Donald Trump is back, and so is his mouth.

Since he announced his presidential candidacy in mid-June, the fast-talking billionaire’s unique way with words has drawn as much attention as his policy proposals. Dissections of his speaking style have varied. Some commentators have taken a scientific approach. The popular linguistics website 

, for example, is probably the only place 

 by the likes of “weighted log-odds-ratio, informative Dirichlet prior,” which they did in September. In October, the 

 that concluded that Trump spoke at a fourth-grade level, the lowest of all major candidates for president. (The jury, however, is still out on the 

Most outlets and blogs, though, haven't bothered with the fancy science, opting instead to poke fun at Trump’s speech on simpler grounds. In particular, these critics seem to take special glee in mocking Trump’s use of the term 

. For evidence, think about all the headlines that scrolled past your Twitter feed this summer, like this one from 

“If You Don’t Click on This Classy Post, You Are a Loser and a Moron.”

 Other participants in the surprisingly bipartisan cackling squad include 

 (“Waiting for a ‘Classy’ Trump Presidency”); 

 (“The 8 Funniest Lines from Donald Trump’s Classy, Major, Quality Presidential Campaign Launch”); 

 (“Meet Donald Trump’s Super Classy Cabinet”); 

 (“Trump Tops His Ultra-Classy Debate Performance by Suggesting Megyn Kelly’s on the Rag”); 

 (“Donald Trump Steals Jeb Bush’s Tax Plan, Makes It Classier, More Luxurious”); 

 (“Is Donald Trump a Classy Conservative — or the Classiest?”); 

 (“Not Classy: Donald Trump Calls Fox News Critic in Wheelchair a ‘Loser’ Who ‘Just Sits There’), and so on. The list is longer than a stretch limousine from the ’80s.

This isn’t the first time that Trump has been dinged for his overuse of the c-word. In 2011, in a more measured diss befitting the 

Timothy Egan scolded would-be candidate Trump for his boorishness and birtherism

. In the process, Egan made a long and remarkably astute comparison to another turgid billionaire-turned-politician, Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. “Trump and Berlusconi revel in all those things your mother said not to do,” wrote Egan. “They’re crude, obnoxious, boastful and bullying.” Refusing to pull his punches, Egan came to a devastating conclusion: “They are the opposite of classy.”

You get the idea. While pundits of all persuasions are having a laugh at Trump’s expense, for liberal critics of Trump, 

 has evolved into a perfectly ironic mock, nestled somewhere in the drawer between “bringing democracy” and “religious freedom bill.” The long, hot summer of Trump had me thinking: what does it mean to be 

 modifies the word “class.” According to the 

’s first record of it comes from the dedication to the 1868 British comedy 

. In his note, the play’s author, Henry James Byron, attempts to defend his fans from snobby judgment. “Although [

] is to a certain extent ‘classy,’ I can assure those critics who think London and provincial audiences care only for sensation and extravagance … that it ‘went’ (to use an actor’s phrase) with remarkable effect.”

 seemed to have been confined to Victorian England, possibly just London. The next work to include it was a novel, 

, a cheeky report about life as a young single woman abroad. The book’s author, Sara Jeannette Duncan, was actually Canadian, but she had been living in the city. In the story, one of the narrator’s hosts invokes 

 to question why the narrator doesn't join up with a group of people (“not classy enough, eh?”). Next up was an 1892 volume of the status-centric London literary magazine 

 magazine of its day. Among its offerings is an essay titled “Creatures of Transition,” which takes on the task of dissecting the latest generation. Among the exotic creatures of 

 She is “married to a man much older than herself,” or is at least independently wealthy. She “makes no puddings, mends no stockings, and visits not the sick,” but is “

In the United States, the word’s debut in print appears to be in an 1890 issue of the 

. It’s limited to a groan-inducing zinger that involves a character named “Classy Cuss,” but that seems to be it. According to 

Brigham Young University’s Google Books corpus

, there weren’t any other mentions of the term in an American publication in the 1890s.

