Andrew Coyne sneaks in a literary quote from Chesterton on the eternal snobbery of the not-so-hidden class war in Canadian politics:
Democracy, in G. K. Chesterton’s careful definition, means government by the uneducated, “while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.”
The enduring value of this distinction was suggested by the ruckus stirred up over the weekend by Amir Attaran, professor of law at University of Ottawa. Responding to a recent Abacus Data poll finding the Tories leading the Liberals by a wide margin among Canadians with a high school diploma or less, with the Liberals ahead among those with bachelor degrees or higher, the professor tweeted: “The party of the uneducated. Every poll says this.”
In the ensuing furor, Attaran tried to protest that he was just stating a fact, but the disdain in the tweet was clear enough to most. For their part, while some Tories quibbled with the data (just one poll, within the margin of error, misplaced correlation etc), most seemed less offended by the sentiment — every poll does show the less formal education a voter has, the more likely they are to support the Conservatives — than by the suggestion there was something shameful about it.
It was, in short, another skirmish in the continuing class war: class, now defined not by occupation or birth, as in Chesterton’s time, but by education. Conservatives, true to form, professed outrage at this arrogant display of Liberal elitism, while Liberal partisans protested that they were not snobs, it’s just that Conservatives are such ignorant boobs (I paraphrase).
The professor compounded matters by objecting, not only that he is not a Liberal, but that he is not an elite, since his parents were immigrants. And everyone did their best to be as exquisitely sensitive (“let us respect the inherent dignity of labour”) as they could while still being viciously hurtful (“not uneducated, just unintelligent”).
At the Post Millennial, Joshua Lieblein describes his initial reaction followed by sober second thoughts:
When I read the following condescending tweets from University of Ottawa professor Amir Attaran, my first thought was, “Well, somehow he wasn’t educated enough to predict this reaction. What did he expect?”
[…]
And then I realized that I wasn’t giving him enough credit. Professor Attaran knew exactly what to expect.
Professor Attaran wants you to read his unsolicited and deliberately insulting tweets. He wants you to talk about the tight links between the polling firm that provided him with his QUOTATION and the Liberal Party of Canada. He wants you to hurl all kinds of abuse at him.
Then, he and others will go through the pile of invective generated by this Sunday evening musing, pick out the most racist and inflammatory takes, and use them to justify the idea that facts are under assault, that minorities cannot speak out on issues of the day in Canada, that Conservatives don’t believe in freedom of speech, and that “right-wing mobs” exist and are being directed by CPC thought leaders.
It’s not like this is a new phenomenon, or something that’s new to Canada. Did you think all of Trudeau’s ridiculous behaviour was spontaneous? Sure, some of it is. The man is a certifiable moron. But we really should have guessed that we were being played for fools by the time he was doing shirtless photobombs of weddings.
