The academic concept of Elite Panic is actually more about how wealthy elites view mutal aid activities (communities helping themselves to survive - people helping people outside of state assistace programs) during times if crisis.

It turns out that in multiple real world disaster examples elites see humans self-organising as a direct threat that needs to be combatted with state forces of organization - such as police and military intervention.

This is because Elite Panic is really about a kind of fear that the poorer classes are going to use disasters as an excuse to kill the nearest rich person (rather than act with any sense of shared humanity or community in mind).

In response Elites tend to demand that police/governments shoot “looters” and anyone that isn’t official basically. Elites demand forms of “Command and Control” fascism in disasters because they’re paranoid and fearful of poor people.

That’s basically the academic concept/theory under the name “Elite Panic”. They get very twtchy, demanding, and needy during disasters, projecting their paranoia and spending most of the time demanding state action like an over indulged Karen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_panic

Behind the Bastards did an episode about it:

https://youtu.be/_j9L2ppuANc