Though there seem to have been only a handful of mentions of 

 in the first decade of the century, the turn of the twentieth century was looking up for the scrappy new modifier. In 1901, 

 was given its first big audience on Broadway in W. Clyde Fitch’s play 

. It seems like just the adjective Fitch was waiting for, which may explain why it was uttered no less than nine times in the “satirical portrait of manners,” 

 the production. The next sighting may have been in 

 about the lifestyles of New York’s rich and obnoxious. A group of aristocrats are described as “exceedingly ‘classy’; they affected to regard all the Society of the city with scorn, and had their own all-the-year-round diversions — an open-air horse show in summer, and in the fall fox-hunting in fancy uniforms.”

 began to appear in advertisements, suggesting that the word had oozed into the mainstream and middle class, at least in certain areas. The Alan-Higgins Wall Paper Company of Worcester, Massachusetts, advertised its “Classy Wall Papers” in 

a 1908 issue of the quirky, Aurora, New York-based literary magazine 

. Between its reporting and advertisements, 

in a different Boston-based footwear trade journal, 

, companies that advertised the classiness of their goods included manufacturers from Webster, Lynn, Campello, North Adams, and other towns throughout the Bay State.

A Massachusetts connection seems to loom large here. Playwright Fitch — who was a reputed paramour (and confirmed friend) of London resident Oscar Wilde — had graduated from Williams College in Williamstown. Between these multiple connections, the early 

 reference, and the close cultural and transport links between Boston and London, it seems like a decent possibility that the long and winding road to 

However it made its way to the new world, 

 was definitely sticking around. Between the first decade of the century and the period between 1910 and 1920, the Google Books corpus records an increase in mentions of the term from 192 to 1,045. In a 1914 article in the U.S. Navy’s 

 is on clear display. In a recap of a sailor’s ball held in Vallejo, California, the author marveled at the “classy music, classy flowers, classy programs, classy punch, classy eats and last, but not least, a real CLASSY crowd.” 

 was used in its original form. If you doubt this, allow me to counter with an excerpt from 

a Hall and Oates concert review published in the 

. In the review, John Rockwell concluded that the band’s sound “may not often rise to the heights of celebratory release, but it is genuinely classy pop music.” If a rock critic — the most jaded, sarcastic creature working in letters — could bestow the term on notorious smooth rockers Hall and Oates, I think we can agree that 

The late ’80s was a very classy time in America. A younger, less-scowlier Trump published not one, but two bestsellers within just a few years, 

 (1990). The culinary tastes of President George H. W. Bush earned pork rinds that most improbable of adjectives in 

: “Suddenly, Pork Rinds Are Classy Crunch.” 

To take one random but representative example, the personals section in the 

, a southern California lifestyle magazine, featured multiple ads that were either seeking a classy woman or were posted from self-described classy women. Two typical posts:

Introvert, feminine, redhead, 43, 5’2”, intelligent, classy, sexy, sense of humor, sometimes shy Ph.D. A brain for business and a bod for sin. Seeks to share romance and friendship. Photo/note.

Dynamic, successful, adventurer, business professional, 40s, 5’11”, with varied interests and a broad comfort zone (black tie or jeans), seeks intelligent, classy, humorous, special lady, 30–40, to share soft heart, tenderness, and travel. Warm, honest relationship with possible commitment. A note/photo/phone could open new horizons for us both.

Judging from the magazine’s distribution area and advertisers, which included luxury car dealers, plastic surgeons, home-remodeling companies, and other predators on the insecurities of the status-minded, we can infer that its target audience was affluent strivers. The term shows up as well in personals in similar lifestyle publications across the country, including 

 was still a straightforward, positive word among the country’s middle or upper-middle class. And yet.

Classy has become the yacht of adjectives.

