The clash between the ruling class and the "country class" Pt 2

Janet Daley's latest blog post touches on the same subject as Angelo M. Codevilla's essay America's Ruling Class, from which I quoted earlier.

American politics has caught the British disease:

When David Cameron visits the United States this week, he will find a country whose national political argument has become more like our own in Britain than probably he – and certainly I – would ever have imagined. For America has learned, thanks to Barack Obama's crash course in European-style government, about the titanic force of class differences. The president's determination to transform the US into a social democracy, complete with a centrally run healthcare programme and a redistributive tax system, has collided rather magnificently with America's history as a nation of displaced people who were prepared to risk their futures on a bid to be free from the power of the state.

They are talking a lot about this in the US now. Suddenly the phenomenon of class resentment is a live political issue. Some commentators describe it as the Democrats' "middle-class problem", which means that there has been a spectacular collapse of support for the administration among the core blue-collar voters who should constitute its base. (This terminology may be confusing: the "middle class" in the US means the skilled working, or lower middle class. University-educated professionals are described as the "upper middle class" which, in this country, tends to mean a notch or two below titled aristocracy.)

There was a warning of what was to come during the election campaign with Joe the Plumber, to whom Mr Obama unwisely confided his intention to "spread the wealth around". Americans who have risen from poverty to become qualified tradesmen or entrepreneurs generally believe that they have a right to put what wealth they produce back into their own businesses, rather than trusting governments to spread it around among those judged to be deserving.

But Joe's warning was not heeded. Most of the constituency whose instincts were the same as his voted for Obama, and have now lived to regret it. This in itself is not especially surprising: it could simply be seen as the self-interested politics of personal survival. What is more startling is the growth in America of precisely the sort of political alignment which we have known for many years in Britain: an electoral alliance of the educated, self-consciously (or self-deceivingly, depending on your point of view) "enlightened" class with the poor and deprived.

America, in other words, has discovered bourgeois guilt. A country without a hereditary nobility has embraced noblesse oblige. Now, there is nothing inherently strange or perverse about people who lead successful, secure lives feeling a sense of responsibility toward those who are disadvantaged. What is peculiar in American terms is that this sentiment is taking on precisely the pseudo-aristocratic tone of disdain for the aspiring, struggling middle class that is such a familiar part of the British scene.

Liberal politics is now – over there as much as here – a form of social snobbery. To express concern about mass immigration, or reservations about the Obama healthcare plan, is unacceptable in bien-pensant circles because this is simply not the way educated people are supposed to think. It follows that those who do think (and talk) this way are small-minded bigots, rednecks, oiks, or whatever your local code word is for "not the right sort".

The petit bourgeois virtues of thrift, ambition and self-reliance – which are essential for anyone attempting to escape from poverty under his own steam – have long been derided in Britain as tokens of a downmarket upbringing. But not long ago in America they were considered, even among the highly educated, to be the quintessential national virtues, because even well-off professionals had probably had parents or grandparents who were once penniless immigrants. Nobody dismissed "ambition" as a form of gaucherie: the opposite of having ambition was being a bum, a good-for-nothing who would waste the opportunities that the new country offered for self-improvement.

But now the British Lefties who – like so many Jane Austen heroines looking down on those "in trade" – used to dismiss Margaret Thatcher as "a grocer's daughter", have their counterparts in the US, where virtually everybody's family started poor. Our "white van man" is their Tea Party activist, and the insult war is getting very vicious. It is becoming commonplace now for liberals in the US to label the Tea Party movement as racist, the most damaging insult of all in respectable American life.

So the Democrats, who once represented the interests of ferociously self-respecting blue-collar America, are now seen – under their highly educated president, who wholeheartedly embraces the orthodoxy of the liberal salon – as having abandoned their traditional following.

Janet Daley is an American who lives in the UK. She used to be a Leftist but living under British socialism cured her of that. Here are some snippets from her essay, Up From Liberalism -
Living with European socialism turned this Berkeley girl into a conservative:

I became a Marxist out of sheer perversity. Well, perhaps that is unfair to my adolescent self: it was a mixture of conscientiousness and perversity.
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Born in Boston and raised in New York, I had my own version of the American dream: a cross between New England Puritanism and cerebral Jewish idealism.

Daley fell in with the radicals in Berkeley in the Sixties and became a cynical Marxist.

In that implacably despairing state of mind, I took myself off to Britain, where Harold Wilson’s Labour Party had recently been elected with a tiny Parliamentary majority (which would be vastly increased in the general election of 1966). The possibility of living under European socialism, even of a tenuous kind, seemed too exciting a possibility to miss.

