"taste, intelligence and culture, (so-called,)"

"The People!  Like our huge earth itself, which, to ordinary scansion, is full of vulgar contradictions and offence, man, viewed in the lump, displeases, and is a constant puzzle and affront to the merely educated classes.  The rare, cosmical, artist-mind, lit with the Infinite, alone confronts his manifold and oceanic qualities -- but taste, intelligence and culture, (so-called,) have been against the masses, and remain so.  There is plenty of glamour about the most damnable crimes and hoggish meannesses, special and general, of the feudal and dynastic world over there, with its personnel of lords and queens and courts, so well-dress'd and so handsome.  But the People are ungrammatical, untidy, and their sins gaunt and ill-bred."

-- Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas