By MICHAEL KNOX BERAN [City Journal] – More than a century and a half ago, Benjamin Disraeli, affecting to believe that Britain’s Tory elite was “the really democratic party of England,” showed that the well-to-do could more easily maintain their ascendancy if they became paternalist champions of working people. By adopting socially progressive policies, they could “dish the Whigs” and stave off free-market reformers like Richard Cobden and John Bright.
In a no less duplicitous spirit, Otto von Bismarck invited Ferdinand Lassalle, founder of the General Union of German Workers, to the Wilhelmstrasse, where the two explored an alliance between Bismarck’s Junker ministry and the working classes. Bismarck did not “promote social reform out of love for the German workers,” historian A. J. P. Taylor wrote. Following, by turns, Marx and Metternich, Bismarck sought to make workers “more subservient” to the Junker-dominated state.
Elites who seek alliances with progressive tribunes are not always feudal aristocrats (like Bismarck) or feudal retainers (like Disraeli). They may, like the Roosevelts, be high bourgeois who have succumbed to the Medici Syndrome. Abandoning, as the Medici did, the tradition of their forebears, who were proud of their market squares, the high bourgeois find commerce vulgar and ape the manners of the nobility.
As part of its acquired feudal style, the haute bourgeoisie dabbles in social policy as a form of noblesse oblige…Principle plays a part in motivating elites who hoist the flag of social reform: the free-market ideal, they argue, is a source of misery when pursued too unrestrainedly.
Continued at City Journal
Democracy for those who lose elections.
By D.D. GUTTENPLAN [The Nation] – Senior Labour Party figures seem to believe the public will turn against the government once the cuts start to really bite. Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor and supposedly Labour’s hardest hitter against the Tories, joined the march today but argued only for a more gradual approach to reducing the deficit rather than a wholesale rejection of the austerity agenda. And in a way the whole day reflected this disconnection between parliamentary politicians, who still seem terrified of appearing “irresponsible,” and the teachers, nurses, librarians, social workers, train drivers and hospital workers who are terrified of losing their jobs and having to rely on a shredded social safety net.
It’s easy for us old veterans to heap scorn on the few hundred anarchist punks in their black hoodies who come to these demonstrations looking for trouble, and whose appetite for mixing it up with the police threatens to hijack the headlines, and the airtime, earned by the hundreds of thousands of peaceful protestors. But when the political system seems sclerotic and unresponsive dissent will find other avenues. The demonstrators chanting—and singing—“March Like an Egyptian”, or carrying London street signs proclaiming “Tahrir Square, City of Westminster” were clearly engaging in wishful thinking. That has to be preferable, though, to the refrain (sung to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic) I heard as the crowd passed under Big Ben: “You can take your Parliament and shove it up your arse.”
Continued at The Nation | More Chronicle & Notices.
