Sowell's 1996 book, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, remains relevant. America's election was surely a rebellion against our moral and intellectual betters.
PJ O'Rourke: The Revolt Against the Elites And the limits of populism
Intelligentsia Elegy - American intellectuals are at odds with the workings of democracy.:
You would think that a free society would give full expression to the intelligentsia’s virtues. Yet, somehow our own intelligentsia, lacking any serious need for moral courage, has managed to concentrate in itself the worst aspects of its Russian cousins: sanctimony without sacrifice; obsession with egalitarian social justice that “paralyzes the love of and interest in truth”; hatred of its own history and the confusion of that hatred with a “passionate ethical impulse”; an exaggerated sense of its own rights and entitlements; contempt for the views of ordinary people; a transparently false, pretentious pose of acting only on the basis of undisputed facts and disinterested principle. If in the Soviet case we see a servile intelligentsia crouching defensively against an all-powerful totalitarian police state, in the United States we see a different dynamic: a powerful, self-assured intelligentsia increasingly at odds with the workings of democracy.
