Dr. Helen, in a post explaining why intellectuals tend to sympathize with criminals, quotes Theodore Dalrymple,

Intellectuals need to say things that are not immediately obvious or do not occur to the man in the street. The man in the street instinctively sympathizes with the victim of crime; therefore, to distinguish himself from the man in the street, the intellectual has to sympathize with the criminal, by turning him into a victim of forces which only he, the intellectual, has sufficient sophistication to see.

It is difficult to overestimate how much this way of thinking drives the liberal view of the world.

It doesn't matter whether they're dumb, smart, successful, failures, good, bad, you name it, liberals view themselves as better, smarter, and more compassionate than the average person by virtue of the fact that they're liberals.

It's like Thomas Sowell said,

"The charge is often made against the intelligentsia and other members of the anointed that their theories and the policies based on them lack common sense. But the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else?"