The 'Intellectual' President and His Allies

James Taranto wrote a thought-provoking piece that appears in The Wall Street Journal:

The lefty intellectual resents successful businessmen and conservatives because they threaten his own sense of superiority. Wealthy businessmen's material success is a mark of higher status than the professor or journalist's mere affluence. Conservative politicians act as if the lefty intellectual is not morally superior. In addition, conservative intellectuals challenge his sense of cognitive superiority. Within journalism and academia conservatives are smarter than liberals on average, because the former are those who have managed to succeed despite going against the grain ideologically.

Left-liberal intellectuals, then, fail to appreciate the intellectual shallowness of the president's class-warfare rhetoric because it seduces them by reinforcing their own superiority over competing elites.