Britain’s populist right-leaning tabloid, The Daily Mail, is commonly viewed by bien-pensant liberals as a repository of Britain’s baser interests and inclinations. Its pages alternate between outrage over the scourge of youth crime and the ceaseless flood of (mostly Islamic) immigrants, and dire pronouncements on newly discovered cancer-inducing agents and the ceaseless rise of UK house prices, while not forgetting volumes of celebrity gossip about low-rent stars from trash TV shows.

Yet despite the moral panic liberals claim over the bigotry and ignorance the right-wing rag is breeding among the (invariably passive) lower orders, there is smug comfort in their disdain. Among well-educated left-leaning circles, expressing outrage over a recent headline (“did you see that xenophobic filth in the Mail today?”) is effective short-hand for establishing one’s enlightened liberal credentials; and “Daily Mail reader” has become a popular class pejorative to designate a narrow-minded somebody of the aspirant working or lower middle classes. Much the same validating function is provided by Fox News for U.S. liberals, in providing a ready-to-mock caricature of the Forces of Ignorance against which they are nobly pitted.

Here’s an example of the fun to be had with the “Daily Fail”:

But it appears that the Mail might not be quite so lamentably British as all that. In the vast, loss-making fight towards internet hegemony that established newspapers have been waging, the Mail has come out trumps; and not just in Britain. The MailOnline is now the world’s second most popular news site, having overtaken The Huffington Post, and sits awkwardly behind the high-brow liberal opinion-maker The New York Times. Yet, its rise being exponential, some predict that it will take the top spot some time this summer, in which case the world really isn’t safe for democracy.

The curious thing is, a large swathe of its online readership is American, the U.S. edition offering a similarly sensationalist take on American affairs alongside the obligatory celebrity/cancer/housing-market guff. This led Rod Liddle to muse in The Spectator on what the American character shares with the British:

it transpires that [the Mail‘s] audience’s taste in news, in how it views the world, is not quite so uniquely British as many had thought or hoped. The Americans are just as atavistically bitter and vengeful and unhappy as we are, just as scared of horrible diseases and as susceptible, in their lighter moments, to meaningless sleb bilge, just as transfixed about what their house is worth today, tomorrow and the day after.

In America’s enthusiasm for what has long been perceived as a parochial British tabloid, more a dirty family secret than a news outlet, we are perhaps witnessing a different register of Anglophilia than that which overtook America at the time of the Royal Wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton, when countless whole families jumped out of bed early to watch the ceremony live. America’s strange fondness for the quainter elements of the British aristocracy, and its Royal family in particular, is well known. But with the bizarre stateside success of the MailOnline, Americans are displaying an equally eager appetite for the interests, fears and foibles of Britain’s much-derided working and lower middle classes. The “shared culture” operates at many levels, and the Forces of Ignorance can’t be quarantined within British hamlet towns.