I once had the dubious good fortune to be lunching at a café somewhere in North London at the same time as a prominent left-wing intellectual. I cannot name him, British libel laws being what they are. Suffice it to say that he is what is known, these days, as a “public intellectual” — is a public intellectual allowed to be really thick in the privacy of his own home? — and one with decidedly left-wing views.
The café was short-staffed, and the waitresses were rushed off their feet but doing their best to cope. Their best wasn’t good enough for our left-winger, who let rip at one poor girl, when, through no fault of her own, she was a little late with his order. When she explained that they were short-staffed, he roared imperiously that it was not his problem and that she should damn well do what she was paid for. It seems that his egalitarian principles collapsed when confronted with a real “prole.” And I bet he didn’t leave a tip.
I was not surprised to see this, for I have long believed that there is no snob like a socialist snob. Take Virginia Woolf — she of the impeccably feminist and socialist credentials — and consider how she treated her servants. Theodore Dalrymple in the New Criterion:
She was that peculiarly emblematic type of our age, a person of advanced views and reactionary feeling. … Her servants worked long hours in harsh conditions, of a kind not met with anywhere in the Western world today, but she nevertheless berated them in her diary and in her letters for their stupidity, their lack of finer feeling or accomplishment, their suspected dishonesty and even their greed when, like Oliver Twist, they asked for more (despite her advanced views, she never offered them more than the going rate, and sometimes a little less, the annual wages of a servant employed by her being at one time no more than one percent of her own annual income).
“Advanced views and reactionary feeling” best sums up the attitude of Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown when challenged on immigration by — horror of horrors — an ordinary person. He was friendly enough to her face, but once in the car, when he thought the microphone was turned off, he recoiled with fastidious disgust. “You should never have put me with that woman,” he said to his flunkies. He also called her a bigot. “That woman” is Gillian Duffy, a grandmother from Rochdale, Lancashire; the story has been all over the British newspapers, and has been well covered here at Pajamas Media by Andrew Ian Dodge.
Rochdale is a poor town with high unemployment, and Mrs. Duffy, who worked hard all her life and whose grandchildren are struggling, is right to be worried about immigration; most of the British population think it is too high. But Gordon Brown did not just call her a bigot — he is entitled to his opinion, and he thought he was speaking in private — but “that woman.” The message was not merely “You are wrong,” but “How dare you!” This was insubordination. The working classes, Labour voters especially, are required to embrace the ideas of their betters, and not to get above themselves.
Unless they are dutifully overthrowing the bourgeoisie as ordained by Marx, the working classes must stay firmly in their place. Socialists do not really believe in equality of opportunity, because they do not believe in meritocracy. They prefer poor people, or indeed ethnic minorities, to remain in their ghettos where they can be patronized. I have often wondered whether this partially explains the anti-Semitism of some parts of the left. Jews are an ethnic minority who do well for themselves and refuse to play the victim. The left cannot patronize them as it can other minority groups.
If all citizens, male and female, black and white, have something approaching equal opportunity of advancement — a truly level playing field, not affirmative action, diversity quotas, and other procrustean measures — all hell breaks loose. Muslim women may step outside the house and cast off their hijab, their religion, and their menfolk. Black women may reject black men as lazy and feckless. Women may cease to be “caring” as the feminist dogma insists they are, and may even become a secretary of State under a Republican government or, in the UK, a Conservative prime minister.
Yes, a Conservative prime minister. Socialists hated Margaret Thatcher, a grocer’s daughter, because they cannot abide an “upstart.” Julie Burchill:
A whole host of characters who had previously passed for decent revealed themselves as sneering snobs when they applied themselves to Thatcher. Mary Warnock said it made her feel sick to hear that Mrs T bought her a pussy-bow blouse at Marks & Spencer; Jonathan Miller whipped himself into a self-righteous frenzy over “her odious suburban gentility.”
America is not thought to be as class-ridden as Britain, but was not some of the left’s hostility to Sarah Palin based on social snobbery as much as on opposition to her politics? And what was Joe the plumber if not an ordinary working man made good? In wanting to hang onto his hard-earned cash, instead of giving it to immigrants and “community organizers,” Joe the plumber had stepped outside his appointed limits. No wonder Obama was offended. How dare he!
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