The comparison with language is a great one! Of course, we have a similar phenomenon in this country with Received Pronunciation - though none of the UK dialects of English are called anything other than English (albeit "poor" or "ungrammatical" English), except on occasion for Scots, but that's as much a political as a linguistic distinction.
I suppose "those in power" may not always mean "those in political power". Even most royalists wouldn't claim that the queen's reading tastes are by definition elite - indeed, Alan Bennett wrote a novella based around the assumption that she is an unsophisticated reader. I would guess that Obama's reading Franzen did his ratings at least as much good as the author's - and I would lay a small bet that David Cameron has his holiday reading chosen by a focus group. But there are other elites, and I think it's true to say that the Modernists and their literary heirs stormed the ivory towers early, along with the editorships of places like the TLS and NYRB and the reviews pages of the Sunday papers, and that their heirs are still very well entrenched and have done a good job at confusing their particular tastes with Taste.
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I suppose "those in power" may not always mean "those in political power". Even most royalists wouldn't claim that the queen's reading tastes are by definition elite - indeed, Alan Bennett wrote a novella based around the assumption that she is an unsophisticated reader. I would guess that Obama's reading Franzen did his ratings at least as much good as the author's - and I would lay a small bet that David Cameron has his holiday reading chosen by a focus group. But there are other elites, and I think it's true to say that the Modernists and their literary heirs stormed the ivory towers early, along with the editorships of places like the TLS and NYRB and the reviews pages of the Sunday papers, and that their heirs are still very well entrenched and have done a good job at confusing their particular tastes with Taste.