The leaked email from Des Browne's aide containing the words "If you’ve not been to Sweden before, I think you’ll really like it – it’s the country Scotland would be if it wasn’t narrow, Presbyterian, racist etc. etc." is much more than an idle, stupid and unrepresentative comment. While elected politicians are rarely so explicit in public statements, such an attitude in more private venues towards whole swathes of society is common from liberal-leaning people who would rather self-identify as an enlightened few, privately contemptuous of the values of most of their fellow countrymen, than accept that attitudes less 'progressive' than their own are anything other than bigoted and unpardonable.
Most often this attitude is expressed as an obsessive vitriol against Britain's second most popular newspaper, the Daily Mail. Such rhetoric is consciously or unconsciously an attack on the values and priorities of Middle England - eurosceptic, un-PC and sick of paying such high taxes for such puny return; more worried about crime and teenage pregnancy than about climate change or Islamophobia; more interested in what Migration Watch has to say than Liberty. While conservatives have our own policy preferences that are minority enthusiasms, none of the same venom is expressed towards the millions who disagree.
American conservatives have long been expert at showing the lofty distain of liberal elites for what it is - the snobbish contempt of the affluent, fashionable, well-connected and powerful for those weaker and less fortunate than themselves - and turning it towards electoral success. With so much material to work from, smart conservative strategists should be thinking hard about how to do the same here.
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