A snob’s put down is really a badge of honor. From Paul Rosenberg at freemansperspective.com:
Even if you’re not exactly sure what bourgeois means, you’ve almost certainly noticed that it refers to something bad or embarrassing. But before I explain its actual meaning, I want to turn the tables on it: I will maintain that bourgeois is good. For most of us, the bourgeois way of life is something to be sought, and hopefully to be attained.
Now, let’s get back to the proper meaning of the term.
Who Is Bourgeois?
The original meaning of bourgeois was “middle class;” it refered especially to people like shopkeepers. It was a reference to people who were neither peasants (tenant farmers) and nobles (a legally privileged class).
Beginning in the 18th century, a variety of political theorists used the word to lambaste the people who stood in their way. Through 19th and 20th centuries it was seized by socialists, who continued it as a tool to discount and insult large numbers of people.
Now, to support my characterization of intellectuals using the word as an insult, here’s a comment from a famous French writer named Gustave Flaubert:
Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom.
What really irked intellectuals about the bourgeois was that they were stealing their thunder. Over the 19th and early 20th centuries, intellectuals – people who wanted to sell their ideas – were rushing into socialism, because it could give them the same position the nobility used to hold: that of a legally privileged class.
An underrated Orwell quote is the some ideas are so stupid, only an intellectual would believe them.
Stealing their thunder by getting out there and doing it while the “intellectuals” naval gaze.
The enlightened ones are also always busy plotting revolution, where they get all the spoils and power upgrades.