By elite I mean people who thought they were so much superior to everyone else (And they were!), that they'd left the beginners and inexperienced programmers out of the discussions and decisions. But guess what, high level people who make decisions aren't always the best programmers, so C++ won because they had better sales people and were more beginners and sales friendly.
By "Math", I mean that most functional books and tutorials used to only focus on physics or maths aspect of the language, or AI.. whereas the languages who seemed to have won the war (Think Perl, PHP at the time, or Python/Ruby) were much more practical in how the language can be used to solve day-to-day pragmatic problems.
I think it's changing.. and it's really nice to see amazing concepts from LISP in the mainstream/hipsters languages..