I judge others on competence and character. Such are the people I feel a commonality with and a connection to. It has nothing to do with “looking down” on anyone.

Only if you judge people by their competence and feel a need to look down on those you feel more competent then.

“The demands required to build a new community necessarily selects for competency and efficacy on the part of individuals. This selection process is necessary for the emergence of true community because such can only arise among individuals who have true respect and admiration for each other. Established cultures, based on the worship of mediocrity and ineptitude, can only engender a loathing contempt and hostility on the part of more competent individuals. This, of course, makes true community impossible.”

One of the principal ideas of liberalism is that of the “individual.” This is the being who, because he is human, is naturally entitled to “rights” that can be enumerated, rights that are attributed to him independently of his function or place in society and that make him equal to any other man. As familiar as this idea may seem, it is strange. How can rights be attributed to the individual as individual if rights govern relationships between several individuals, if the very idea of a right presupposes an already instituted community or society? How can political legitimacy be founded on the rights of the individual, if he never exists as such, if he is always necessarily linked to other individuals, to a family, class, profession, or nation? Yet it is this on this idea, so obviously “asocial” and “apolitical,” that the liberal body politic was progressively constructed. The inhabitants of Western democracies have become every more “autonomous,” ever more “equal,” and have felt themselves to be less defined by the family and social class.