When this blogger first shaved, Australia’s ruling class were upper middleclass, snobbish, hypocritical and puritan. And protestant.
Now, the ruling class is upper middleclass, snobbish, hypocritical and puritan. And leftwing secularist.
Brendan O’Neill, whose name, like mine, suggests he could never have been part of Australia’s old ruling class, sticks the hobnaileds into the new would-be bunyip aristocracy:
The hysterical war on pokies shows that, today, nasty snobbish moralism, a desire to re-engineer people’s lifestyles, is more likely to spring from the secular middle classes than from the cut-off religious elite. Indeed, if anything, the modern-day leftish wars on smoking, boozing and gambling are worse than the antics of the prohibitionists and anti-gamblers of the 19th century.
Where those old lifestyle cops at least believed that men were capable of making sentient moral decisions — hence they implored heavy drinkers and problem gamblers to “turn their lives around” — the new lifestyle cops see us all simply as hapless saps, brainwashed zombies who can only be wrenched away from our filthy habits through tough legislation or therapeutic intervention.