 “is kind of a weird word,” Betsy Rymes, a linguistic anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me during a phone interview. “People have two ideas about the word ‘classy.’ The first is that it’s sort of somebody who has class or seems high-class. The other, which seems like it’s gotten so saturated with sarcasm and irony, is used just as often to mean the opposite, like super-slutty or tasteless.”

How did it come to this? I pestered a number of linguists and discourse-watchers to help me sort it out. None could point me to the exact moment when 

 split off to Ironyville, but they had some good theories as to how it might have happened.

The process is pretty uncomplicated. “When something like ‘classy’ gets associated with a divisive figure like Trump, it tends to take on meanings associated with Trump as well,” says Nic Subtirelu, a Ph.D. candidate in applied linguistics at Georgia State. “Words are not simply namers of things; they also end up taking on the property of those things as well.”

“Words are not simply namers of things; they also end up taking on the property of those things as well.”

As the public, conspicuously tanned face of 

, Trump brought new attention to an unremarkable old term

 Consequently, even by the ’90s there were stirrings that all was not sunshine and monogrammed cufflinks for the word. The publication of a Trump spoof called 

The Really, Really Classy Donald Trump Quiz Book

(1990) may have been the first sign that the yacht of all adjectives was heading into rough seas. Six years later, an issue of 

 magazine lamented a certain Manhattan real estate developer’s “classy decision to pollute our local ecosystem with a renovated Gulf and Western Building.”

For the most part, the ironic use of classy seems to have been limited to a select band of scolds

 In 2004, however, classy had its mainstream moment

 was released, introducing American moviegoers to Ron Burgundy, the dapper, dense 1970s newsman played by Will Ferrell. Every evening, while his favorite bottle of Scotch sat nearby, the mustachioed TV anchor signed off his evening newscast by commanding his audience to “stay classy.” The success of the movie, which came out near the peak of Ferrell’s popularity, may be a big reason why 

 became the lazy putdown we know today. One strong proponent of this theory is 

 writer Samer Kalaf, who charted the signature phrase’s rise in a 2013 article, “

 In the post, Kalaf complains that “‘Stay classy’ is a tool of smarm for dumb people. Well, 

 people. It says, ‘I, a person with class, think your action does not have class, though I will not deign to explain why not. Also, I saw that movie everyone else saw.’”

Still, despite its evolution into sarcasm, many people still use 

 with sincerity. Another pop culture example is informative: on the 

 reality TV show franchise, there’s no higher calling than being considered classy. It may seem counterintuitive, but the fact that 

 is being aspired to actually means that, at least for some people, the word has retained its power, says Lauren Squires, an Ohio State University linguist and author of the 2014 journal article “

.” “The way in which these women — mostly American women — use this word has to come from their sense of its normative use,” says Squires.

 “means something about behavior: behavior that accords with a person’s station in life, which is one of privilege and politeness,” Squires told me in an interview. However, what constitutes acting 

 is “always being negotiated,” she says. “It’s a term that’s being fought for in the face of transgressions against it. I think to be ‘classy’ for a woman who lives in the Upper East Side is probably different for what it means for a woman in Beverly Hills with money or for a woman in Atlanta with money. It probably means something different to men than for women,” as well.

A quick survey of pop culture confirms that 

-classy is far from dead. On August 31, 2015, the day after this year’s MTV Video Music Awards, the popular New York hip-hop radio station HOT97 

Was #NickiMinaj being classy or trashy for calling out #MileyCyrus at the #MTV #VMAs?

There’s no irony here. For HOT97 (and likely for much of their Twitter audience, which numbers over 650,000), 

 has much the same meaning as it did for nineteenth-century British playwrights. Like the Housewives, the author of this tweet reveals that their perception of 

 is still positive, almost affirmational.

