In defence of the liberal elite

You can hear it already. Rising from the tents of the dejected Democrat camp comes the whimper of self-reproach. It’s all our fault. Liberalism created this monster. There’s a distinct whiff of mea culpa in the air. Nostra culpa, nostra maxima culpa for the alienation of half the American people.

 Donald Trump and his mob? It’s the fault of liberals for not feeling Trump-America’s pain. We fed their despair. Nigel Farage and his Reform party? Liberal Britain’s fault for being too stuck up to take Red Wall voters’ concerns seriously. Noses in the air (apparently), deaf to the woes of all those deplorables, and babbling about trans rights, preferred pronouns and all the rest of the woke agenda, we have lost the trust of those we (apparently) secretly consider negligible.

Hence Trump, apparently. Hence Reform. Hence Le Pen. Hence the AfD. Hence populism. Symptoms, all of them, not agents: unwitting by-products of American and European liberalism’s self-indulgent disregard for the silent majority of the just-about-managing. Apparently Theresa May’s ‘citizens of the world’ have simply blanked what the (normally liberal) David Goodhart calls the ‘Somewhere people’ in his The Road to Somewhere. No wonder they’re revolting. Blame the Anywhere people.

The US presidential election has provoked an inflamed outbreak of this liberal self-flagellation. A hero of mine, Andrew Sullivan, high priest in the marriage of personal freedom with conservative politics and one of the finest essayists alive, writes in the Sunday Times about how he was almost (but not quite) ready to vote for Trump, so sympathetic is he to forgotten America’s rage against the woke ‘elite’. The Democrats (he writes) have ‘missed a critical new reality in American politics: it’s about class, not identity’ – and we liberals are snobs.