Is
liberalism really to blame for Britain's (and America's) ills?
Roy Greenslade
Thursday 17 November
2016 08.57 GMT
With
rightwing newspapers heaping abuse on ‘the liberal left’ in this
post-Brexit era, we need to consider why the working class appear to
agree with them
Are we turning our
backs on the age of enlightenment? Reading the rightwing press in
Britain would suggest we have. Its editors and commentators have
sought to turn liberalism, the enlightenment’s political gift, into
a dirty word.
Newspapers have
derided liberalism and all its works, ridiculing those who espouse it
and praising “the people” for rejecting it.
As evidence, they
point to the people’s revolt in Britain against the European Union
and the people’s revolt in the United States against the political
elite.
The Brexit vote has
unleashed a storm of anti-liberal tirades. The “liberal left are
political orphans: their entire world-view is in tatters”, wrote
Allister Heath in the Daily Telegraph.
US voters who
plumped for Donald Trump were protesting at “a complacent liberal
elite that had ignored them for too long,” wrote Dominic Sandbrook
in the Daily Mail. And they were also rejecting “multiculturalism,
militant feminism, internationalism and social liberalism.”
Trump recognised
that it was “the liberal elite in Washington” who were guilty of
denying citizens the opportunity to succeed, wrote Jacob Rees-Mogg in
the Times.
On both sides of the
Atlantic, there has been a backlash against a prevailing liberalism,
wrote Rod Liddle in The Spectator.
In addition, plenty
of newspaper leading articles since the EU referendum have scorned
liberalism for its supposed failures. And, at this point, you may
well think I am about to scorn the scorners. I am not.
I do not share their
distaste for liberalism. But, like all good liberals, I seek to
understand and not to decry. And I think Heath, Sandbrook, Rees-Mogg,
Liddle and assorted anonymous leader writers do raise concerns that
we have tended to ignore.
It would appear that
the fracturing of the British population, as exemplified by Brexit
and the erosion of the two main political parties, notably Labour, is
a failure to “sell” liberalism. Now there is common cause between
the ideologues of the right and the majority of the working class.
In two previous
postings, one in December last year and another in June this year, I
attempted to get to grips with the disconnect between the Labour
party at Westminster and its traditional working class voters (now, I
suspect, former voters) across the country.
I have been provoked
to go further down that road after reading a controversial essay by
Joan C Williams for the Harvard Business Review, What so many people
don’t get about the US working class.
I don’t go with
her all the way, but her polemic contains insights that are
applicable to the development of the British working class. Anyone
who spent hours trudging from door to door on council estates in the
early 1970s trying and failing to persuade residents to join a
Marxist party and make revolution, as I did, will recognise the sad
truth of Williams’s analysis.
It was apparent that
large swathes of the British working class did not have a socialist
bone in their bodies. Nor, it transpired, were they turned on by
social democracy. On the doorsteps, there was a clear lack of empathy
for liberal political ideals, with overt racism and sexism.
By that time, more
than a generation on from the post-war Labour landslide, many people
were voting Labour out of habit rather than conviction. And many
were, of course, voting Tory, the much derided “cloth cap
Conservatives.”
A large number,
embracing the meritocratic spirit unleashed in the mid-1960s, were
eager to climb the social ladder. If unable to accomplish it
themselves, then they were happy to help their children up the rungs.
But not all of them,
and arguably the majority, were necessarily interested in adopting
the ethos of the middle class. Their cultural values remained intact.
Money counted more than refinement.
Although keen to
earn more, they were unconvinced that trade unions were much help.
Organised labour was giving way to individualism, a change grasped by
the Sun from the mid-1970s onwards and totally misread by the Daily
Mirror.
However, there was
also a significant section of the working class that was not
interested at all in advancement (and, some would say, not much
interested in work either). Famously described by Marx as the
lumpenproletariat, they were rare and reluctant voters, although I
suspect many did vote in the EU referendum.
Meanwhile, the
Labour party at national level was gradually becoming, for want of a
better phrase, professionalised. A growing number of its
university-educated MPs were no longer as recognisably working class
as the people who voted for them.
Tony Blair’s
electoral success stemmed from his engagement with the middle class.
Despite introducing reforms that benefited the working class, New
Labour was not as appreciated as it should have been, partially
because of the liberalism that accompanied the policies.
As for the Tory
party, its Westminster intake was also changing. The grouse moor was
past. Many Conservative members had been educated in state schools
and/or were drawn from business backgrounds. Plenty were identifiable
as having working class backgrounds.
Over time, working
class voters would come to perceive little difference between Labour
and Tory MPs (despite the divergent policies of the parties they
represented). Westminster was growing ever more remote from the
majority of the population they represented. An elite was under
construction.
In the US, according
to Williams, a social class movement was also occurring in somewhat
similar fashion. Starting in 1970, she writes, many “blue-collar
whites” were voting Republican.
Her essay refers
only to America’s white working class but, in many respects, the
political attitudes she traces echo the British experience.
Referring to a class
culture gap, she argues that “class migrants (white-collar
professionals born to blue-collar families)” adopted a new outlook
towards politics and, as importantly, the people inhabiting senior
positions, whether at their own workplace or in the professions.
The white working
class (WWC), she writes, did not dream of becoming
“upper-middle-class, with its different food, family, and
friendship patterns; the dream is to live in your own class milieu,
where you feel comfortable — just with more money.”
I’m unsure whether
it holds for the British working class but I suspect there is
something to it. More pertinently, there is a shared resentment
towards professional politicians. Hillary Clinton, writes Williams,
“epitomises the dorky arrogance and smugness of the professional
elite.”
Williams then moves
on to another point that might well make feminists bridle: “Manly
dignity is a big deal for working-class men, and they’re not
feeling that they have it. Trump promises a world free of political
correctness and a return to an earlier era, when men were men and
women knew their place.”
And the breadwinner
role remains important because many men still measure masculinity by
the size of the pay packet. “Look,” writes Williams, “I wish
manliness worked differently. But most men, like most women, seek to
fulfill the ideals they’ve grown up with.”
She argues that “WWC
men aren’t interested in working at McDonald’s for $15 per hour
instead of $9.50. What they want is... steady, stable, full-time jobs
that deliver a solid middle-class life.” (Class categorisation in
the US does not match that in Britain).
And then there is
the immigration issue. Again, it’s possible to see shared attitudes
across the ocean, most obviously an antagonism towards the
combination of liberal politics and global capitalism.
The loss of
manufacturing jobs has hurt the working classes in both countries.
But there has been a reluctance to accept the replacement - low paid
and, just as importantly, low status jobs.
Those jobs have been
taken instead by immigrants. The indigenous white working class are
not found in either the fields of California or the fields of
Lincolnshire.
That has tended to
fuel anti-migrant opinions alongside the anti-Muslim feelings
generated by fears of terrorist attacks. There are few divides
between the working class and liberals greater than their opposing
views over immigration, race and multiculturalism.
But does all of this
really amount to a failure of liberalism itself, as rightwing critics
contend, or has it more to do with a failure to educate? Or is it a
case of liberalism taking the blame for capitalism’s failure to
deliver economic satisfaction?
And where do we go
if liberalism is consigned to the dustbin of history? Is it not
frightening to imagine a society which rejects such an enlightened
political philosophy?
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