Ta-Nahesi Coates just defined it for all time. Since it would be impossible to excerpt his excellent piece and retain the sense of it, click the link. I'll add my thoughts.

"Elitism" is the charge leveled by rural whites against those who disdain their culture of grievance. I was frankly surprised that a man of Coates' background can understand this as clearly as he does, but perhaps it is not so surprising after all: he lived in Marion Barry's Washington, and the forces that drove Barry's candidacy are the same as those driving Sarah Palin's (and James Inhofe's, and half the School Board candidates of my tiny West Virginia home town, and any number of others). When a population feels persecuted, the key aspect of political appeal is not whether the politician is competent, honest, or qualified, but whether he is One Of Us. Cultures of grievance have a standard that is simple and binary.

Rural whites are never accused of this in public, but they have been nurturing such a culture for at least two generations. All the elements are present. There's the mythologizing of history: Palin's comment that "If the Pledge was good enough for the Founding Fathers, it's good enough for me" and the insistence by white evangelicals, in the face of all evidence, that the United States was founded on the Christian faith. There are the demands of redress for their suffering -- yep, the biggest beneficiaries of federal money are overwhelmingly red states with high populations of rural whites (21 of the top 25). There is the culture of honor, where machismo is highly prized (Tim Wise, in a piece linked by Coates, strikingly compares Bristol Palin's boyfriend with a gangsta rapper).

And, of course, the central definition of cultures of grievance is that they live in a constant state of affront. They revel in it, in fact. No one can read the exultant screeds penned this campaign season -- dealing with everything from Obama's bowling score, to his ill-considered (if quite accurate) "bitter" remarks, to the laughably manufactured "sexism" of his lipstick-on-a-pig comment and the beyond-ridiculous arugula flap -- without such revelry staring them right in the face.

So what is elitism? It's nothing at all. The charge of "elitism" is something: it is an expression of identity politics. The taboos Obama has broken are the taboos of white rural political-correctness. If any final proof of this were needed, consider that Sarah Palin's acceptance speech quoted Westbrook Pegler. The quote read "We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity." Innocuous enough; but who's Westbrook Pegler?

He's the guy who also wrote this, of Robert F. Kennedy: "[I] hope some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies."
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The other day I heard that ignorance and apathy are sweeping the country. I didn't know that, but I don't really care.

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The other day I heard that ignorance and apathy are sweeping the country. I didn't know that, but I don't really care.

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The other day I heard that ignorance and apathy are sweeping the country. I didn't know that, but I don't really care.

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The other day I heard that ignorance and apathy are sweeping the country. I didn't know that, but I don't really care.