Of course all this could sound rather ‘conspiracy-minded’, when saner folk are more ‘coincidence-minded’ or ‘cock-up-minded’. I don’t actually regard it as just a matter of master plans – and not at all a matter of master plans of the vast, ancient, all-encompassing, omnipotent, monolithic, occult, extra-terrestrial etc varieties. But for now I’ll leave the models of merely quasi- or partly- conspiratorial media control to the Glasgow Media Group, uncle Noam Chomsky and all.

Well they are about all, actually, as far as I have been able to discover without current Athens credentials. If anyone can recommend any reasonably rigorous readings in sociology, psychology – or whatever – dealing with informal, distributed, unconscious, emergent, or otherwise non-smoky-room-based group action (‘quasi-conspiracy’) in the media or anywhere else, please please speak now. I don’t really include 70s-vintage Marxian a prioricities about class action since these seem to lack microfoundations – and for the most part empirical rigour. I am, though, willing to have my mind changed on that, and indeed – to seat myself more firmly on my high epistemic horse – on anything else.

No, you just have to be sufficiently powerful*, really. I’d say ‘Elite’ is more or less a mealy-mouthed way of saying ‘ruling class’ – updated to sound more meritocratic (don’t get me started on ‘meritocratic’) and less Marxian. ‘Intellectual elite’ is kinda metaphorical or analogical, if it means much at all.——————————————————————————————-

*No smart remarks, please, about power corrupting (fostering perfidy?), nor of the need for ruthlessness (perfidy?) in getting it. That would, according to Pollyanna Chris, be paranoid-conspiracism – which, as the sound of the words tells you, is bad. It has nothing to do with paranoia though, and doesn’t imply any imputation of conspiracy, so feel free to substitute your own wooly folk-sociological sneer term.

Hint: if your sneer comes under scrutiny, you can always make it seem more plausible by narrowing its scope on an ad hoc basis. Never mind that this will probably undermine your wider point – with any luck that won’t be widely noticed or remembered. Suggested method: claim to have used a special meaning of a term, e.g. ‘populism’, or ‘communist’, whereby it covers only that subpopulation which conforms to your generalisation (e.g. pitchfork-wielding morons, well-informed supporters of Stalin). Ideally, you can turn any sentence into a tautology by pretending that the predicate is also part of the subject (‘Islamists are evil’ is tautologous as long as you are willing to assume that no-one non-evil can count as an Islamist).

This is not ideal if anyone is paying attention, not only because you reach the unassailable heights of tautology only insofar as you remove substantial content, but also because the appeal to idiosyncratic usage tends to be rather unconvincing. The latter problem at least can be mitigated if you start with a term having no clear meaning, like ‘inherent perfidy of elites’. Readers will tend to charitably assume a plausible reading, given the intended scope (in this case, candidates for basic tenet of all or most ‘anti-elite’ popular movements). This will leave plenty of room for plausibly finessing the point later. You can just interpret your candidate as a sufficiently implausible tenet (ignoring the fact that this makes it a less plausible candidate too), for sneering to become acceptable. In this case, an interpretation like ‘a theory that every member of an [=any?] elite is, necessarily, perfidious’ might be sufficiently overstated, especially if ‘perfidious’ is read as entailing a strong tendency to self-conscious betrayal of acknowledged loyalties, and ‘necessarily’ is given the syntactically-indicated scope.

“I do sort of wonder what is left of populism to which the name can sensibly be applied, if you’re going to steer clear of anti-intellectual appeal to gut checks and the theory that every member of any elite has, of his nature, a strong tendency to consciously betray acknowledged loyalties.”

And still – what paranioia? What conspiracy?