The rage of the entitled overclass

The collective mental breakdown among self-styled progressives since Donald Trump’s re-election has been quite the sight to behold. The subsequent declaration by many that they will leave X, in protest of that platform’s supposed descent into fascism, has made matters all the more entertaining. What a glorious outpouring of self-importance and self-righteousness, combined with an utter lack of self-awareness.

Though such tantrums are amusing, the spectacle has also been appalling. This has been a grim cocktail of piety, sanctimony and belligerence, with rancour and malice thrown in, too. If the cleavage between remote, moneyed liberals and normal people was laid bare by the US election result, the fall-out since has made the gap appear all the more cavernous.

We should have been prepared for this behaviour, of course. We witnessed such sneering petulance from the entitled overclass back in 2016, the year that saw Trump first elected as US president, and also the year a majority of the British public voted to leave the European Union.

Up to then, the elites had silently become ever-more detached from the lower orders, regarding them with increasing disdain. This antipathy suddenly erupted in spectacular fashion. They had grown so accustomed to getting their way that they just couldn’t process or accept that, for once, their demands had not been met.

In America in 2016, there was rage and grief. ‘You’re awake by the way’, said MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, in a clip widely circulated from that fateful night in November. ‘You’re not having a terrible, terrible dream. Also, you’re not dead, and you haven’t gone to hell’, she continued. ‘This is your life now.’

On campuses nationwide, students marched with signs bearing the legend ‘Not my president’, an apolitical slogan that neatly captured an egotistic and cosseted mindset. And so it continued.

The reaction to the EU vote was a comparable mixture of horror and disgust directed at the insolent masses. As Matthew Goodwin reminded us in his book Values, Voice and Virtue, Brexit voters were smeared as ‘bigots’, ‘clowns’ and the ‘lumpen mass with… half formed thoughts and fully formed prejudices’. And so it still continues.

Perhaps the most egregious response came from the host and panellists on the BBC comedy show, Mock the Week, who carried on belittling Brexit voters into the next decade with an unrelenting fervour that no doubt hastened that show’s cancellation in 2022. That decision, in turn, was met with snotty, snobbish outbursts on the programme’s final episodes.

So yes, these tantrums have been fun, as car-crash viewing. But do prepare yourselves for this stream of resentment to continue, just as it did after 2016. The elites won’t find peace and permanent hermitage on Bluesky. They’ll be back, demanding once more to be heard and once more to be obeyed.

The dystopian horror of the Allison Pearson scandal

Faced with an example of the state behaving in an alarming, unreasonable and authoritarian manner, we are usually too prone to describe the scenario as either ‘Kafkaesque’ or ‘Orwellian’. What makes the case of Allison Pearson so sinister is that it is both.

Pearson is a Telegraph journalist, currently under police investigation for a post she made on social media last year. When she received a knock at the door from Essex Police earlier this month, she was told that something she had written was now a police matter. That fits the Orwellian test, of the state monitoring and menacing citizens for speech it deems dangerous, as in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Furthermore, Pearson wasn’t told what she is supposed to have said to have triggered the police’s inquiries. Nor was she told who had made the accusation. That qualifies as Kafkaesque, as this is precisely what happens to Josef K in The Trial.

Since Pearson’s ordeal came to light, it has also emerged that former Conservative MP Tom Hunt has had a non-crime hate incident (NCHI) recorded against him, following a complaint from a Labour activist. An NCHI, which Pearson initially thought she had been charged with, is a tool used by police to record accusations of ‘hateful’ speech, even when no law has been broken. The logic is that police should catch people making minor transgressions, such as un-PC tweets, before this escalates to a serious hate crime. It rests on a slippery-slope theory of criminality. As Essex Police themselves explained on Monday: ‘With every report of this kind made to us, we must consider future risks of significant harm against freedom of speech…’ (My emphasis.)

This development goes beyond Kafka and Orwell. As Toby Young pointed out last weekend, the NCHI also belongs to the dystopian imagination of Philip K Dick. In his short story, Minority Report, Dick describes a world of ‘precrime’ in which suspects are arrested by the police for future felonies that they are expected to commit. As John Anderton, the protagonist of Minority Report, explains to a new colleague: ‘You’ve probably grasped the basic legalistic drawback in precrime methodology. We’re taking in individuals who have broken no law.’

Rather than keeping their focus on crimes that have taken place, the actual police now seek to punish you for potential crimes that have not.

Don’t be fooled by a British accent

One of the most smug and irritating regular guests on Mock the Week was John Oliver. He has since moved to America, where he has become a smug and irritating presenter on HBO’s Last Week Tonight.

On Sunday evening, Oliver launched into one of his trademark rapid-fire sermons, this time on the issue of trans children competing in school sports. ‘There are vanishingly few trans girls competing in high schools anywhere. Even if there were more, trans kids, like all kids, vary in athletic ability and there is no evidence they pose any threat to safety or fairness’, he said.

We have come to expect such tin-eared aloofness from our overclass. And comedians, like actors, are often the worst specimens. They hope that a feeble argument delivered with sufficient style, elan and conviction will please a pliant studio audience.

The audience outside the studio, however, was less impressed and even less convinced. The most pithy rebuttal came from Benjamin Ryan, a science and health reporter for the New York Times, who responded: ‘There absolutely is evidence that trans females have a competitive advantage.’

Sadly, Oliver is not an isolated case. Mehdi Hasan, also British born and bred, is another to have made his name on US television. From 2021 until earlier this year, he fronted The Mehdi Hasan Show on MSNBC, where he opined along much the same lines as Oliver.

Hasan’s and Oliver’s success stateside no doubt owes to an ingrained perception among Americans that a British accent automatically reflects greater intelligence (this might even explain James Corden’s baffling popularity over there, too). But the success of these two exposes this delusion as manifestly untrue.

Thus, my advice to American friends who feel themselves seduced by this myth is to return to the movie, This Is Spinal Tap. Here you will also see half-wits with British accents making brain-dead observations. Only this time it’s far more entertaining.

Patrick West is a spiked columnist. His latest book, Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times, is published by Societas.