"Intellectual," especially when one applies the label to themselves, is not a synonym for "smart" or even "intelligent."

Most Americans admire smart people. Many of the people they know are smart. They admire educated people who accomplish things. They admire experience, skill, talent, and the results of a life of hard work and study.

They are not impressed by someone with three different degrees in things like Progressive Sociology or English Studies who thinks it somehow gives them the right to run things for everyone else.

I described what an "elitist" was in another post, and that one slid past you too as you immedately redefined the term once again to mean "smart." It doesn't.

William F. Buckley, who was no idiot himself, once said "I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University."