Matthew Arnold on America (1882)

I recently read an excellent examination of Matthew Arnold, the British philosopher-poet, in Jerry Muller's The Mind and the Market. Muller shows how Arnold tried to use high culture and intellectual complexity to reverse the deadening of high culture as Britain's expanding commercial class extended its resolutely middle-brow tastes to everyone, high and low. Rupert Murdoch is proof that Arnold failed. Anyhow, interested in finding out more about Arnold, I Googled him and turned up this cutting quote, from his book Culture and Anarchy (1882), addressed to his British audience:

Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace; and America is just ourselves, with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.

Sounds like a good motto for Bush's America: "All Philistines, All the Time."