The left have always been raging snobs. Just look at the likes of the Bloomsbury Circle: they only stopped whining about how hard it was to get good help these days to sneer at how awful those smelly working-class oiks are. Orwell called their ilk ‘a dictatorship of the prigs’. “Force them into any real contact with a proletarian”, he wrote, and they revert “to the most ordinary middle-class snobbishness”.
They haven’t changed a jot in the last 80 years. If anything, they’ve stopped even pretending.
The only change is that the new class divide is not by birth, nor even by wealth.
We have a new class system emerging. It is based not on wealth, education or occupation, but on the group of thinkers to which you belong. You tell me your social and political views, and I will cast your hierarchical horoscope.
There are only two classes now: Right Thought or Wrong Thought.
If you voted for Trump, you are garbage (not just horribly, horribly wrong). If you support Israel in Gaza, you are genocidal war criminal. If you are seriously religious you are a gullible bigot, and a would-be persecutor to boot.
Your class is Wrong Thought, right at the bottom. You are despised and dismissed on sight, like a Victorian chimney sweep.
You certainly won’t get invited to the ‘better’ dinner parties.
Contrariwise, if you saw Kamala Harris as the new Joan of Arc, want Benjamin Netanyahu drowned in ethically sourced tar and see religion as the crystal meth of the masses, welcome to the top of the social tree. Your class is Right Thought.
You will be invited to Peter FitzSimons’ harbourside New Year party.
The Right Thinkers are not entirely Calvinist in their condemnation of Wrong Thinkers.
Generously, though, there is an intermediate position between thought classes, like one of the better suburbs of Purgatory. You may be confused, or misinformed, or just plain uninterested in the really important issues of the day, like climate change and pangolins.
If so, you are No Thought, which is not good, but redeemable. With education and dedication, you may yet be elevated to Right Thought. Or through sloth and disinformation, you might find yourself stuck firmly among the Wrong Thoughted.
This is not a matter of mere differences of opinion. Like old-school Marxists, the Right Thinkers are adamant that their views are not just opinions, they’re science. Only a mad person would disagree with such self-evident facts as science, so to disagree with Right Thought is malicious and insane. At best, they generously allow, it’s mere ignorance.
But the critical problem for the Right Thoughted is that there are just so many people who are irredeemably wrong, or lazily without thought. Like 18th-century Whig aristocrats, our thought superiors despair of the endemically incorrect.
They try to educate us, but we are stubbornly ignorant. This breeds condescending frustration, which quickly turns to contempt, followed by righteous rage.
If you’ve ever tried to debate a Right Thinker, on anything from climate change to Covid vaccines to transgenderism, you’ll be familiar with the immediate response.
This partly explains why contemporary political and social debate is so vituperative. When one class is automatically right and the other by definition wrong, mere dissent is an Orwellian thought crime. This in turn underlies the current obsession with disinformation and misinformation.
The only way a Right-Thoughted person can confront contradiction is if their Wrong-Thoughted opponent is either spreading lies, is a contemptible dupe, or preferably both.
Either way, there is no need to actually address an argument. The mere fact that it is being put by an inferior intellectual class will explode it.
Because if there’s one thing the Right Thinkers have always really hated, it’s having to defend their idiotic nostrums in open debate. The mere fact of having to stand up and defend the claim that ‘some women have penises’ is enough to prove what a ridiculous load of rubbish it really is.
Easier to just shout ‘transphobe!’ instead.
