Well, What Would You Call Them Then?

I an article at Slate, David Greenberg talks about historians dismissive of social scientists like Richard Hofstader.

They fashion the right's midcentury critics as hopelessly elite liberals, peering down their noses at the Southern and Western riffraff mindlessly rallying behind screwball ideas, demagogic leaders, or ethnic hatreds.

SO is the problem that they were peering down their noses at the riffraff? Because the description of the riffraff sounds awfully dead on.