Spectator
Getting to the point where you can’t imagine voting for Brexit or Trump takes years of hard, misguided study
'Ordinary people'
(Photo: Getty)
Enough! Enough! For months, the so-called liberal elite
has been writing articles, having radio and TV discussions, giving sermons
(literally) and making speeches in which it has struggled to understand those
strange creatures: ordinary people.
The elite is bemused by what drives these people to make
perverse decisions about Brexit and Trump. Are they racist,
narrow-minded or just stupid? Whatever the reason, ordinary people have frankly
been a disappointment.
Time, ladies and gentlemen, please! Instead, let’s do the
opposite.
Let’s try to explain to ordinary people what drives the liberal
elite. The elite persists with some very strange and disturbing views. Are its
members brainwashed, snobbish or just so remote from real life that they do not
understand how things work? What is the pathology of liberal eliteness?
Why would anyone support Hillary Clinton — a
ruthless, charmless Washington insider with socialist tendencies?
Why do lawyers,
churchmen, the BBC and, indeed, most educated people support the EU — an
organisation as saturated with smug self-righteousness as it is with corruption;
one which created the euro, which in turn has caused millions of people to be
unemployed; an organisation which combines a yawning democratic deficit with
incompetence over immigration and economic growth?
The elite are supposed to be educated. So why are they so
silly?
Ah! There is a clue. That word ‘educated’. What does
‘educated’ mean today? It doesn’t mean they know a lot about the world. It
means they have been injected with the views and assumptions of their teachers.
They have been taught by people who themselves have little experience of the
real world. They have been indoctrinated with certain ideas. Here are some key
ones.
They have been taught that capitalism is inherently bad. It is something to be controlled at every turn by an
altruistic government or else reduced to a minimum.
Meanwhile the pursuit of
equality is good. These are truly astonishing things for educated people to
believe when the past 100 years have been a brutal lesson instructing us
that the opposite is the case.
The pursuit of equality brought the world
terror and tens of millions of deaths along with terrible economic failure.
In
the past 30 years, by contrast, since China and India adopted more
pro-capitalist policies, capitalism has caused the biggest reduction in
poverty the world has ever known. You may know that, but it is not taught
in schools.
Schools actually teach that Stalin’s five-year plans were a
qualified success!
The academic world is overwhelmingly left-wing and the
textbooks spin to the left. They distort the facts or omit them.
What the elite have been led to believe is that
governments make things better.
‘Market failure’ is taught; ‘public-sector failure’ is not.
In my own area,
they are taught that everything was awful in 19th-century Britain until
governments came along to save the day with an ever-bigger welfare state.
The importance of friendly societies, voluntary hospitals and so on is omitted.
It is rubbish — left-wing propaganda.
But misleading education of this and
other kinds rubs off even on those who are not studying history or politics. It
comes through in the Times, the Guardian or, in America, the Washington
Post or New York Times. In Britain, BBC Radio 4 is the continuation
of university propaganda by other means.
Meanwhile, from early on, environment-alism and recycling
are taught as doctrine, rather than as subjects for discussion. My children had to report to their school whether they
had arrived by public transport (good), bicycle (excellent) or car (evil).
Children
don’t escape the propaganda even when they study languages. My daughter studies
French and has had to write essays on how marvellous recycling is. There
is no analysis of counter-arguments. In fact, no data is offered on which a
counter–argument could be based. This is not education. It is not teaching
children to challenge ideas and think for themselves.
This is anti-education:
teaching them what they must think. It is as prescriptive as education in the
Soviet Union. At least in the Soviet Union, many understood that they should
not trust what they were being told. Here, because the propaganda is less
obvious, students do not have their guard up.
One of the most important things schools and universities
teach is that the students must never, under any circumstances, be suspected
of racism.
It is not enough to treat people of all races with respect. You
must be even more above suspicion than Caesar’s wife.
That is part of why the
elite was against Brexit. They could not bear that someone might think they
supported it for racist reasons. That, in the minds of the liberal elite, would
be too awful.
By extension, they also would hate to be thought of as
insular or inward-looking. Yes, I know that many on the Brexit side were
particularly global and outward-looking, but Remainers assumed that Brexit
must equal insularity. It offended their view of themselves as
internationalists.
Another central tenet of the dogma is that women have
been oppressed, are oppressed and, for the future, there is no limit to what we
must do to ensure they get to be in the same situation as men — having as many directorships and military medals and
anything else one can think of.
Feminist doctrine has so permeated the elite
that its members assumed that all women in the USA would vote against Trump
after his vulgar, arrogant remarks about touching women were leaked. The
elite thought that was ‘game over’ for Trump. Ordinary women took a different
view. A majority of white women voted for Trump.
Ordinary people have been subjected to the same kind of
indoctrination as the elite. They have just had less of it. They were in
the hands of the propagandists for a shorter time and have been in the real
world for longer. They do not read the ‘quality’ papers or listen to Radio
4. They watch Sky Sports and Strictly Come Dancing. For their
understanding of the world, they rely more on what they see for themselves
and experience.
The elite’s fuller education in the key beliefs explains
why it was for Remain and Clinton.
They voted for Remain because, in doing
so, they demonstrated they were not racist but tolerant internationalists.
They were not put off by the incompetence of the EU, because they have been
taught an irrational respect for government — even EU government. They also
perceived the EU as more likely to pursue environmentalism than an elected
British government. You could say they were trained to vote for Remain.
Clinton,
too, ticked every box. Members of the elite could effortlessly show how
feminist they were by wanting her to win. She was also the embodiment of the
other key tenets: more equality, more government and anti-racism.
You may think, ‘Can’t they think for
themselves?’
Unfortunately,
formal education, while requiring thought, does tend to discourage too much
independent thinking, especially on the key parts of the faith.
If a
member of the elite, for example, finds him or herself reflecting that it is
usually quite difficult to interest little girls in train sets and guns, they
must squash that thought.
Some rebels do hold on to an ability to think, but
it’s noticeable that quite a lot of the most original minds, such as George
Orwell and Pascal, never went to university.
Let’s try to understand why members of the elite get so
cross when others don’t take the same view of Brexit and Clinton as they do.
It’s partly a sense of entitlement. People talk of a culture of entitlement
among those who live on benefits.
But the elite has its own entitlement
culture.
They think that because they studied English literature at Durham they
understand the world better than a plumber in Croydon.
They think they are
superior and therefore their view should prevail.
They also think they
are morally superior because they hold to the views which they were told were
virtuous.
Anyone who appears not to subscribe to these views must, of
necessity, be a sinner or else appallingly misled by the Daily Mail or
some other evil force. It is outrageous to the elite that the work of the Devil
should prevail.
They are virtuous. They know best. They are the chosen
ones. They have only a token belief in democracy. They expect and intend to
prevail.
James Bartholomew is the author of The Welfare of
Nations, and coined the term ‘virtue signalling’ in The Spectator.
