Posted here Tuesday, July 20, 2004 at 10:00:57 PM 
Looking at contemporary history, a look back can help. Here we have a vie of a rising middle class that stood for moderation, about 1700. We in the US, in 2004, are moving in the opposite direction.
from the magnificent 18 vol history of english lit, on line
http://www.bartleby.com/219/0201.html
STEELE and Addison are writers of talent who rose almost to genius because they intuitively collaborated with the spirit of their age. They came to London at a time when, quite apart from politics, society was divided into two classes, apparently so irreconcilable that they seemed like two nations. On the one side was the remnant of the old order, which still cherished the renascence ideals of self-assertion and irresponsibility and had regained prominence at the restoration. They followed the old fashion of ostentation and self-abandonment, fighting duels on points of honour, vying with each other in quips and raillery, posing as atheists and jeering at sacred things, love-making with extravagant odes and compliments, applauding immoral plays, while the more violent, the “gulls” and “roarers,” roamed through the town in search of victims to outrage or assault. The women, in these higher circles, read and thought of little but erotic French romances, wore false eyebrows and patches, painted themselves, gesticulated with their fans and eyes, intrigued in politics and passed the time in dalliance. But, on the other hand, the citizens of London, who, since Tudor times, had stood aloof from culture and corruption, were now no longer the unconsidered masses. Each new expansion of trade gave them a fresh hold on society, while the civil war, which had decimated or ruined the nobility, conferred on the middle class a political importance of which their fathers had never dreamt. As a rule, members of the citizen class who have risen in the social scale intermarry with the aristocracy and imitate the manners, and especially the vices, of the class into which they enter. But, in the great political revolution of the seventeenth century, merchants and traders had triumphed through their moral character even more than by their material prosperity. The time had come when England was weary of all the medieval fanaticism, brutality and prejudice which had risen to the surface in the civil war, and it was the citizen class, apart from the zealots on both sides, which had first upheld moderation.
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