Ed West on Political Differences, 10/10

Peculiarities in how elites relate to the masses

Ed West writes,

Many notional urban liberals are much more conservative than they claim, or even believe themselves.

…These people are notionally non-judgmental about lifestyles, because that’s what they’re expected to be, but they don’t really believe it, and their revealed preferences are usually towards very conventional relationships.

…Conservatism is the human default, while liberalism is adapted for relatively modern urban environments; progressivism is a form of runaway liberalism in which people often competitively take ever more extreme viewpoints for reasons of status or pathological empathy.

But people’s commitment to liberal and progressive causes is often quite thin, a form of decorum exaggerated by preference falsification.

Charles Murray complained that elites do not preach what they practice. They practice impulse control and a conservative lifestyle for themselves and try to inculcate it for their children. But they excuse misbehavior among those they see as oppressed.

This might not be hypocritical. They could hold the view that the only reason poor people behave badly is because of the grinding pressures of poverty.

But West is suggesting that liberal sympathies for the poor are superficial. On the inside, liberals are inclined to blame misbehavior of the poor on the poor themselves. But they are afraid to say so out loud. He argues that liberals will shift to conservatism if the “permission structure” allows them to do so.

But West (like me) is no populist. In a subsequent post, West writes,

out there in the real world there were all these Labour supporters who were even more Right-wing than my dad, whether on crime, immigration, Europe, sexual relations or pretty much any social issue. They just wanted, in Blackadder’s words, a few less fat bastards eating all the pie.

…public opinion on economic issues is quite eye-watering: a full 28 per cent of British adults want banks to be run by the state, and 30 per cent even want internet providers nationalised. A quarter want travel agents nationalised. 

It goes without saying that I think it’s a bad idea for the state to run most of these things — I can’t imagine many things worse than a holiday organised by the government or local council. On this subject the majority of people in the media would agree with me, because the media tends to be out of step with the population at large. It is disproportionately upper-middle-class, university-educated, and liberal on both economic and liberal issues. The public are not.

But (also like me) West is afraid of the elites as well.

the opinion of someone who knows nothing about politics or economics shouldn’t be respected just because they’ve got the vote. But it is true that educated, upper-middle-class voters aren’t necessarily better judges of ideas, being prone to adopt luxury beliefs, voting for tribal and class interests disguised under a moral banner, and adopting far more extreme ideological positions than the less educated.