He refers to judicial activists as "Olympians" and defines "Olympianism" as "the project of an intellectual elite that believes that it enjoys superior enlightenment and that its business is to benefit those living on the lower slopes of human achievement" A society ruled in this way has been called a "
snobocracy".
On the one hand, I have an instinctive sympathy towards him as a victim of the media
snobocracy that invariably sets out to destroy anyone from a working-class background who achieves high office.
His fiction simultaneously turned him into the "the prose laureate of the
snobocracy" (6) and made him one of the key figures for the "guns and bananas school of fiction." (7) As these dual accolades suggest, the typical Davis hero was not only influenced by the "savage war" legacies of the American frontier, but was also learned in the ways of European refinement and aristocratic culture.
(This view of China outside Shanghai as hicksville is a favourite stereotype of the post-Mao
snobocracy of the lower Yangtze Valley, who like to see themselves as the vanguard of China's new urban elite.)