"Battlers" vs "Elites"

by Cathy Greenfield + Peter Williams

On the 11th of September, 2000 John Howard branded protests against the World Economic Forum as "unacceptable and unAustralian" (Age, 12 September 2000). This is of a piece with much of the rhetoric that characterises "Howardism." It is a rhetoric which asserts mainstreaming and Howard's battlers engaged in heroic struggles against privileged elites. Reference to some "elite" or other, and to "the mainstream" it is blocking becomes the rationale for policy after policy; their preamble, the means of making them intelligible, the means by which they are "sold" to journalists and thus to media audiences and thus to constituencies. Our aim is to register this increasingly pervasive rhetoric circulated through Australian media in the last six years or so and to note its contributory role to the effectiveness of "Howardism"; that particular version of neo-liberalism associated with the three Howard governments and their blend of economic fundamentalism, assimilationist social agendas, the steady privatization of capital and associated personal risk, and a nostalgic politics (Johnson 18).

This rhetoric of "elites" has been politically instated and has gained widespread cultural and media currency. Editorials, opinion journalism, cartoons, headlining practices, most effectively talkback radio, news and current affairs TV treatments of issues such as Hansonism, Aboriginal affairs, United Nations reports, social security recipients, immigration, and industrial relations repeatedly and routinely relay this rhetoric. It is a key part of the working-up and maintenance of a cultural terrain on which a wide range of current policy issues are having to be fought out, regardless of the combatants' position on the political spectrum.
In this cultural terrain, media are key players. One instance of the workings and consolidation of this terrain was media coverage of the Constitutional Convention. This was notable because it has been treated by some journalists and commentators as an instance of how democracy is currently operating as "a conversation among elites," and by some other journalists and commentators as an event that was "heady", "refreshing", "electrifying" and "a democratic adventure" (Carney "Unique exercise", "Is there a speaker") because it interrupted this "conversation among elites."

Another memorable but by no means exceptional example of the media currency of the rhetoric of elites comes from coverage of the1999 Republic vote and of the resounding defeat of the "yes" case. The "Opinion" page (Monday 8 November 1999, 15) presented readers of The Age with a mosaic of familiar positions: Tony Abbott's targetting of "the media" as ultimately unsuccessful purveyors of "elite" arguments in "The People Chose Both Queen and Country"; Phil Cleary's welcoming of "the great wisdom" of "the workers" in the face of the "elitist mantra...for a republic with a president appointed by Parliament"; Pamela Bone's diagnosis of the hatred of "elites" as a contributing factor to the defeat of the referendum; Andrew Robb's "Another Vote Against the Politics of Exclusion", written in terms of "the elites" vs "the people", from the position of his membership of an elite.

This newspaper opinion page is emblematic of the repeated use of the concept of "elites" and of Australia as divided into "elites" and "ordinary people," and of how this bifurcation is being used to organize people's understanding of things. In the case of the republic referendum, the volume of this analysis across all media was pretty much deafening. At such moments it became very hard to hear, or even to allow oneself to think of different accounts of, the Australian polity than this bifurcated view. Another such moment was the aftermath of the 1996 election, where this view of an Australia divided - symbolised by the accepted diagnosis of Keating and Keating supporters as "out of touch" - was relentlessly taken on board. The outcome was to effectively paralyse and publicly silence other analyses of the Howard Government's electoral victory and opposition to its platform, for quite a time.

Social elite theory

While Howardism is a recrudescence of it, social elite theory had never really gone away. It became routinized in the Cold War climate of the 1950s by sociologists and political scientists in particular from the USA. Bottomore notes the term "the elite" only become widely used in Europe in the late nineteenth century and in Britain and the USA in the 1930s with sociological theories of elites. The writings of Mosca and Pareto provide a basic definition:

"In every society there is, and must be, a minority which rules over the rest of society; this minority - the "political class" or "governing elite," composed of those who occupy the posts of political command and, more vaguely, those who can directly influence political decisions - undergoes changes in its membership over a period of time..." (Bottomore 12)

The argument that all societies must be divided into "a ruling minority and a majority which is ruled" (Bottomore 19), served to counter concepts of class (and with the idea of a changeable or circulating elite, specifically the idea of a stable ruling class), and to counter the socialist ideal of a future classless society. Social elite theory makes societies visible in terms of two strata, and simultaneously ushers in a blindness to other divisions, those which Marxism worked to make visible in terms of class, and feminism in terms of gender and sexuality, and historians in terms of "race" and culture and generation.

Boris Frankel, in a 1998 Arena article "elites and the Politics of Australian Nationalism", provides an excellent account of key exponents and sources of elite theory in Australia, with exactly this connection to "the unpopularity of class analysis" (32). For us, the point is not to return to ontological and teleological concepts of class where classes are invoked as social actors, but it is to think about what is lost when class, understood as nothing more nor less than classifications of social relations in which people are bound up in institutions and organizations, goes out of the picture. One way of putting it is that analysis in terms of "elites" loses the sense of related-ness which analyses in terms of class - though not only class analysis - puts in view. For example, treating enterprise managers as an elite conceives of them as separate or separable from the rest of the organization; but managers are not separate: they occupy a space within the social relations that make up organizations. It is elite theory's assumption of a foundational and inevitable division between a ruling minority and ruled majority that allows ATSIC to be presented as separable from "real" Aboriginals, rather than occupying a particular space within the social relations of Aboriginal communities.

