You want elites? We got ’em.
18th September 2008
Lileks is in fine form today.
The term “elitist” does not mean a smart person with an area of expertise. It means a person who occupies a narrow stratum of society, usually academic – although people in think-tanks who view the world through steepled fingers qualify as well – whose Olympian perspective is usually predicated on a set of assumptions about people tinged with equal parts indulgent condescension and faint amusement, as an anthropologist might bring to the study of a Cargo Cult. It also confuses proximity to the Washington Monument with access to truth.