David Solway: ‘The Snob Factor among Conservatives’

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Many of those who have benefitted from an elite university education and hail from prosperous families tend to react with suspicion, or even with a certain disdain, toward their lower-and-working class counterparts who speak with regional accents, prefer tankards to carafes and are, on the whole, less erudite and articulate than those whom I call “palatine conservatives.”

Thus, for example, many of these patrician and accomplished figures look down their noses at Sarah Palin with her rustic habits, non-prestigious educational background and brash rhetorical delivery. That Palin is a rare, honest politician, a woman of the people, and a bearer of genuine conservative sentiments and ideas does not count in her favor. She is too “common” to inspire enthusiasm among the “quality.” (…)

…Sarah Palin and […] the Tea Party, Tommy Robinson and the EDL are willing to defy a despotic and pusillanimous constituted authority that has sold out the culture for a mess of leftist and Islamic pottage. The group is willing to take risks and to suffer defamation, false accusations and even imprisonment, in short, to put itself “out there” for their beliefs. Very few among their “superiors” would ever expose their comforts, privileges, and intellectual and social status to the mercy of their antagonists. And this is an unmitigated shame.