In his blog post, Memories of 2003, the great Paul Krugman notes:

Back in 2003 all the Kewl Kids, as a lot of my friends call them,

FWIW, I call them “very serious people”.

thought that to suggest that Bush was misleading us into war was, you know, shrill — it marked you as not being a Serious Person.

And here’s the thing: they still do. Even now, it’s better for your reputation not to have noticed until, say, 2005 that we had some dangerous people running the country. If you noticed earlier — or, worse yet, you caught on to the administration’s essential mendacity right from the beginning — it’s not a sign that maybe you had good judgment. It shows that you were an irrational Bush hater.

This is kind of like the term “Prematurely anti-fascist” that was big in the 1950s.

How can one be prematurely anti-fascist??? That’s kind of like being prematurely anti-baby eating.

It was a way of dismissing people’s ideas without any serious review.

It’s why the Democratic party should extricate from groups of “very serious people” like the Council on Foreign Relations.