François Hollande is revealed as a snob – something more common on the Left than you might think
By Daniel Hannan Politics Last updated: September 5th, 2014
 Was the last Bourbon king as unpopular as the current president?
As well as being a bore, a fornicator and a nincompoop, François Hollande stands accused of being a snob. His former mistress, Valérie Trierweiler, has revealed – along with other peccadilloes too excruciating to recount here – that the man who publicly professes to loathe the rich privately despises the poor. The son of a solidly bourgeois home, Hollande apparently sneered at Miss Trierweiler’s humbler origins, and referred privately to the underprivileged as “les sans-dents”: the toothless.
Miss Trierweiler finds this attitude incongruous in a Leftist politician, which makes me wonder how many Leftist politicians she can have spent time with. Snobbery is a well-established socialist vice. It began with Karl Marx, who could be vicious about the people modern Leftists primly call “the most vulnerable in our society”. The old cadger had no time for such euphemisms.
Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, pimps, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars — in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass which the French call la bohème.
Not all Leftist politicians are snobs, obviously. Some honourably speak to and for their poorest constituents without ever patronising them – Tony Benn was an outstanding example. But others are clandestinely dismissive of the people they purport to represent. Gordon Brown’s “bigoted woman” remark was a rare – because recorded – glimpse into the way Labour can privately view its core voters.
After a lifetime of observing such hypocrisy, George Orwell – who was a socialist, but no snob – brilliantly portrayed it in Nineteen Eighty-Four. On the one hand, the Party claimed to be on the side of the masses.
But simultaneously, true to the Principles of doublethink, the Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules.
Snobbery is not confined to any party or faction, of course. What seems far more common on the Left, though, is the need to find some inert, subjugated, grateful mass to champion. At first, that mass was supposed to be the industrialised proletariat. But, when working people were enfranchised, they often turned out to have troublingly conservative opinions. The needy politicians then turned to immigrants and other minorities.Annoyingly for them, some of these groups were equally unwilling to play the part allotted to them. So Lefties began to cast the net wider, searching for people who could be relied on not to contradict the official line: oppressed colonials, Palestinians, black South Africans. Sadly, these groups, too, refused to be either unconditionally grateful or politically correct.
I sometimes wonder whether political neediness explains the popularity of the animal rights movement: here, finally, is a constituency that can be relied on never to gainsay its self-proclaimed champions. Passive, predictable and in need of protection, animals are the perfect political prop.
As for Hollande, the French saw through him long ago. With 13 per cent approval ratings, he is the most unpopular leader in the history of his country (though, in fairness, there were no opinion polls during Charles X’s reign). Some French people may be toothless, but they’re evidently not mindless. They are on the receiving end of the Euro-correct socialism that is immiserating France, and they know it. Vivent les sans-dents!
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100285268/francois-hollande-like-so-many-left-wing-elitists-despises-the-poor/
[ Get a liberal to talking about southern or Appalachian white poor folks or Walmart people and you'll see just how snobbish they are. ] |
