An interesting piece in the curent edition of The Spectator. Excerpts:
For a start, the elite is not liberal in the classical liberal sense, but closer to the American sense of the word. It is certainly not ‘liberal’ if by that you mean tolerant: it is intolerant and authoritarian. And by elite I do not mean the elected government: establishment elites can survive most forms of government and easily outlast them.
The liberal elite we talk about today is beholden to a leftish cultural and political paradigm which predominates in all the non-elected institutions which run our lives. In the judiciary, for example. Within the BBC. In the running of our universities and in the courses they put before students. In the teaching profession. In the social services departments of every council in the land. At the top of the medical profession. On the boards of all the quangos — the lot of them, from those which hand out money in the arts to those which regulate our media and our utilities. It is a left-liberal paradigm, informed by affluence, which has been swallowed whole by all of these institutions and which is utterly intolerant of dissent…
Elites do change, though. I remember as a speechwriter for the Labour party in the early 1980s suggesting that we do something in support of the teachers, who were complaining about pay. ‘Fuck them — they’re all Tories,’ I was told. And so statistically they were, at the time. And in the 1970s the BBC, the Church of England, the judiciary and the emergent quangos were small ‘c’ conservative. Elites last for about two generations. Our liberal elite has lasted since about 1985. And my guess is that right now it is on the way out, which is why we are hearing this continual howling.
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Justice for Men & Boys 
Interesting indeed, and much though I like Rod’s conclusion that the illiberal left has had it’s day I wouldn’t rejoice just yet.
Even IF it’s heyday is past, I fear the Frankfurt school left is likely to be
around for what’s left of the rest of my life at least – although someone in the first flush of youth may be luckier
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I think you’re right about the Frankfurt school cultural Marxists, well embedded in the Universities. I think that the narrowing of the sort of people” in charge” from the mid eighties reflected in a way a Triumph of the middle class professionals. One of the unintended outcomes of the collapse of both the big industries and the labour movement, mass unions etc. was the end of “mobility”. The affluent woring class suburb in was brought up in boasted skilled male workers and indeed skilled women workers and it wasn’t unusual to see them become councillors, and other prominent roles in local society and in the industries they worked in. There were a lot of ways to “get on” through education in work. However the spread of graduate only and “fast track” graduate schemes has all but put paid to these routes. Both limiting the “sort” of people getting on and giving them a far more uniform early life experience and education. The apotheosis of this was the orchestrated euphoria at the Blair election, which marked the start of the triumph of the clever Uni. types and a ramping up of PC including whatever “wave” of feminism we are dealing with.The coalition of course continued this technocratic theme as does to a lesser extent the May Gov.
In a way the scuffles about transgender, Brexit vote, contradictions in policy and even the more frequent mention (without action) of male health and education issues betokens some changes particularly the under 45s who can see that the PC, Technocratic, “Equalities” “Diversity” agendas neither work and are actually discriminatory. In my final years working in NHS local Gov.it was interesting to see the steam bleed out of the push to employ and promote ethnic minorities to the extent that as I left this had effectively fallen off the agenda with only “wimmin” seen as in need of special treatment.
I suspect that the generations that have seen the “positive discrimination(sorry “action”) and felt the effects in work family life and daily experience are less deferential to the ideas of the now middle aged, and don’t see why they should suffer.
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Nothing new there. I’ll bet that isn’t one person that reads this blog that couldn’t tel you the same things. But it is nice and somewhat reassuring to hear it from another direction.
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