I am not sure why you think that translates to exploitation of its poor, so yes, anti-intellectualism works. There's currently a strong anti-intellectualism movement in the USA, which is almost ironic, considering anti-intellectuals are more likely to find that sentence pretentious. Though I am not saying all that did are anti-intellectuals.

For the second part, since bravado means a vaunted (Vaunted means to praise and boast) display of courage, he likely meant 'Proudly ignorant' there. Bravado is the only $5 word in that sentence, with wantonly a close second. At the same time, I think bravado fits fine and don't see anything wrong with it.

Also, I don't see anything vague about it, and only 2 words could be considered uncommon, which is far from a lot. I actually asked someone which words were $5 dollar words and got this reply.

"disdain" "excellence" "advancement" "impoverished" "bravado" "elite's" "supplemental" "innovation"

Which made me feel a bit sad. I really hope most people don't believe ALL of those words are $5 dollar words. I'm not exactly some highly educated person either.

Just because a sentence hasn't been broken down to the simplest possible words, doesn't mean it's suddenly pretentious. You want to see what I consider a pretentious sentence? I tried to find one from the top posts of /r/iamverysmart, but quickly realized most posts actually wouldn't work, because it's full of people proclaiming they're smarter than other people, or actually pretty dumb when trying to sound smart, so I instead grabbed a sentence from /r/atheism, which btw, is a treasure trove of pretentious sentences.

"In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god's blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my intelligence."

That makes me cringe from the pretentiousness level. But a sentence talking about the rise of anti-intellectualism, the ignorance of the middle class, and the greed of the 1%, while making extra points about all three, (Like how the lower classes even reject advancement in education due to their anti-intellectualism; the middle class is swaggering and loudly ignorance; and the 1% will take greed over innovation) is far from pretentious, at least for myself. Based on the votes going back and forth, is seems you guys are divided on this.