If Trump stays in the limelight long enough — four more years, perhaps? — he just might ruin classy for good.

 shouldn't rest on its (surely gold-encrusted) laurels. If enough negative associations accrue, a word may undergo “pejoration,” says UNC sociolinguist Connie Eble, using the term for what happens when a word evolves into something with bad connotations. As an example, she cites the Southernism “bless your heart,” which has evolved from an earnest expression of gratitude into a sharp-elbowed passive-aggressive insult. “I'm still utilizing it the old way,” she says, but her students definitely aren't. “I said to my class, ‘bless your heart,’ and they started laughing.”

If Trump stays in the limelight long enough — four more years, perhaps? — he just might ruin 

 for good. “People may not want to be referred to as ‘classy’ if it means they show characteristics of Trump,” says Eble.

’s breakaway into sarcasm has less to do with word dilution than it does with changing attitudes. “I don’t really think it’s a matter of when the word ‘classy’ changed,” she says. “People just use language in a more ironic sense.”

At least, they have been. She does add that some of her younger students seem to be way more earnest than their predecessors. “They’re more into starting nonprofits, things that people in their 30s are more cynical about.” In the view of this thirtysomething, that’s totally classy.

 works in academic publishing in Asheville, North Carolina, and is

19134005484_ddc6cb8873_o (1).jpg

The long, hot, summer of Trump prompts a question about one of the billionaire’s favorite words: what does it mean to be classy?

In the age of Trump, what does it mean to be “classy”?

Though he won the North Carolina governorship in November 2012 with a pledge of centrist moderation, in the less than two years he had been in office, a relentless stream of criticism had washed away the Republican’s bipartisan goodwill. His positions on teacher pay, unemployment benefits, voter ID laws, and abortion rights — to list but a handful of his trespasses — provoked tremors of outrage that radiated far beyond the Old North State’s borders. Six months into his term, no less than a 

an unsigned op-ed with a declarative title: “The Decline of North Carolina.”

In July 2014, McCrory stumbled into a chance to strike back. The tenure of North Carolina’s poet laureate had expired the previous month. While the position is ceremonially appointed by the governor, the nitty-gritty of selection is traditionally left up to the North Carolina Arts Council, the state’s arts agency. A special committee organized by the Council does the heavy lifting, soliciting applicants, evaluating them, and making a recommendation — in effect, only bothering the governor for a rubber stamp. Presumably, the leader of the nation’s tenth most-populous state has more important things to do.

On a Friday afternoon, a time slot typically reserved for news dumps of information you don’t want the press to cover, 

McCrory’s office issued a press release introducing the state’s new poet laureate

: Valerie Macon, a state employee with the Department of Health and Human Services and the author of two works of poetry, both self-published.

Established North Carolina poets were livid. A Durham-based literary magazine publisher 

 that the selection “was an act of utter arrogance,”

 and a former laureate complained to the 

 that the governor “just didn’t give a damn.” This may not be an unfair assessment. 

 revealed that McCrory's staff had requested information about selection protocol two days before Macon's appointment, but declined to act on it.

The governor may not have predicted the strong reaction to his announcement — the selection process for a poet laureate isn’t exactly known as a political “third rail” — but he seemed to relish a newfound opportunity to answer his critics. The seven poets who had served since the position was created in 1948 may have been distinguished, 

Gov. McCrory conceded, but this time, the door would be open to “people that aren’t always a part of the standard or even elite groups that have been in place for a long time."

This pivot to populism wasn’t an accident. In doing so, McCrory deployed the oldest tactic in the book of political warfare: elite bashing.

Pity the poor, unloved elite. Everywhere you turn, they’re getting whupped. Nary a day goes by that you don’t hear about their evil plans to bring ruination to our once-great nation. It’s hard to think of any other group as routinely and unquestioningly pilloried by commentators across the political spectrum, with the possible exceptions of ISIS and the Kardashian family.

Pity the poor, unloved elite. Everywhere you turn, they’re getting whupped.

Talk radio tirades against culture-making Hollywood mandarins and the 

-reading Prius drivers who worship them are a cliché by now — ditto attacks against the “liberal media” — but elite-pummeling isn’t restricted to pundits on the right. In books and blogs and TV, elites are being disdained and disowned by talking heads on the left, too.

