Snobbish Britain and Racist America

Britain snobbish and America racist? You bet. But not quite in the ways that you probably thought.

Both countries are governed by elites that deny being elite. In Britain, the ruling class flaunts its state education. But its members attended pseudo-comprehensives. Yes, David Cameron’s cocooned background and lifestyle are a very serious problem. Most obviously, though, David Miliband didn’t exactly grow up on a council estate, either.

Nor did I. However, like all genuinely middle-class people (people in the middle), I grew up around those who did. We went to school with them. We still see them. We couldn’t avoid seeing them even if we wanted to.

Whereas, to the new ruling class, they are invisible. So is the old upper class. They know nothing about either “chavs” or “toffs”. Except, of course, that they hate them.

Meanwhile, in America, there used to be the squash-playing, golfing, tennis-playing, badminton-playing, horse-riding, polo-playing and yachting class of Lowells and Cabots, of Vanderbilts and Roosevelts, of Rockerfellers and Astors, of Du Ponts and Carnegies, of Mellons and Joneses, the original “Joneses” with whom others strived to “keep up”.

It still exists. But even the last, and the least probable, of its notable scions is now coming to end of his time as President. And he pretended not to be in it, surrounding himself with ethnic and regional outsiders in relation to the old elite. Those are the new insiders, the new elite.

So the old upper class no longer bothers to point to the clause in the Constitution prohibiting the conferral of any “title of nobility”. As if that settled the matter. And as if a self-aware aristocratic class were necessarily a bad thing. It is characteristically conscious of the responsibilities of the more fortunate towards the less fortunate.

Such was the British one, before Thatcher banished both it and the old working class by declaring only money, and only new money at that, to be “merit”. And such was the old American upper class, protected by the governing covenants that kept Philadelphia’s Main Line and Chestnut Hill, New York’s Upper East Side and Boston’s Beacon Hill well-bred rather than merely wealthy.

But now even that old American elite, certainly not without a social conscience, has been supplanted by a new ruling element, as deluded as its British equivalent that somehow it came up the hard way.

The real British ruling class, which might be called the New Labour core vote, has little or no connection to the Armed Forces. So it gleefully dispatches its class enemies, whether the “toff” officers or the “chav” squaddies, to be harvested in pointless, unwinnable wars.

Something very similar also applies in America. But race is even more important than class in America, whereas class is more important than race in Britain. So the real American ruling class dispatches to the blighted and blighting harvest, not so much its class enemies, as its race enemies.

Those enemies are heavily concentrated in the military’s heartland, Appalachia: West Virginia, Kentucky, North and South Carolina, Pennsylvania. Blacks, of course. Irish – working-class, seriously Catholic. Scots-Irish – Southerners and Westerners, seriously Protestant. And, yes, blue-chip WASPs, the dispossessed who have to be presented as still in possession.

Take out these from America’s all-volunteer military, like take out the hated “toffs” and the hated “chavs” from ours, and there would be almost nobody left. Certainly not the sons, daughters and future members of the decision-making, warmongering circles.

Those circles, a philistine collection of fund-controlling agenda-setters, are equally contemptuous of the cultures of the old upper class and of the working class, insofar as they have allowed it to survive at all. They are just as ignorant of pitmen poets as of T S Eliot, and just as ignorant of grand opera as of brass and silver bands.

But they know that they hate them.

And they know that they hate the people who don’t.