This article originally appeared in the Daily Telegraph and was written by:
Brendan O'Neill
Brendan O'Neill is the editor of spiked, an independent online phenomenon dedicated to raising the horizons of humanity by waging a culture war of words against misanthropy, priggishness, prejudice, luddism, illiberalism and irrationalism in all their ancient and modern forms.
My hero Thomas Paine must be spinning in his grave. No, not necessarily because there is still a monarchy in Britain, something he was fighting tooth-and-catapult against 250 years ago. But because the political creed that he espoused with such vigour and clarity – republicanism – has now been co-opted by the most miserabilist, misanthropic, killjoyish sections of society who wouldn’t recognise a political principle if they were accosted by one in an alleyway. Once upon a time, being a republican meant trusting in the people, seeing in the mass of society the potential for reason and self-governance. Now it means precisely the opposite: distrusting the people, sneering at them for being an easily brainwashable mob of forelock-tugging freaks.
The great irony of the Diamond Jubilee celebrations is that the most overt snobbery emanated, not from the House of Windsor or its posh cheerleaders in political and media circles, but from so-called republicans. It was them, these embarrassments to Tom Paine, who looked with horror and derision upon the great hordes of modern Britain. They pronounced themselves “aghast” at all the little people “happily buying Union Jack cups and bunting”. They mocked the masses for obediently heeding the “message from on high” telling them “not to worry about increasing inequality and its accompanying social problems, but to clap your hands, smile and applaud”, like good little children.
They railed against the “infantile emotions” of the public, who apparently squeal: “Oh look here is the Queen! In yellow! In a hat!” They told us that“never are the peasants more revolting than when tugging their forelocks”. They informed us that certain groups of people – rough translation: the thick and uncultured – have been swallowed up by an“orgy of deference” to the Queen. And these thickos don't even understand that the Queen-oriented “cult of personality” has been sinisterly designed as a “diversion from more serious issues”, like the recession. What the dainty-minded ordinary people fundamentally don’t get, apparently, is that royal events like this are, in the words of a Mirror columnist, “magnificent pleb-pleasing distractions”, “psycho-spectacles”designed to make the “plebs” forget about their hardships. And the reason these plebs can so easily be made to forget that they are poor and wretched and downtrodden is because they have been“brainwashed on an Orwellian scale” into loving royalty.
What an historic turnaround. Today it isn’t royalists who look down their noses at everyday folk, viewing them as a malleable mob without a brain cell between them. Rather it is republicans, or “republicans”, who do that. In their very elitism, they reveal that they aren’t real republicans at all, for republicanism is about believing that the public is capable of great and wondrous political things. All that these shallow republicans believe with any intensity is that the public are “infantile” and “brainwashed” and easily swayed by “psycho spectacles”, and as a consequence are beyond both reason and hope. They sound less like Paine and more like his nemesis Edmund Burke, who described the people as a “swinish multitude”.
What is most amusing is the reaction of those same "miserabilist, misanthropic, killjoyish sections of society who wouldn’t recognise a political principle if they were accosted by one in an alleyway" - here's an extract discussing the article from Facebook on 6 June 2012:
~o0o~
Republic Campaign ... We are not the ones whe believe this is an issue only for elitist chattering classes, that is the likes of O'Neill. He is being hypocritical and snobbish himself. He is also clearly ignorant of the issues at hand...- Conrad Brunstrom O'Neill lazily misquotes Burke, who never described "the people" in general as a "swinish multitude" - only that "swinish multitudes" do sometimes exist. As a full time eighteenth-centuryist, I'm professionally obligated to point that out.
The Burke misquote is typical of a very lazy piece of writing. Without having met us, or spoken to us, he describes us as "miserabilist". Now I'm not miserable at all. I'm jolly and upbeat to believe that Britain deserves (and will get) something less tedious and undemocratic as the hereditary principle to express its own sense of sovereign identity.
It was important that Republic demonstrate by the Thames because the media constantly talk about the nation being "united" in its monarchism - that "everyone" is celebrating the monarchy. Republic would have been failing in its most obvious responsibilities if it hadn't organised some sort of visible refutation of this fallacy. - Republic Campaign ... O'Neill is appallingly hypocritical, suggesting that 'real' republicans have to be quoting from Paine and limiting their views to the chattering classes, then calls us snobs. His article has no credibility and is entirely predictable and typical of his writing.
- Oooooh! Catfight! LOL
Just goes to show how Republic's "campaign" has backfired on them disastrously. They were desperately looking for any avenue to up their public profile from the occasional articles in the Grauniad and other left-wing publications. But having become a focus for wider attention, their widely-held fantasy that the media and the population at large would simply fall into line behind the standard bearers of "democracy", when they can't even use the word in the same way as the rest of the world, has proved to be hollow. Some of us knew that all along, of course!
