BE honest, in the conservative lexicon, elitist = 'smarter than you'. Talk about class warfare. And as long as smart is a dirty a word as liberal, I want no part of an 'anti-elitist' position. The Jesuits taught me to demand intelligent involvement with the world.

Certain conservative intellectuals may have always been happy with the label of "elitist" but at the grassroots and political level, conservatives have tended to focus on "elitism" as a negative trait possessed by liberals and/or internationalists but not by them. Thus it was that Goldwater, Nixon, Agnew, Reagan and more could frequently invoke their opponents names as "elitists" without the slightest hint that there could be any positive connotation to the word. In fact, it was conservatives at the grass roots level ever bit as much as liberals, that have given the word "elitist" a bad name. In fact, I once wrote a letter that appeared in my fraternity alum magazine that the word "eltist" had been pushed off the cliff and could never regain any signifcant degree of respectability.

From the left, it might have been the "military elite" but from the right it was the "banking elite" or the "Eastern elite" or the "media elite."

I don't know what a boutique is. If we have them in this part of the country they are called something ele. Also, I've never had a subscription to the New Yorker, nor read it, so my credentials as a liberal are beginning to look suspect.

Ronald Reagan was elected via a populist movement, whether his campaign from the top level down was run on that theme or not. Many of Reagan's supporters were not only thrilled that he had gone to a somehwat obscure college, they would have been even happier if he hadn't attended college at all.