I loved this in the Daily Mail, by Stephen Glover:
Over the past 30 or 40 years, the Left has captured the citadels of our culture. I don't mean the old formidable communist Left, which is dead and buried, but a trendy soft Left whose world view is promulgated by The Guardian and the BBC. This is the club which aspiring members of the cultural elite are required to join.
You’re wrong Mr Glover. The cultural elite aren’t required to join this club. The reality is that the cultural elite can and do think. And when you do both you realise money is not the be all and end all of life, unless you’re in poverty. This makes you left wing.
Those who can think but don't use that ability believe that money is the most important thing in life. This is, the say, expecially true for those who are well off since they also believe people are poor through their own fault as they equate wealth with competence or the expenditure of effort - even though this is very obvuiously not true. The consequnce is they are right wing. Wrong, of course, too. But then, that follows on from being right wing because it is culturally anti-social which is why the cultural elite could not embrrace it.
So of course the cultural elite are left wing. This will always be the case. It’s the natural order. And it shows how daft Stephen Glover is that he thinks anything else possible.
NB Post tidied 20.35 - 24.7.09
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This is the most arrogant, condescending and insulting thing I’ve ever had the misfortune to read. The believe that only those who agree with you think, and everyone who disagrees does not, undermines anything useful that you can contribute. It indicates that you are a fool, and an unworthy one at that.
Dave
Dave
I merely supplied a reasoned reply (with one or two typos added, I now notice) to an idiotic article in the Mail
At least I made an argument
Did Stephen Glover? No way
But that’s the way it is: you guys like diatribe – and it’s what you deliver here
Richard
Don’t get cocky. Spain is about to hit 22% unemployment. A HARD right turn is likely around the corner. Unless you think a Spain with 22% unemployment is going to embrace a “Cultural Elite” that is primarily concerned with “diversity” and “multiculturalism”. Ha. The “cultural elite” are totally out of touch with how actual humans live in the actual society. Get ready.
These things cycle.
If they do swing right they’re mad – Keynes is the answer to this problem – we spend more not less
It won’t take people long to realise the fallacy of cuts being a salvation
Cuts will create a recession, massive social tension, chaos and maybe a path to war
Is that what you guys want?
Mr Murphy you are incorrect
To be left wing you do not need to think but feel – thats why left wing solutions feel nice but but always lead to a pile of bones and poor people
the left concentrates on how morl they feel instead of the outcome of their drivel
You don’t understand.
The left has sold itself to the religion of diversity. It not longer in any way, shape or form defends or advocates for the actual working class. It has nothing to offer me. Nothing. It is not a beast with anything meaningful to say about the economy. It has nothing meaningful to say about unemployment. It has nothing meaningful to stay about social stability (the elephant in the living room). All it (the cultural elite, or leftist thought) is able to produce is love letters to the diversity and angry diatribes about how evil the natives are. That’s how we prols see it. That’s it. That’s all. All done.
The swing to the right will be caused by the economic crises but not about it. It will be xenophobic, nativist and right-wing (not conservative). Geert Wilders is a mushy moderate compared to what 22% unemployment across the EU (and it is coming) will do to the political order.
Seriously. Do you have your ear to the ground of the actual working man at all? Have you any idea what is being said in pubs and cafe’s all over the EU? And good god, the UK is a tinderbox. I’m gonna stay here in dysfunctional Miami and watch it all explode from a distance.
But surely no one can believe any more in the power of keynesian thought. It failed to explain the economic circumstances of the UK stagflation of the 1970s. why should it help now? And the cultural elite in the UK contained nice guys like Kim Philby who deliberately betrayed networks of spies to the KGB, for slaughter. Seems that the Left is very rarely truly compassionate.
It is of course possible to have a right-wing Keynesianism provided most of your extra spending goes on the military (Germany in the 1930s, the US under the Bush administration) – that’s one (expensive) way of creating “a pile of bones and poor people”…
Stephen Glover, like almost all Daily Mail columnists (with the exception of Peter Oborne, whom I think does write a good, thoughtful column even if I don’t agree with it that much) is obsessed with trying to make the Mail look like some kind of radical popular front which is fighting the Whitehall status quo whereas in fact the truth is more or less the exact opposite.
The Daily Mail is read by about ten times the number of people who read the Guardian and has a much bigger – and malign – cultural influence. It is a contributory factor to why political debate in this country is so poisoned. The immigration debate – where it and the Express compete to see who can publicise the rabid right-wing nonsense that Migration Watch spew out on a weekly basis – is the most obvious example of this.
