If you are so rich, how come you are so left-wing?

Spring reads 4/

Punch cartoon from 1933 mocking the champagne socialists of the day

Over the break I want to leave the news schedule behind and run pieces on bigger themes.

Today I look at the underexamined question: why do so many wealthy people refuse to vote conservative, even when it would seem to serve their economic interests?

I tried to tackle it by using the magnificent autobiography of Polly Toynbee, who has a family tree that covers the last 150 years of English radicalism to base her arguments on.

Wealth and leftism are coming together. In the 2024 US presidential election 51 percent of voters with a total family income of $100,000 to $199,999 voted for Kamala Harris. In the British general election of the same year Labour won more votes from professionals than the Conservatives.

The dilemmas, hypocrisies and agonies Toynbee confronts are faced by tens of millions of guilty liberals.

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​A wide-eyed incredulity at working-class support for conservatism has gripped the political left for as long as there has been a political left. From Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, via Antonio Gramsci and Lenin, to today’s denouncers of Fox News and the Tory press, the far left, and often the centre left as well, believed that conservatives have a near supernatural power to brainwash the masses into voting against their real interests.

Liberals have paid less attention to an equally perplexing question: why do wealthy people vote against what appear to be their interests and refuse to endorse conservatism? In materialist terms their politics make no sense. How can they simultaneously benefit from and denounce a system that gives them and their children such abundant privileges?

The right, of course, cannot stay off the subject. Across cultures it knows how to mock the Champagne socialists, the limousine liberals, the salonkommunists, the liberal elite, and La Gauche caviar.

And, let us be fair, the gap between the upper-middle class left’s words and deeds is often wide enough for an army of satirists to march through.

The mockery is occasionally gentle but usually​ ​delivered with real venom​ and a deep loathing​.

Polly Toynbee has heard it all. Most wealthy people will not accept that their most significant achievement was to be born to the right parents, she writes. They are “certain that merit has propelled them to the top and just as certain their children will merit their inheritances.”

They turn on class traitors who recognise the injustice of the society that created them.