. Here we had a sociologist who felt the need to tell us who was really in charge, and that it wasn't us. The existence of an elite, after all, is an affront to democracy, all the more so in the age of the rise of the mass middle class. I think as well of the appearance, a generation later, of Paul Fussell's Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (1983). The highest rung in Fussell's taxonomy is occupied not by the upper class (the mere bank presidents and foundation heads) but by the "top-out-of-sight," people whom you never see: scions of plutocratic dynasties (DuPonts, Vanderbilts, Pews) and other heirs of great wealth, hiding out on Caribbean islands and Connecticut estates. "It was the Great Depression, Vance Packard speculates, that badly frightened the very rich, teaching them to be 'discrete, almost reticent, in exhibiting their wealth.'"

A marvelous moment occurred in this connection when the fall of Claudine Gay as president of Harvard offered us a glimpse, just the tiniest glimpse, of this upper upper class in action. Our protagonist, as the story was reported in The New York Times, was Penny Pritzker, "senior fellow" of the Harvard Corporation (i.e. chair of the board of trustees), who had pushed for Gay and now, to save her own position, had to push her out. Penny (Penny!), a billion-heiress and the sister of the governor of Illinois, had been an early patron of a young Chicago politician named Barack Obama. Now, at her vacation home in Aspen over Christmas, she fielded calls from panicked fellow fellows—a hedge fund manager, a Tootsie Roll heiress—who were at their own vacation hideaways, hearing from their own connections, until the pressure got too great and she was forced to give her latest protégé the ax.[1]

This, apparently, is how power operates in the United States. But elites don't just divide, and hide, they periodically get swept aside. Plantagenets give way to Tudors; Federalists to Democrats. New industries give rise to new plutocracies, an order of magnitude richer than the incumbents. Astors yield to Carnegies, Texas cattle to Texas oil (as dramatized in Giant), industrial billions to Wall Street decabillions to Silicon Valley centibillions. We are seeing such succession now, of course, but we are also clearly seeing the beginning stages of a more complex, uncertain process of elite replacement in the spheres of politics and culture.

Around Trump, much more than the first time, a new elite is coalescing. In the White House, tech lords like Musk, Republican vassals like JD Vance, tribal chieftains like RFK Jr. In the cultural sphere, the situation is even more fluid, because the structure of culture itself is: podcasters, editors of online publications, intellectuals, policy entrepreneurs, all contending for influence and position.

The result is that we have, more genuinely than in many decades, two rival elites: an ossified liberal establishment, staid, defensive, but as yet with significant power, and a populist insurgency, dynamic, confident, but still in turbulent flux, with no one's future certain past the middle of next week. Over here, Ezra Klein is interviewing a credentialed academic ("What are three books you would recommend to the audience?"). Over there, Bari Weiss is interviewing Marc Andreessen ("And now for a lightning round").

So who are the real elite? Behind that lies a further question: What do we mean by elite? We speak about the liberal elite, for instance, and I include myself among it, but how many of us really matter? I think of Teddy Wayne's novel Loner, about a Harvard student—suburban, upper-middle-class, a child of professionals who's destined to become another—and his obsession with a classmate from Manhattan's upper crust. That pretty much defines the social landscape at the most selective schools, and among the classes they produce: a mass of educated schleppers ("the elite") peeping through the window at a ruling coterie (the real elite) they'll never join or even know.

The same question—who really matters?—can be asked about the sectors relative to one another. There is an elite in the media, define it how narrowly you will, and in entertainment, the arts, higher education, the nonprofit world, the consultant class: a lot of people talking, waving their arms, scribbling (like me, right now). Does any of it make a difference? Or is the course of the world decided by a thousand people in a hundred rooms—the people with money and actual power—or a hundred in ten, or maybe only ten in one? We don't know that either. Maybe we don't want to. Maybe the imprecision of "the elite" is exactly the concept's appeal. You can always fool yourself into believing that you're in it.

---

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/06/business/claudine-gay-harvard-corporation-board.html