And before I’m put in my place and called a ‘racist’. I’m half-diversity half native. And gay as all hell. I live in Miami because it is safe for me here. I got my arse kicked for the last time by ‘the diversity’ in Europe. Here, I’m safe. 2/3 gays in Holland now vote right-wing. When the ‘cultural elite’ have lost the gays, it’s over. I’m a middle class accountant, btw. Not a hedgie or spoon swallowing daddy’s boy. I am 100% alienated from the “cultural elite”. It makes my blood boil to read the nonsense in the OP.
Ever heard of Antonio Gramsci? 😉
Svend
What has this to do with what I wrote?
And how wrong you are. I have a gay brother and a gay brother in law. I have extensive social networks in a small town – where itn is easy to fnd out what others think. I am often at the school gate – a great place to learn what is happening. as a community doctor in a poor area my wife knows and feeds back a great deal
And I know that the Right despise ordinary people – and will throw them to the wall through the tax cuts they propose that will wreck the lives of a generation.
They’ll also bring back Clause 28 – which will show how stupid you are
Get real – the right wing hate you – you’re not one of them – and that’s all that matters to them
It’s the left who break down the silos the right build
Richard
Its nice to hear you don’t think money is the be all and end all. I’m sure your clients are very re-assured that you take a relaxed view of their accounts.
Of course the Original left wing , the sans coulottes, were the cultural elite of their day- its not that they couldn’t afford trousers as the lying historians have been telling us for two hundred years- they were demonstrating their cultural supremacy. Be brave- publish a full length photo.
What I write is perfectly related to your post. You’re rambling on about the “cultural elite” being ‘left’ as the natural order of things. This is 1) historically inaccurate and 2) not zeitgeist appropriate. The time, it has passed you by.
There is a sea-change in Brit/EU politics on the horizon for the very reasons I stated. The “cultural elite” have absolutely no relationship with the actual prols, and how we live our lives. They have nothing for us. They exist not for us. They are drunk on platitudes and oblivious to the growing momentum.
Of course right-wingers dislike homos. You know what? The Muslims who attacked me again and again and again and again and again in Rotterdam and London were RIGHT-WING. And the UK won’t even charge them with hate crimes! The supposedly evil American red-necks AT MOST point and laugh when I’m in RedState country.
As I said, the EU, and the UK in particular, are going to explode in social unrest. This is the end-point of our social policy. You “cultural elites” should have learned from history. I’m going to watch from afar. The left-wing left me behind and the right-wing is reacting to the cultural decay. Have fun.
In America, yeah, ‘it’s the economy stupid’. In the EU/UK. Nope. ‘It’s the society stupid’.
Svend
All I have to say is that my gay contacts aren’t suffering as you claim
And I’ve spoken to some of them to check
Islamophobia is certainly not present in their attitudes – and is not a problem for them
I’m not saying you didn’t suffer – I’m just saying it does not seem general, as you suggest
Richard
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Surely ‘cultural elite’ needs a bit of questioning as a term? What it means? And surely it is INTRINSICALLY non-Left!
How could anyone who describes themselves this way have Left pretensions?
The Guardian and the BBC pander to the concept that we have a liberal democracy, while all the best elements of our society (indeed the parts for which people from all over the world try to come here) are social democratic. Day after day I see BBC programs where perception and debate are limited to issues of individual rights, with nothing on social rights, and what abuse of the system by a few means to the rest of society. (‘Abusers’ includes, but is not in any way limited to, bankers, politicians)
I thoroughly agree that this ‘cultural elite’ which likes to CALL itself Left, is indeed totally out of touch with what people are thinking and feeling. I have previously been banned from commenting here for suggesting that the Green New Deal (absolutely a product of ‘the cultural elite’) fails to take account, in its ‘jobs policy’, of the reality of jobs going to overseas workers as soon as they are created.
Instead of appreciating having someone point this out, I have been banned from commenting!
Lets see what happens this time.
Perhaps your gay contacts do not live close to Moslem groups, Richard – and that’s why its not a problem for them. I can tell you Tower Hamlets IS a dangeroud place for gay people. Do any of your gay close associates live there??
Linda
You were not banned – you were not posted because, like many from the Right you were offensive
Re Tower Hamlets – no – I have no close friends in that borough now, that I can think of – but is one borough indication of the state of the nation as a whole? I do not think so
Richard