, among a bountiful supply of examples. Stories on reliably liberal online outlets like 

“How Inbred Elites Are Tearing America Apart,”

“Elites’ Strange Plot to Take over the World,”

“Bush Is the King of All Elite, Effete Snobs.”

The elites, we are to believe, are everywhere, lurking in the shadows as they plot society’s ruination. 

 In Jacobin, the feisty socialist magazine upstart, 

one recent (and representative) essay lamented “the near-total capture of the political system by elites.”

 Another HuffPo title reminds us that no one is safe from their clutches, not even little league and AYSO teams: 

“Youth Sports: For Everyone, or Elites?”

Peak elite-hate may have actually been reached in July 2014, when 

 published William Deresiewicz’s cover-story essay blasting the Ivy League

. In the article — one of the most-shared pieces in TNR’s history — the former Yale instructor bemoaned that the Ivies are “exacerbating inequality, retarding social mobility, perpetuating privilege, and creating an elite that is isolated from the society that it’s supposed to lead.” The following month, Deresiewicz released a book. Its title? 

Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and The Way to a Meaningful Life

All of this handwringing raises an obvious question: what actually makes an “elite”?

One place to start, perhaps, is the reliable stereotype from American popular culture: a WASP, probably of old-line stock, probably from America’s northeast, resplendent in topsiders and blue blazers, with second homes on Martha's Vineyard or the Hamptons, perhaps speaking in a Boston Brahmin accent. Think of Thurston Howell III, or the characters in books like 

This milieu is the setting of Columbia sociologist Shamus Khan’s 2012 book, 

Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School

, an ethnography of the prestigious New Hampshire boarding school. The “elitist” tropes aren’t entirely true: Khan, himself an alumnus of Pakistani and Irish heritage, observes that St. Paul’s has been drifting toward meritocracy, resulting in “an intentional diversity that few communities share or can afford.” Still, while the school may be shedding some of its aristocratic traits, its role as proving ground for the future wealthy and high-achieving seems to remain in force. Within this context, "elite" seems to be objectively descriptive. It’s not a slur.

In foreign affairs, the traditional definition of “elite” has been more straightforward. With so many countries in the grip of dictatorship, oligarchy, or kleptocracy, elites have been easy to identify: they’re the ones with money to spend and, frequently, immunity from the law.

But to define an “elite” in the United States is a slipperier business. An American journalist may not have much in terms of pay or wealth, but their influence on public policy, culture, and discourse is probably bigger than, say, the wealthy owner of a Dallas car dealership. Who is an elite? The journalist? The car dealer? Both? Neither?

The answer depends on how we delineate classes in American life. An “elite” in the eyes of a liberal is not necessarily the same thing as an “elite” in the eyes of a conservative. On the left, “elite” status is largely presented as an outgrowth of economic status (oftentimes inherited or earned on the backs of others’ work). On the right, elitism is often portrayed as less an outgrowth of economic wealth than one of cultural choice, a marker that differentiates the “in” crowd from red meat, “Duck Dynasty” America.

In this way, we can understand how, in 2004, George Walker Bush — millionaire scion of a political dynasty — was beloved by conservatives as folksy and authentic, while John Forbes Kerry, similarly privileged as his Republican rival, was seen as an out-of-touch “elite” prone to haughty gaffes (as in Maureen Dowd’s famous misquote of Kerry trying to win over fans of stock car racing: 

“Who among us doesn’t like NASCAR?”

