RICH HIPPIES REDUX. Some kid at the Starbucks must have given Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds some attitude, because the simple country lawyer from Yale is on about the "elites." He finds an article by fellow Tennessean Jack Neely who reports:

A Nashville man was convicted of ramming his SUV into a car purely because it had an Obama sticker on the bumper. A colleague of my wife’s endured a barrage of insults from men in a pickup truck on Pellissippi Parkway.

You will be unsurprised to learn Neely follows up by trying to understand the root causes of these gentlemen's anger, and that race is only mentioned, dismissively, about halfway down. More prominent reasons for the Vols' violent Obama rages include this: "He’s the first son of an immigrant to be elected president since 1832; Andrew Jackson was the last one." Yes, I'm sure the boys set around at night, denouncing Obama because he's the son of an immigrant like that bastard Andrew Jackson.

Ridiculous as this is, Perfesser Reynolds goes further with his own particular reading, which is that Obama is one of them no-'count elitists who look down on simple law-perfessin' folk such as himself:

Obama was also the favored candidate of the Gentry Class. Southerners and the Gentry Class don’t get along well, since...

...y'all lost the War?

...one of the key aspects of Gentry Class membership is looking down on Americans from Flyover Country in general, and the South in particular.

Yeah, I thought so. The Perfesser also throws in a link to one of his old baw-haw-Howell-Raines posts, about how Southerners who were liberalized by the civil rights struggle suffer from a "neurosis."

And to think, this guy was only a short time ago trying to convince us that the Tea Parties are racially integrated. The election must be getting close.

The Perfesser's got another, too, in which he asserts that "the main problem with the 'new elite' is that they’re not an elite at all. That is, they aren’t particularly smart, or competent." Though in an earlier, similar rant he mentioned Nancy Pelosi and David Brooks, here he doesn't say who specifically he means by this -- I guess "person who also lives in a big house but disagrees with me politically" probably covers it. (I haven't seen the Perfesser say anything positive about a liberal in years. Remember when he used to be nice to Oliver Willis? No more; the groovy TP revolution is too important.)

Later he adds a reader email which he presumably thinks makes his point:

I am an elite anti-elitist Tea Partier and I made my first protest signs way back in March 2009. I’m a Yale [BA, Philosophy], Columbia [MA, International Affairs] former Wall Street trader and risk manager who is just about done getting another masters...

The salt of the earth, the common clay! This fella explains that though he is flush with cash, degrees, and a string of poloponies, he's still cool because while the bad elitists "think (erroneously) that they know better what we should be doing with our time," he's the right kind of elitist, because he's going Galt, he's "ornery," and he wants to elect Republicans who won't try and tell people what to do, man. Then we'll be free!

Once upon a time a rich guy had to dress like a dirty hippie and otherwise conceal his wealth in order to insinuate himself with the groovy revolution. Now he can just send the rabble an email of support from his penthouse. Well, if we can't have honesty or consistency, at least we can have a more streamlined hypocrisy.

UPDATE. "I can't wait for the next NRO cruise," says monkey.dave in comments, "when we can listen in while grizzled men of toil Glenn Reynolds and John Derbyshire discuss 'Dale Earnhart Jr vs Jimmie Johnson' over a gruelling round of shuffleboard."