America’s liberal backlash is noisy, but it will be deadlier in class-riven Britain

Trump’s victory has provoked extremes of opinion, but it’s in the UK that ‘ordinary people’ are treated with most disdain

Sometimes large political patterns can be illuminated most effectively by small incidents. Last week, Robert Ivy, the chief executive of the American Institute of Architects, issued a statement on the election of Donald Trump which he clearly thought unobjectionable.

While acknowledging that the election process had been “contentious”, Mr Ivy stated that his organisation was “committed to working with President-elect Trump to address the issues the country faces, particularly strengthening the nation’s infrastructure”. He pointed out that candidate Trump had called for committing at least $500 billion to infrastructure spending over five years, and that the AIA stood “ready to work with him… to ensure that investments in schools, hospitals and other public infrastructure continue to be a major priority”.

So this was a nice mix, you might think, of professional self-interest on the part of the architects’ lobby and political pressure on Mr Trump to follow through on his campaign promises. And given that the commitment to spending on public infrastructure was pretty much the only Trump policy that was supported by Democrats – harking back as it does to Franklin Roosevelt’s programme of public works – shouldn’t this announcement have passed without controversy?

Well forget that. What actually happened was that the sky fell in. The American architectural profession rose up as one to denounce Mr Ivy. There were public resignations from the AIA itself and the editorial board of The Architect’s Newspaper condemned the shameful conciliatory tone of his statement. There was rending of garments across the academic architectural establishment from the Yale School of Architecture, which decried the AIA’s “cowardly position”, to the Art Institute of Chicago, which created the inevitable hashtag #NotMyAIA.

In the end, believe it or not, Mr Ivy had to issue an apology video in which he atoned for his transgression, standing alongside the AIA president Russ Davidson, who promised that in future the organisation would “advocate vigorously for our sustainability agenda, including the impacts of climate change”. Good grief.Presumably this Maoist public self-mortification will earn Mr Ivy only a conditional reprieve, since he must now be regarded as under permanent suspicion of impure thoughts.

Readers will know that I am no Trump supporter. I am as alarmed by his election as everybody else. But I absolutely refuse to have my concerns identified with this outrageously – yes, let’s use the word – fascistic liberal hegemony. As the noisy demonstrators say: not in my name. In fact, of course, the word “liberal” is a complete misnomer: this is a profoundly illiberal movement in the great American witchhunting tradition, which demands the extirpation of any view (or any person) that does not conform to the official orthodoxy.

The parallel tendency here in the UK – in the form of our irreconcilable Remainers – bears watching, even if it pales in comparison with the full-blooded McCarthyism of the US model. The British version relies, predictably enough, on snobbery rather than intimidation: you do not threaten your adversary into retreat – you just sneer and condescend until he wilts under the weight of social inferiority.

So, in the UK, there are scathingly dismissive rejections of benighted public opinion which may – or may not – be circumvented by the courts, the result of which may – or may not – result in a constitutional crisis. But the whole farrago will be couched in terms of how worthy of respect the views of real people are, since this is seen as a viable matter for debate in British public life. It is still possible, for example, for a member of the House of Lords, the Europhile peer Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, who wrote Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, to state as he did last week that the UK needs to import intelligent migrants because “native” Britons are “so bloody stupid”.

You may – or may not – find this shocking, but it is just an unusually frank rendition of what is being implied constantly by the Remain camp in the media, who are now firmly in harness for the next round of this epic battle: call it Project Fear and Loathing. This isn’t just about inciting anxiety any more. It’s about straightforward hatred of the other side, and an irresponsible reliance on naked abuse.

The words “racism” and “bigotry” are being tossed around with abandon as if their power was a magical anathema, like holding up a cross to a vampire. So let me tell you what real racism looks and sounds like. Pamela Ramsey Taylor, a resident of Clay, West Virginia, put up a post on Facebook after the US election that said: “It will be refreshing to have a classy, beautiful, dignified first lady in the White House. I’m tired of seeing an ape in heels.” The mayor of the town, Beverley Whaling, wrote on the site that the post had “made her day”. And that, boys and girls, is the real thing. Stating that unlimited migration may place unsustainable pressure on housing and public services is nothing like this. It may be right or wrong, provable or unsubstantiated – but it is a proper argument that must be addressed. It is not inherently despicable or malign. It is not remotely like describing Michelle Obama as “an ape in heels”.

Meanwhile, in the US, there are people arguing that the Electoral College should be abolished because Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by a small margin (which is not unprecedented). The effect of this would be precisely the one that the founders who drafted the constitution sought to avoid. All presidential elections would be decided by a handful of states with the largest urban centres of population – effectively by California and New York. There would be no point in bothering to campaign in any of the “fly-over” states, since they would have little or no effect on the result. The views and concerns of Middle America could be ignored: held hostage by what everybody (even Bernie Sanders, bless him) now calls the “liberal elite”.

Somehow I doubt that the same people would be making this protest about a betrayal of democracy if Trump had lost in the Electoral College but won a popular majority. But surely even the most rarefied elitists should understand the danger here: it cannot be right to dismiss the electoral voice of whole swathes of the population because you find their views objectionable. Think again. This is precisely what is being proposed quite shamelessly both over there and over here. It is another version of Plato’s philosopherking argument, in which he advocated rule by the enlightened as a safeguard against the ignorant mob – which caused Isaiah Berlin to name Plato, along with Marx, as one of the great enemies of the open society.

What the (misnamed) liberal elite demands now, in startlingly open terms, is benign oligarchy – the rule of those with wisdom and expertise who will maintain the public good in the face of brutishness and unreason. Oddly, the British version of this autocratic impulse seems to me more likely to succeed than the more febrile American one. The United States is, for all its troubles, profoundly committed to popular democracy. The Leftliberal hauteur that is fashionable in cosmopolitan circles is a quite recent thing and it goes against the grain of what every American schoolchild is taught about the Constitution.

But in Britain, the disdain for ordinary people and their opinions runs very deep (and remains unforgivably respectable) in what is still a class-based culture. While the British will never be bullied by outsiders, I fear that they may, in the end, be susceptible to the derision of their “betters”.