I’m curious; why do you attribute the tainting of “elite” to liberals? When I’ve seen it used to denigrate someone as an out-of-touch-with-real-people arrogant ivory-tower snob, it’s a club being wielded against a liberal rather than by one. During the presidential election, for example, McCain’s campaign tried hard to paint Obama as elite in that pejorative sense.
I used to be sophisticated, but I realized sophistication was simply the ability to construct complex, floridly expressed rationalizations for my gut feelings. Then I became jaded.
BINGO !
Want some chili fries dude ? 
Maybe it’s a matter of where one lives, ETF. I’m from Boston, and around here elitist is a word I hear more often coming from the Left than the Right, though I’ve heard populist conservatives use it, too.
I tend to think that many people confuse snobbery with sophistication, because there’s a lot of overlap.
I’m going to use food/booze/beer/wine examples and metaphors here…
Sophistication is the ability to have a more than ordinary ability to discern the value in things that others might not. Different things become important- it’s not necessarily about whatever the “signature” quality indicator would be (steaks = tender, booze = smooth, beer =?)
For example, a naive whiskey drinker knows that he likes bourbon and doesn’t like Scotch, and he knows that generally the more expensive the hooch, the “smoother” it is. The sophisticated bourbon drinker can tell you which bourbons are wheat, and which ones are rye, and also generally tell which ones are aged longer.
Or, to use a beer example, the naive person knows that he likes “light” or “dark” beers, and frequently makes the mistake of conflating strength of flavor with alcoholic strength. The sophisticated beer drinker knows that he prefers IPAs over brown ale, because he likes bitterness, hop aroma and flavor, and isn’t that wild about the roasted malt taste in many ambers.
In food, this equates to being able to appreciate the difference between say… a Golden Corral steak and one from Morton’s on some level beyond one being tender and one not.
Snobs are the folks who seize upon these differences and use it as a way to distinguish themselves from others that they look down on, whether or not they actually know what they’re talking about. These are the import beer lovers who “only drink Heineken”, or who “only drink Jim Beam Black”, or who won’t eat at a chain restaurant, or they’re the people who “only drink Knob Creek, because that other stuff’s swill”, or “only drink microbrews”, etc…
Non-snobbish sophisticates have no problem admitting that everything has its place- why would you mix drinks with say… Blanton’s, or drink Chimay Blue at a 4th of July party? Jim Beam and Bud Light are perfectly appropriate libations for those events, sophisticate or not.
Isn’t sophistication just exposure to a great number of varieties of something, awareness of its history, perceptions of subtleties in each, plus a selection ranking the varieties in a hierarchy with some rational explanation of your own personal tastes?
A lack of sophistication is the lack of the above: “I like them Big Macs, you can keep your flamin’ yon and all that fancy frenchie crap. No, I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout koo-zine, and I don’t need to. I jest knows what I likes, is all. Meat’s meat–I ain’t paying no ten or fifteen dollars a pound when I can gets me a Big mac for a couple bucks, no one’s pullin’ that trick on me, no sir…”
Basically yeah… although I tend to look at it being more a combination of the willful ignorance combined with some narrow criteria for quality based on a one-metric evaluation that frequently ignores or minimizes defining characteristics of an item.
Those who drink Keystone because they don’t want “Bitter Beer Face!” are by my definition, not sophisticated beer drinkers.
Yes, PRR, yet it’s seems entirely possible (if somewhat unlikely) that a person of high intelligence and vast learning to have idiosyncratic, seemingly unsophisticated attitudes and tastes simply because what pleases them is quite different from what one pleases others, and they don’t care if it’s bad taste or not. This isn’t too common, yet I’ve noticed it in at least two classes of people: first, those with a high level of education, creative and independent minded, who, if hungry, will go to Burger King, if in need of a pair of sneakers, will go to the bargain basement Payless rather than a high end sporting goods store because it’s convenient and they have the right product (while more typically upper middle class types “wouldn’t be caught dead” in a fast food joint or a place that caters to low income working people). Then there are the “starving artist” types and contrarians who generally who go out of their way to buck the system, so if “green” is in, they’ve buy a pick-up truck; if everyone’s into mung beans and tofu, they’re grilling hot dogs and hamburgers in the back yard. Whether absent minded professor or contrarian, cutting against norms, including norms that imply sophistication and worldliness, is not all that uncommon. There are times when the outward signs of sophistication become themselves a kind of stultifying conformity, especially in cities like the one I live in, which is one of the reasons I go out of my way, when discussing a book, a play or a movie, to avoid using works like textured, layered and nuanced, which have become lazy cliches.
Obviously if you’re going to a 4th of July party you should mix Chimay Red, White and
Blue together and make the most patriotic beer evar!
Rube.
Everything is beautiful that is new. -Stendhal
Speaking from the vantage point, at least, of storytelling, I can say for certain that any story which will be enjoyed follows certain criteria. If you’ve studied story structure, you can spit out basic stories all day without having to particularly exercise your brain. And all of those rapidly produced stories will fit the criteria of what is needed to make an enjoyable story, so certainly the product should be enjoyable. But at the same time, they didn’t take a significant amount of skill to produce.
But there’s no particular rule that a person can’t play about the edges of story structure to create something that–while still enjoyable–did take skill to fashion. In this case, I’m not only enjoying the story, but also admiring the choices made in constructing the tale.
Such a work is quantifiably better if it is no less enjoyable than any other tale, because it has a second method of enjoyment hidden there. And so there’s no particular reason for someone who has the ability to enjoy the work on both levels, not to prefer the more masterfully created works. It’s not like there’s a dearth of stories being produced in a year.
Going by this, it should seem like one should still be able to enjoy a less skillfully crafted, but still fully enjoyable work. But the problem is that works like that are essentially all just repeats of one another. It’s like watching an endless loop of 4 stories that simply shift the name of the main character. If you made anyone watch the same one movie in a loop a hundred times, they’d be pretty bored of it. That doesn’t have anything to do with being jaded or having developed sophistication, since they still haven’t been exposed to a lot of different stuff. But once you do learn a lot, you come to realize that those films which all seemed different before are really just repeats of one another. It ruins them for you.
Education makes everything boring. It’s not as exciting that the Earth isn’t the center of the universe. It’s not as exciting to realize that you weren’t the first person to discover that frozen pizza tastes good. Should that be called being jaded? Perhaps. But at the same time, it is quite truthfully a more honest appraisal of the world. So it is also being sophisticated.