The following is the second installment of a four-part symposium republished here from the current edition of Modern Age: A Debate on Localism & Cosmopolitanism. Read from the beginning.

The central thesis of Adam Webb’s essay is that anti-liberal traditions need not be parochial, that cosmopolitans can find themselves at home in the anti-liberal menagerie—and indeed, that for anti-liberalism to be successful, it needs to expand its horizons and develop a more cosmopolitan outlook.

This particular animal is quite at home wearing the cosmopolitan anti-liberal label, though the label may not be quite so up-market as some passages in Webb’s essay suggest. As he acknowledges, the interests of plain folk and the highly cultivated are not necessarily as antagonistic as liberals like us to believe. There is potentially quite a range of socio-economic positions represented in the anti-liberal menagerie, and the shared political pedigrees of the plain folk and the aristocrats deserve to be emphasized.

This point is not made often enough. There are some excellent historical examples of these two groups working together. The most dramatic is that of the resistance offered to the French Republicans by peasants and aristocrats operating along the marshlands of the Loire Valley. The peasants sent signals to the aristocrats and to one another by mimicking bird calls and positioning the arms of windmills in certain configurations. But for a couple of tragic mistakes, Napoleon claimed, they could have retaken Paris.

More recently, in the 1999 Australian constitutional referendum, the “No” campaign was won on the basis of an alliance between left-wing communitarians and true blue Tories. The question was whether to reconstitute Australia as a secular republic with a non-elected President or to retain the current constitution by which the Commonwealth of Australia is a Christian constitutional monarchy under Queen Elizabeth II. All six states returned majority “No” votes, but in the state with the largest republican constituency the “No” victory was in large measure due to an alliance between Evangelical Protestants and an assortment of leftists who tend to prefer soy milk, never eat at McDonald’s, and use only public means of transport.

Similarly, Prince Charles tends to be popular in rural parts of the United Kingdom because of his support for community co-operatives, organic farming, classical architecture, and retaining the traditional folkways of British village life; whereas precisely these interests and sympathies make him a subject of ridicule among the urban liberal intelligentsia. In all these examples an alliance has been forged between the plain folk and the aristocrats, against the values of liberal elites. Even the British Labour Party’s opposition to fox hunting can be construed as an attempt by the bourgeois elements within that party to stop ordinary country folk and the local gentry from having fun together.

Webb’s observation that the high cultural challenge to liberal modernity has fallen mute also deserves the attention of the anti-liberal camp. Not only do anti-liberals need to highlight the tension between the aristocratic good of human excellence and the liberal goods of efficiency and equality; they also need to focus on the way that liberal elites rely on rhetorical references to efficiency and equality in order to mask their own self-promotional (anti-egalitarian) agenda.