Examples of elite contempt for the American Volk. The elites in question are political elites: pundits and politicians.
* Influential political scientist/apologist Charles "*The Bell Curve*" Murray 
's *Losing Ground * has harsh things to say about poor whites and their bad culture. (I haven't read it, but it made something of a splash for saying poor rural whites have a bad – weak – culture and need fixing for their own good.
* I've no intention of reading it either, but J.D. Vance's book, *Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis * reportedly makes similar arguments about (part of) his own family and their rural-ish neighbors.
* In 2008, Barack Obama (running for President) caused a flap by saying "And it's not surprising then [rural people in areas where the jobs have gone] get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them." His message was supposed to be that his upcoming administration would deliver jobs, but it doesn't present them as having sterling characters, rather people easily led astray, ignorant of their own interests. It was treated as contempt.
* In 2016, Hillary Clinton (running for President) described "half" of Trump supporters as "a basket of deplorables," who are "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic." That crossed a line: Republicans are allowed to call Democratic constituencies all kinds of bad names, but the reverse is not true.
They probably all say worse things in private. These people are all elites, and there sure seems to be downward contempt.