The greatest description I've ever seen of our cognitive elites

From The Australian:

In the ’90s, however, The New Yorker became one of the pet publishing projects of Tina Brown, an astute celebrity-hunter and trendsetter, and its tone shifted overnight. Brown understood that the old Left had pretty well died as an organised force, but that a vague tincture of self-righteous leftism had permeated the professional classes so thoroughly as to have become the new cultural default position. You didn’t have to belong to a union or have suffered at any point in your life to make fun of suburban social conservatism or to ridicule the attitudes of your presumed intellectual inferiors. And somehow this ironical attitude could be reconciled with the archest moral hauteur, a tone of voice that, magically, was capable of being turned on and off like a tap.

(Hat tip: James Bowman)