At least not when discussing politics. "Progressives against Progress" in today's City Journal illustrates the point very clearly.
First of all by making a distinction between what Americans (and me-tooist Brits) call "liberals" and "their socialist cousins". There is no distinction to be made. Understanding would be best served by eschewing these terms altogether to describe the lefty Gadarene swine as statists.
Secondly by grossly misrepresenting what 19th century Tory Radicalism stood for: "Like the Tory Radicals, today’s liberal gentry see the untamed middle classes as the true enemy". Horse-shit. Tory Radicalism sought to challenge the Liberal Party for the votes of the lower classes in what was still an oligarchical political system. And it was very successful. Even the Labour Party did not win a majority of the working class vote until 1945.
What the author calls "today's liberal gentry" have nothing in common with the values of the old landed aristocracy beyond, perhaps, a shared disdain for the class immediately below theirs. But while non-radical Tories did indeed look down on the aspirational middle class, the values of today's "liberals" express the secret fears of the clerical lower-middle class, determined to make the class barrier below them as impermeable as possible.
It is they whose "disdain for democracy and for the habits of their inferiors remains undiminished". Tory Radicals in fact appreciated that there was a rich vein of conservatism in the working class, and mined it very successfully.
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The propounders of these confusions should be assigned as a study punishment to review a number of Penelope Keith's old 'To the Manor Born' TV segments.
ReplyDeleteI remember once being rescued from the Andover RR platform on the day in 1987 was it, of the Big Wind, and driven by a lady of the landed gentry to her large Hampshire homestead with its thatched roofs for coffee. Then the husband in his yellow mac waved to us from a rainy meadow as we departed in search of another train. He was a Rumanian timber merchant. I miss Penelope Keith.She showed us how it would happen.