What struck me first about my new life in Britain, as it strikes virtually every American, was the presence of a visible and audible (especially audible) class system. I had never encountered anything like this before. Of course, the U.S. had regional accents, parochial social divisions, and huge disparities of wealth; but what I encountered in Britain was something else altogether. British working-class people were not simply superficially identifiable as being uneducated, provincial, or even poor—as many Americans might be. They seemed to live in a parallel universe to the professional classes: to be consciously and deliberately a world apart, locked into their own self-defeating social patterns, low expectations, and perversely destructive behavior, which seemed designed to prevent them from aspiring to any condition other than the one into which they had been born.
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the British middle and upper classes have perfected lethal cruelties for humiliating those who rise from below them. British manners and social codes, as many a bemused American expatriate has discovered, are almost impenetrably arcane, their subtlety and complexity aimed precisely at separating the sheep from the goats in class terms. The British put-down extends deeper than anything that even the most snobbish American could contemplate, and, most excruciatingly, it is almost always delivered under the cover of patronizing kindness. For example, at a formal English dinner one doesn’t eat one’s salad with the main course, but later, as a freshener of the palate before the dessert and cheese courses. I can recall one painful incident in which a dinner guest who had helped himself to salad along with his meat course (without uttering the disarming disclaimer, “May I be rude and have my salad straightaway?”) receiving the excruciatingly gentle benediction, “You are quite right, Simon. So much nicer not to wait for the salad.” That—in coded British terms—is as cruel as it gets.

But what was less explicable than this working-class defeatism was to hear those who regarded themselves as progressive liberals conniving in it. The Left in Britain then (and scarcely less now) believed deeply that personal ambition was a petit bourgeois vice to be despised. Such left-wing antipathy to supposedly vulgar social striving became particularly vicious during the Thatcher years. The most telling left-liberal character assassinations of Thatcher herself focused on her being a “grocer’s daughter.”

One of my more vivid 1980s recollections is of an upper-class woman, whose family had been colonial officials in Kenya, saying airily, “When I was a child, profit was a dirty word.” This Jane Austenish disdain for the grubby business of trade strongly marked anti-Thatcherite rhetoric. The notion that private prosperity could transform the lives (and self-image) of ordinary people was viewed as faintly obscene.
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What decisively transformed my views was my growing understanding of the consequences of the welfare state that Britain had constructed out of a wartime command economy: it both reinforced the fatal passivity of the lower classes and provided a moral justification for the paternalism of the upper classes. The realization was slow but inexorable. It came through concrete example and abstract argument. By the end, it was so blindingly obvious that I wondered how anyone could ever not have seen that the socialist solution—the great, generous dream of perfect fairness—was inevitably destructive of the human spirit.
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In the 1970s, as I clung to my Marxist convictions, I heard an interview with Sir Keith Joseph, one of the great architects of the Thatcherite revolution. He described the dangers of what he called “the pocket-money society.” If the state provided all of the basic human needs—housing, health care, education, care for the elderly—it left nothing for people to provide for themselves, other than the more trivial recreational things. Their own earnings became like children’s pocket money, to be spent on toys or self-indulgence. The state took all of the significant economic choices of adult life out of their hands, diminishing them as responsible, moral beings. Joseph’s words did not convert me on the spot, but they shook my beliefs to the roots, because they chimed so convincingly with the evidence that I saw around me.

This was the reality of the collectivist ethic in which each should be striving for all, not for himself and his own. It amounted to the infantilizing of people, who had come to believe that they could not, positively should not, be making life-determining decisions for themselves, because their choices might deprive someone else.

And this is the same philosophy that Obama and the Democratic ruling class now believes. The American "ruling class" is the product of nearly a century of Progressivism. The Boomer generation was the first to be able to attend college almost en masse. In college they were indoctrinated with Marxist ideas and forgot that their prosperity and education were the result of the hard work and sacrifices of the generations of working class Americans before them.

They then proceeded to cut off the branch of freedom and prosperity on which they were sitting. They allied themselves with the ultra-rich to redistribute wealth to the poor and unfortunate but seemed to be ignorant of the fact that the wealth that is being redistributed is from the taxes on the middle class.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the middle-class pay for everything through their hard work. We pay the taxes for the ultra-rich who simply pass on the cost of their taxes to the petit borgeoisie by charging more for their products. The ultra-rich like socialism because it keeps the peasants from being so revolting. And of course the peasants love socialism because it enables them to sit around watching Oprah while eating junk-food and getting fat. The only people who do not benefit from wealth distribution are the middle class.

You can read other Janet Daley columns here.