O que são "elites"?

Uma passagem interessante sobre o assunto:

“Take the way the right has narrowed the meaning of elite, so that it’s more likely to be used to describe ‘liberal’ sectors like the entertainment industry, the media, and the academy than leaders of business or the military. It isn’t surprising that on Fox News, references to the business elite are outnumbered by almost 50-to-1. Yet when you look at British papers, whether the left-wing Guardian or the right-wing Telegraph, those proportions are reversed. British papers refer to the business elite about three times as often as to the media elite, which is pretty much the same thing you saw in American papers in the 1970s and 1980s, before the right’s campaign against the ‘elite liberal media’ went into high gear.” — Geoffrey Nunberg, Talking Right (2006).