[The Republicans] must be careful to keep reminding people, however, that the elite at whom they need to be angry is not the economic elite. No, the elite scorned by the blue-collar poseurs is the cultural elite, the college professors and cosmopolitan urban dwellers, the know-it-alls who are insufficiently contemptuous of foreigners and insufficiently devoted to your religion. (This amounts to its own kind of snobbery; as Michael Kinsley wrote a few years ago, "It's the only kind of snobbery with any real power in America today: reverse snobbery.")

If Palin is the politician who defines the current moment for the right, the media figure of the moment is certainly Glenn Beck, who managed to get tens of thousands of his supporters to come to Washington on Saturday. While Palin tells her supporters that their problems come from smarty-pants urbanites, Beck pulls his down a rabbit hole of manic conspiracy theories, telling them that the path to true knowledge can be found only by forgetting everything anyone else tells them. Understanding will come not from deliberation but from revelation, he says. Watch my show, and I will reveal to you the hidden conspiracies to which others are blinded.

And for $9.95 a month, you can enroll in "Beck University," a series of online lectures from Beck-approved polemicists concerning the evils of government and the perfidy of progressives. It doesn't require any prerequisites, just a belief that actual universities are festering cauldrons of lies and liberal brainwashing, and a willingness to turn to Beck for all the education you'll ever want or need. [my emphasis]