The agonies of liberal guilt

Greetings,

This is the last few days of my holiday. At the weekend I will announce plans to take Writing from London forwards, which I hope you like. In the meantime I am reposting my most interesting interviews in the Lowdown podcast series. Here is my conversation with Polly Toynbee, who has written one of the best accounts of the dilemmas of the upper-middle class left I have read.

Beneath it is a long read from me on snobbery and idealism in British liberal culture. It’s paywalled, but if you like my journalism, why not consider supporting it for only £5 a month or £1.15 a week. That’s less than the price of buying a seat in the House of Lords. You’ll gain access to all articles, archives, and to the friendly comment section.

Best wishes,

Nick

Polly Toynbee’s new study of class and guilt is An Uneasy Inheritance. You can listen to my interview with Polly on the Apple player above. The Lowdown is also available on Google and Spotify The feed for all other providers is here. Alternatively, Buzzsprout has links to every podcast player you can think of!

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If you’re so progressive, how come you’re so rich?

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, has 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 their real 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​ which reveals 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.

In feudalism, inequality was justified by the principles of aristocracy; in capitalism, by the myth of meritocracy.