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It is probably more difficult to be a snob now than it once was. The logistical base is gone. If Buckley were one, he would have to be considered one of the last of the great Renaissance snobs, a generalist capable of insufferable expertise on everything from Spanish wines to spinnakers. But the making of such a handsomely knowledgeable, or even pseudo-knowledgeable, character requires family money and leisure of a kind not often available in the late 20th century. "A child's education," Oliver Wendell Holmes once remarked, "should begin at least one hundred years before he was born." It does not take quite that much marination to make a great snob, since the secret of snobbery is mere plausibility, the appearance of knowledge and breeding. Still, in a busy world it is difficult to find the time and resources to give the laminations and high gloss, the old patina, that used to be the mark of great snobbery.
The true snob is a complex character. He is not merely a status seeker in Vance Packard's sense of the term, or a simple showoff. (Still, touches of artful swank are essential—the polo mallet cast casually onto the back seat of the car, or the real, working buttonholes on jacket sleeves that betray the Savile Row suit.) The authentic snob shows it by his attitude toward his superiors and his inferiors. Gazing upward, he apes and fawns and aspires to a gentility that is not native to him; looking down, he snubs and sniffs and sneers at those who don't share his pretensions.
Snobbery has traditionally been founded on 1) birth; 2) knowledge or pseudo knowledge, or merely self-assured ignorance, all of them amounting to the same thing in snob terms; 3) access to power, status, celebrity; 4) circumstances, such as the place one lives or even the things one does not do, such as watch television.
Anyone who thinks that birth and heritage are an immutable circumstance should send away to one of the genealogy services that will, for a fee, supply one's family tree and family crest. It is astonishing to learn from these services that most of America, back in the mists, springs from ancient royalty.
Snobbery today tends to be fragmented. The snobbery based on knowledge is particularly specialized. A person who is otherwise completely unpretending and unimpressive may do some reading and become, for example, a wine snob; he will swirl and sniff and smell the cork and send bottles back and otherwise make himself obnoxious on that one subject. Another person may take up, say, chocolate, and be able to discourse absurdly for an hour or two on the merits of Kron over Godiva. This kind of snobbery based upon a narrow but thorough trove of expertise is a bit depressing, because it reduces one of the great forms, snobbery, to the status of a mere hobby.