Berlin on Rousseau: The Philosopher of the Lower-Middle Class

Isaiah Berlin has probably one of the best readings of Rousseau (as in most philosophically exciting AND most in line with the authentic spirit of that lunatic great). From "The Idea of Freedom," included in his Political Ideas in the Romantic Age (emphasis mine):

This outlook and these opinions in their abraded, inflamed and morbid condition took the form - as so often both before and after him - of a violent, piously philistine attack on all that is refined, distinguished and unique in society, against that which could be considered in some sense withdrawn, esoteric, the product of exceptional elaboration or unique endowments, not immediately intelligible to the casual observer. Rousseau's furious onslaughts upon the aristocracy, upon refinement in the arts or in life, upon disinterested scientific enquiry, upon the lives and characters of all but the most immediate purveyors of objects useful to the average man - all this is not so much the cry for justice or understanding on the part of the representative of the insulted and injured helots, as something far more familiar and less respectworthy: the perennial distrust of moral or intellectual independence and freedom on the port of those spurious representatives of the middle class who found their voice in Rousseau, and who became progressively more influential in the nineteenth century - the believers in a solid, somewhat narrow, morally respectable, semi-egalitarian, privilege-hating, individualistic ideal, with its respect for work, success and the domestic virtues, its sentimental materialism and intolerance of differences - in short the great middle class of the nineteenth century, which becomes the enemy and the butt of all the révolté writers of that period, and which has survived so much more powerfully in America than in Europe today. Rousseau, so far from being the protagonist of the artist or the sans-culotte or the preacher of moral freedom, turns out to be an early and indeed premature champion of the lower middle class - the common man of our century - against not merely the aristocracy or the masses, but the uppers sections of the middle class, with its artistic and intellectual aims and demands and ideals, which prosperous peasants and industrious artisans - the 'common' men - obscurely feel to be a menace to their own more conventional, more deeply traditional, more rigidly set moral and intellectual values and decencies, with their solid protective crust of prejudice, superstition and faith in the sound, the kindly and the commonplace, concealing beneath a solid surface an elaborate network of social sensibilities and snobberies, passionately clung to, and a jealous consciousness of precise status and position in a profoundly hierarchical society. Rousseau is a poor, or rather deliberately self-blinded, sociologist, who threw dust in the eyes of many generations by representing as a rustic idyll or Spartan simplicity - the immemorial wisdom of the land - what is, in fact, an expression of that small-town bourgeois and class-conscious outlook, admittedly in an abnormal and diseased condition, which made him peculiarly aware of the vices and errors of the last days of a collapsing feudal order, and peculiarly blind to the deficiencies of that social outlook and those ideas which his own fiery genius did so much to enthrone in their place. In short, he was a militant lowbrow and the patron saint of the enemies of intellectuals, long-haired professors, avant-garde writers and the intelligentsia - the advanced thinkers - everywhere.

Of course this is all said with an Oxford sneer. But nevertheless, I think Berlin has captured much of the spirit of Rousseau. He's a great critic of luxuriating intellectual elites and a ruthless defender of entrenched popular prejudice. Does this make him a champion of the lumpenproletariat? Of the Trump voter?