No one argued this point more forcefully than Joe Bageant, author of the political cult classic 

Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War

. Bageant, a self-professed “leftneck” (i.e. a leftist redneck) spent the last years of his life trying to explain to the liberal clerisy — in vain — why so many working-class white people ostensibly “vote against their best interests,” to use the parlance common in circles that insist, rather presumptuously, that they instead know what is in the best interest of said people. This utter social disconnect, Bageant argued, explains the alienation of so many working class whites from a Democratic Party they would seem to naturally embrace. Bageant can’t really blame them:

Yet the liberal elite — and verily they are an elite group — don’t think of themselves as elitist. Overwhelmingly white and college educated, they live among clones of themselves. As far as they know, American life is about money, education, homeownership, and professionally useful friends. …

Most of the time the true middle and upper classes are scarcely aware that real working people exist. To wit: It is one helluva comment on the American class system when I can get paid to write and speak publicly about the 45 million or so working Americans who are all around us, citizens of this nation who have been fixing America’s cars and paving its streets and waiting on its tables. As a perfectly decent liberal New York City editor told me: “It is as if your people were some sort of exotic, as if you were from Yemen or something.”

The historian Christopher Lasch made a similar case in his 1994 book titled — what else? — 

. He was especially mad at the academy. “[Members of the academic left] speak, with irritating complacency, as members of a professional establishment that has given up the attempt to communicate with a broader audience, either as teachers or as writers,” Lasch wrote. “They defend their incomprehensible jargon as the language of ‘subversion,’ plain speech having been dismissed as an instrument of oppression.” Even Noam Chomsky, living demigod of the left, has railed against what he sees as the irrelevance of many intellectual class enthusiasms, in particular deconstruction and postmodern theory.

Not that the right takes any less advantage of the cheap spoils afforded by elite resentment. After all, they gave the world such colorful descriptors as “latte-drinking liberals,” “coastal elites,” and “limousine liberals,” among other chuckle-worthy epithets. 

A 2004 ad by the conservative “Club for Growth” 

reeled off these slurs as if calling numbers at some sort of liberal-stereotype bingo: “I think Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, 

-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs.”

In 2003, Bernard Goldberg, the former CBS newsman-turned-mainstream media critic, 

Arrogance: Rescuing America from the Media Elite

. In the years since, unironic use of the term “media elite” has become something of a shibboleth for the right. In his bestselling screed 

 that “the elite snobs who dominate the mainstream media” made targets of the Tea Party as soon as they saw the conservative protesters wore “sweatshirts and baseball caps.” A few years earlier, in his book 

 that “the elite media think the degeneration of American popular culture is beneath them and not very important.” Similar notes peal forth from his Fox News colleague 

 that “within the rule book of the intellectual elite, no one who believes in God is to be taken seriously.”

 article titled “Obama’s Coddled Elites,” Michael Knox Beran grumbled

 about Mitt Romney’s pummeling in eight of the country’s 10 wealthiest counties. “It was just possible, before the election, to imagine that the broken economy would incite the white-collar coastal squirearchy to put down the glass of Merlot and join forces with toothless Appalachia itself to restore fiscal sanity in Washington,” Beran writes, implying both that he’s not part of the elite and that he — a scholar at the Manhattan Institute, contributor to 

, and graduate of Columbia, Cambridge, and Yale Law School — wouldn’t dare drink something as pedestrian as Merlot (perhaps, as I do, he prefers Pinot Noir). The title of his 2010 book? 

Elite-bashing carries marketing currency. In March 2014, Fox News late-night host Greg Gutfeld published a book, 

Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You

. The work attempts to update the timeless accusations made by the likes of Goldberg and National Review staffers and graft them on to our age’s other cultural boogeyman, the hipster. “Being hip not only excuses the heinous — being heinous makes you hip,” writes Gutfeld, stretching to blame a preference for indie films and artisanal chocolate for the 

teen-idol treatment supposedly given to Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

 (To be fair, knocking both elites and hipsters probably is a sound formula for book sales.)

