Recently at a Labour Party meeting attended by the movement’s great and good, one of the speakers made a comment about Margaret Thatcher.
Labour leadership candidate John McDonnell drew loud applause from a party hustings after quipping that he would like to travel back in time to “assassinate” Margaret Thatcher.
Notice the loud applause – it exemplifies the hatred and venom still felt against Lady Thatcher from the left and its ideological accomplices in the media twenty years after she left the political scene – and the reason is absolutely simple. She committed the cardinal sin of breaking the left’s decades long grip on the levers of government. She pushed back the tentacles of the state. She broke the power of the unions. She refused to follow a foreign policy of apology and retreat. She completely ignored the advice of media and academic pundits – and she did it all with the support of the ordinary, everyday people who felt that she remained, at heart, one of them.
The left hate her because the Labour Party, which sprang from working class roots, has come to disdain the values of the very people it originally claimed to represent.
it turned its back on what used to be called “the respectable working class” because of its embarrassing resentments and “prejudices” against welfare claimants, immigrants, and anti-social youths. Bizarrely, among people who see themselves as profoundly empathetic, there was an utter failure to understand why the spirit of benevolent understanding and tolerance did not flourish among those whose daily lives were directly affected by a mass influx of foreign workers, or local delinquency, or a welfare system that rewarded inertia
So writes Janet Daley in the Sunday Telegraph in a warning that President Obama, the Democrats and a complicit media are now following the same path.
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.
It’s a deliberate process, says Daley.
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.
The key to this, for Daley, is a strange new alliance
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
This alliance has sought to confine cultural and political debate within a framework specifically structured to delegitimise the concerns of ordinary Americans.
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”.
Hence, of course, the frenetic media attacks on the Tea Party (ignorant, racist, violent etc) and any political figure like Sarah Palin who appears to resonate (as did Thatcher) with those who are out of step with the this new aristocracy.
Read more of Daley’s article here – then go to Professor Angelo M. Codevilla’s brilliant and perceptive piece in the American Spectator where he drills deeper into the issues raised by Daley. The Democrats and their allies in the media and academia are, he says, the new “ruling class”. Outside this regime is the “country class”
Describing America’s country class is problematic because it is so heterogeneous. It has no privileged podiums, and speaks with many voices, often inharmonious. It shares above all the desire to be rid of rulers it regards inept and haughty. It defines itself practically in terms of reflexive reaction against the rulers’ defining ideas and proclivities — e.g., ever higher taxes and expanding government, subsidizing political favorites, social engineering, approval of abortion, etc. Many want to restore a way of life largely superseded. Demographically, the country class is the other side of the ruling class’s coin: its most distinguishing characteristics are marriage, children, and religious practice. While the country class, like the ruling class, includes the professionally accomplished and the mediocre, geniuses and dolts, it is different because of its non-orientation to government and its members’ yearning to rule themselves rather than be ruled by others.
Significantly the Professor titles his essay “America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution”. Like Daley he sees this time as a seminal moment- for unless action can be taken now the new aristocracy’s agenda will assume an air of unstoppable inevitability……a sad ending for what was once a unique experiment……..
Cross posted at Conservatives4Palin
