LET THEM EAT LOW-FAT MUFFINS!

Saddam's fate divides Right from smug (Janet Daley, The Telegraph, November 6th, 2006)

What the Kerry gaffe did was to make clear the gap that now exists in American politics between the great mass of American popular opinion – for whom soldiers, especially when they are risking their lives in battle, are heroic figures – and the liberal elite for whom military action is a dirty, downmarket game.

So when exactly did snobbery become the province of the Left? In Britain and in the United States, it used to be axiomatic that the wealthy, privileged de haut en bas voices belonged to those on the Right of centre. They may have been paternalistic and charitable (at least as a social hobby) but they were comfortable with their superiority and unencumbered by any sense that their advantages were unjust.

Now all the condescension – all the snide hauteur about common folk and their vulgar prejudices – comes from the Left-liberal corner. It is the views of the common man – caricatured as the politics of the trailer park in the US, and of white-van man in Britain – that are the object of contempt in right-thinking (which is to say, Left-thinking), socially enlightened circles. This mentality reaches a kind of apotheosis in the attitudes of the BBC, where its assumptions are almost entirely unquestioned.[...]

The change must have come in the 1960s, I suppose, when moral outrage became the common currency of political life, and a general licence was issued to every educated person to detest openly all those who did not subscribe to the unimpeachable world view that was handed down at university.