None of this even touches on politicians’ inexhaustible reliance on the elite card. In one recent noteworthy example, in 2014, the online biography of Virginia congressional candidate Dave Brat, the Tea Party-backed insurgent who defeated sitting House Republican Leader Eric Cantor, boasted that Brat “tested his rural values against the intellectual elite while at Princeton.” Never mind that he attended Princeton Theological Seminary, not Princeton University, or that during his campaign, Brat was a sitting professor of economics and former department chair at Randolph-Macon College.

The self-styled anti-elites, left and right, are a mixed bag. Some enjoy their own personality-driven TV shows, churn out books that top bestseller lists, or author cover stories in national magazines. Some are millionaires many times over. Some attended prestigious universities: Harvard (O’Reilly), Brown (Hayes), NYU (Hannity), Rutgers (Goldberg), Columbia (Lasch). Average they are not.

Whether they admit it or not, each conspicuous elite-basher comes from a privileged position. Even Bageant — who, after serving in Vietnam, attended college and carved out a firmly middle-class life for himself — acknowledged the advantages he had over the family and friends whose lives were the stuff of his writings. In a candid assessment, 

 “the problem is that today’s meritocratic elites cannot admit to themselves that they are elites.” Indeed, theirs is the posture of some bizarro-world Eugene Debs: “While there is an elite class, I am not in it.”

With apologies to Gutfeld, I propose that “elite” is a cultural equivalent of “hipster” — it’s something no one would admit to being, but surely exists in multitudes, since everyone seems to hate them. “Elites” are the inverse of “folks.” Both terms are used as coded messages to in-groups: the latter to signal those like us, the former to signal those evil others. Both are also vague and ultimately meaningless — rhetorical flourishes meant to paint the speaker as righteous — and reside in the same ballpark of banalities as “community,” perhaps the world’s next most self-aggrandizing term. “Elite” is the laziest slur in the book.

Who suffers from these internecine battles between the elite-disavowing class? Non-elites: anyone whose supposed interests are invoked as cover for whatever the loudest anti-elitist intends to do.

, calling the former Harvard student and professional man of letters out for his public self-flagellation. Deresiewicz’s position was not really new, but he was a recent and easy to deconstruct example of the elitist’s dilemma. 

In O’Connor’s article, “The New Privilege: Denouncing Your Privilege,” she wrote

 that “the elitists have developed a neat trick for reveling in their privilege while seemingly waving it off: elite populism, the practice of critiquing the privileged class to which you belong.”

Governor McCrory’s trick was especially cheap. Established poets, even if they are at the top of their field, are hardly basking in riches or celebrity-status perks. Given the dim commercial prospects of poetry, it’s a stretch to suggest poets are on par with CEOs, cable news talking heads, and the finite number of people with real influence or money — those who could objectively be judged as elites.

The only person to come out of McCrory’s debacle looking good was Macon, the would-be poet laureate. While justified in their anger, some of the more high-profile members of the state’s literary community seemed to prove the governor right, all but calling the self-published poet a hobbyist and a hack. The governor’s defenders launched into a predictable response of feigned outrage; 

creativity to call the offended poets “snobs.”

 Less than a week after her appointment, the 64-year-old Macon resigned as the state’s eighth official poet laureate. 

 that she didn’t want the controversy to detract from the role of the poet laureate. “I remain passionate about the mission of poetry to touch all people regardless of age, education, or social status,” Macon wrote. “They do not need a list of prestigious publishing credits or a collection of accolades … just the joy of words and appreciation of self-expression.” Valerie Macon may not be elite, but she's certainly thoughtful.

Who suffers from these internecine battles between the elite-disavowing class? Well, non-elites — that is, the working and middle classes, black and white, whose supposed interests are invoked as cover for whatever the loudest anti-elitist intends to do. The assumption being that they should yield to their righteous guardians, elite-basher be thy name.

It all seems rather — for lack of a better word — elitist.

 works in academic publishing in Asheville, North Carolina. Find him at 

Elites-Cover.jpg

“Elite” is the laziest slur in the book. Yet, on both the left and right, “elites” — however we define them — are getting whupped.

Adam Rosen