The Economist is extremely moralizing. It represents the point of view of a city dweller with a high paying job who buys into liberal sensibilities but smugly thinks himself wiser and more prudent than the radicals on the streets. He is a modern day Girondist, at times alarmed to find his kind under the guillotine (we are on the same side! he might protest) but finding comfort in a magazine that reminds him he is part of the moral and economic elite who really know how to run things.

The political viewpoint of The Economist has shifted. Twelve years ago it was right-liberal, today it is left-liberal, but that is only because the above character has shifted in his views.