Social elite theory is not simply a matter of an ideology which needs to be assessed in terms of validity or which needs to be seen through but a matter of a persuasive and effective, because tutelary, rhetoric whose status has to be challenged and its commonsense breached.

Outcomes: Policies and Expertise

The revived rhetoric of elites stops talk about populations in terms of classes. Hindess' work has taught us about the complexities of class analysis and the dangers of assuming class as objectively given by the structures of society. Yet class relations, as well as other categories of social relations of power, are imperative for thinking the outcome of the policies with which a neo-liberal government is transforming Australia.

These policy decisions and associated divisive battles that mark the successive Howard Governments make a long list: around native title, reconciliation, social security, the role of the ABC, the privatization of services, industrial relations, education, immigration, multiculturalism, anti-discrimination. In all these cases, arguments justifying the Government's legislation and positions have worked in large part by presenting their policies as representing the common sense and interests of "the mainstream" against the ideologically driven and superannuating interests of trendy elites (though not, interestingly, business and sporting elites). Meanwhile the intensifying inequalities in the social relations this array of policies oversees remain largely invisible to the analytical tools of "elites" and "battlers."

A second outcome of this rhetoric is its contribution to an increasing refusal of particular forms of "expertise" in a wide range of domains, perhaps most obviously in the popular disdain for parliamentary politicians and public bureaucracies (Hindess "Democracy and disenchantment"), also in the distrust and dismissal of, for example, the historical or legal expertise of academics. How this cynicism about "expert knowledge" is understood is important for how we conceptualise democracy.

It is the concept of knowledge that is held to distinguish elites in the late twentieth century: their status is not simply given by their occupation of posts of political command or influence, but through their role as intellectuals, through the defining feature of expertise. The key point is the way in which "expertise" is understood in the rhetoric of elites. Attributed to the "caffe latte set" or the "chattering classes," expertise is not a specific and technical acquisition but knowledge moralized and aestheticized. It is knowledge seen in the charismatic terms of an essence that is (unfairly) given to certain groups of people, and not others, and therefore enables those groups (the elites) to unfairly manipulate and upstage others. It is knowledge that is not authorised by, runs counter to, is different from, the every-day knowledge of the "ordinary person." Defined from this perspective rather than by other, positive criteria - such as its institutional or professional protocols and its differentiated knowledge-outcomes - this understanding of expertise licenses the "out-of-touch" thesis: a view that somehow intellectual workers are only entitled to use their knowledge if they are in a mystical relation of representation with "ordinary people."

There is, of course, a different way of understanding expertise: as the non-mysterious outcome of specific and available forms of education, and as technical rather than charismatic. Understanding expertise as technical rather than in terms of its putative authorship by elites also enables the crucial work of differentiating amongst kinds of expertise (for example, between straight econometrics as distinct from political economy's analysis of conditions and outcomes).

Privilege does accrue to forms of expertise; and our critical words about the "out-of-touch" thesis are not meant to let intellectuals off the hook as far as knowing about the diverse circumstances of those on whom the results of their analyses and arguments might at some point impact and on whom their incomes depend. However, democratic arrangements will not be furthered by foregoing the policy help of expertise through misunderstanding its limited character, which is what happens when particular forms of expertise are written off because they are collapsed with the revived Cold War political science and pop sociology concept of "elites." To be clear, expertise is not a representative knowledge: it is not a knowledge that represents interests, rather it is knowledge that allows those to whom it is made available to make assessments and formulate interests.

Our attention to the incidence of the rubric of "elites" and its populist alternative "the mainstream" has a straightforward aim: to draw notice to how these rubrics are inseparable from the propagating of the policies of Howardism; and to note the particular provenance of "elite theory." Howardism will pass but not without struggle, precisely the kind of struggles - over the complexities of and inequities currently inscribed in social relations of class and "race" and gender and sexuality and region, for example - it seeks to deny.

This is an edited extract of an article originally published in Southern Review: Communication, Politics & Culture 34.1 (2001), Mediating Democracy.
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NOTES

The choice is between various populist forms of democracy (understood in terms of a sovereignty of "the people") and democracy understood as a political technology (see Hindess Parliamentary Democracy; Hirst).

WORKS CITED

Abbott, Tony. "The people chose both Queen and country." The Age 8 Nov. 1999. 15.

Bone, Pamela. "OK, so I voted yes: an elitist confesses." The Age 8 Nov. 1999.15.

Bottomore, Tom. Elites and Society. Ringwood: Penguin, 1966.

Carney, Shaun. "Is there a speaker in the House?" The Age 3 Feb. 1998. A1, A4.

_______. "Unique exercise in democracy laced with feeling." The Age 14 Feb. 1998. 6.

Cleary, Phil. "Soon we'll have the republic we want," The Age 8 Nov. 1999. 15.

Frankel, Boris. "Elites... and the Politics of Australian Nationalism." Arena magazine 37 (1998): 29-34.

Hindess, Barry. "Democracy and Disenchantment." Australian Journal of Political Science 32.1 (1997): 79-92.

_______. Discourses of power: From Hobbes to Foucault. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.

_______. Parliamentary Democracy and Socialist Politics. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.

_______. Politics and Class Analysis. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987.

Hirst, Paul. Law, Socialism and Democracy. London: Allen & Unwin, 1986.

Johnson, Carol. Governing Australia: Keating to Howard. St.Lucia: UQP, 2000.

Robb, Andrew. "Another vote against the politics of exclusion." The Age 8 Nov. 1999. 15.