The Bruce Report

Once, it was a rare and much-coveted designation. Now, it’s a social disease that’s easier to contract than a case of Montezuma’s revenge from a greasy spoon.

Traditionally, “elite” (adjective) meant “exclusive”, that is: Suitable only for the very best, brightest, wealthiest, aristocratic, noble or accomplished among us. To be an “elite” (noun), therefore, was to be the cream of the crop – you know, a good thing. Today. . .well, not so much.

Writing in Slate a year ago, political commentator Jacob Weisberg observed the shifting definition of the word as a function of populist politics run amok. “Currently,” he wrote, “an elitist is someone who thinks the opinion of a minority should sometimes prevail over the opinion of a majority.”

What’s more, “It has the advantage of providing an escape hatch from the substance of issues by reframing them in cultural terms. Arguments for raising taxes, expanding health insurance, and fighting climate change are all met with by the rejoinder that some people should quit telling the rest of us how to live our lives.”

As Weisberg noted, the conceit is absurd, as people who deploy the word as an insult are, in most cases, similarly kissed by privilege: “In practice, conservatives are no less inclined than liberals to adopt superior stances or to tell people how to live their lives. Such hypocrisy is based on the construct of a pre-political state of nature, where we lived in abstract freedom until government arrived to limit and control us.”

Written like a true elitist, perhaps. But, then, it’s going around.

I notice, with some interest, that a few of the more popular, if still well-educated, Canadian newspaper columnists are lashing the word like whip.

In a screed provocatively entitled, “With Keystone, it’s Harvard vs. the heartland”, The Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente wrote recently, “These environmentalists don’t really care about safety matters such as oil leaks or possible pollution of the aquifers. It’s the oils sands they hate – the water-gulping, forest-devastating, carbon-spewing monster that’s despoiling Mother Earth.”

In other words, they are elites. Specifically, they are “the urban elites of Toronto and Vancouver” as opposed to “the kind of people who vote for Stephen Harper.”

Who knows what the college-educated scribbler, who holds an MA from the University of Toronto, really means by this? (Paradoxically, many elites don’t actually write very well). But, it is possible to infer from her characterization a fundamental bifurcation between the swelling ranks of principled snobs and the dwindling ones of the rank and file, even as it’s not possible to merit her notion with much credibility.

The Harper government recently labeled the mass of opposition against the Keystone project as “radical environmentalists”, foreign interlopers and their domestic dupes bent on destroying industry, gross domestic product, good jobs, apple pie and dear, old mother, herself.

In fact, a large constituency who wants the pipeline stopped includes truck drivers, office workers, farmers and homemakers who live and labour along its proposed route. They’re not elites, per se. But they can read and form opinions just as well. And, apparently, they don’t want to be poisoned or otherwise inconvenienced by an industry with tens-of-billions of dollars at its disposal for development.

Indeed, compared to them, how would we describe those who run the political offices and big banks responsible for juicing the monopolistic enterprises that ply Alberta’s tar sands with private capital and tax dollars purloined from the public purse?

What would we call the geologists, engineers, accountants, management consultants, and chief executive officers who will earn more money in their lifetimes from Big Oil than will a million “radical environmentalists” in theirs from donations?

Elite: “(Occasionally spelled élite) (Latin, electus – ‘chosen’) refers to an exceptional or privileged group that wields considerable power within its sphere of influence. Depending on the context, this power might be physical, spiritual, intellectual or financial.”

Yup. That sounds about right.

Alec Bruce is a Moncton-based writer on politics, economics and current affairs. Check out his other blog here at Atlantic Business Magazine (ABMOnline): The Uneasy Chair.

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