Is Goodwin a bad actor?
Powerful professional-managerial types react poorly to reports of their power
Professor Matthew Goodwin’s book – Value, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics – hasn’t attracted much attention outside the UK. However, the book, which I reviewed in these pages last week, certainly has received plenty of attention inside the UK.
Professional-managerial class (PMC) types have reacted intolerantly to Goodwin’s arguments that the PMC is politically intolerant to the point of not wanting to even be exposed to opposing arguments (see cancel culture), let alone engage with them.
This effort in the New Statesman by leftist intellectual nepo baby Oliver Eagleton is typical. Here’s the money quote:
[Goodwin’s] argument is wearily familiar: that the UK’s elite stratum has become divorced from the conservative instincts of the majority; that the commanding heights of our culture – media, universities, political parties – have been captured by cosmopolitans who impose their outlook on the rest of the country; and that this woke mob has cultivated a censorious political climate to silence its opponents.
Unfortunately, much of the anti-Goodwin bile is locked up in paywalled articles. But based on the material I have accessed, I’ll attempt to lay out the arguments against Goodwin’s thesis then opine on whether they are justified.
Argument #1 – If I’m so powerful, why am I so worried about making the rent?
As I’ve written about previously, once governments decided to encourage mass university education, the economic value of many university degrees plummeted to zero. That is, while getting certain degrees – say, a medical degree from almost any university, or a law degree from a top-tier institution – continues to all but guarantee a prestigious and well-paid career, lots of degrees now don’t lead to anything but a minimum-wage job in the retail or hospitality industries. (If your degree has the word ‘studies’ in it, you’d be wise to do a barista course sooner rather than later.)
But – and I know of what I speak – there is a third category of degrees that offer cultural influence but not affluence.
Imagine that – after racking up a sizeable student debt acquiring a qualification and spending countless unpaid hours doing internships – you land a media job. One day you wake up and realise you are 30 and still trying to live on A$50,000 in an eye-wateringly expensive city such as Auckland, London, New York, Sydney or Vancouver.
You’ve long ago accepted you will never be able to purchase property. If you’re a man, you are beginning to notice that while women might initially express some interest in your “cool job”, increasingly fewer of them seem interested in a long-term relationship with you. If you’re a woman, there’s more opportunity to marry up. But given that highly paid male doctors and lawyers now tend to partner with equally well-paid female doctors and lawyers, you’re likely to have to settle for somebody who doesn’t earn much more than you do.
Now imagine that one day a youngish university professor with ironclad job security and a generous salary releases a book alleging you and people like you have sneakily accrued immense power.
Your first instinct will be to author a hit piece on Mr Reactionary Egghead. Yet, if you take a moment to reflect, you will have to concede you do have cultural power. You might not get paid much, but you and your colleagues play a critical role in shaping how people make sense of the world. You get to create content that champions anti-racism, decarceration, diversity and inclusion, open borders, multiculturalism, transgenderism and zero emissions.
Of course, no one piece of content is likely to change the world, but a tsunami of content making near-identical arguments probably will. I’d wager that the massive overrepresentation of hyperliberal twentysomethings and thirtysomethings from upper-middle-class backgrounds in media organisations in recent decades has something to do with most first-world nations becoming far more socially liberal in recent decades, even when right-of-centre parties have been electorally dominant.
Verdict: The PMC is a broad church. Some PMC types have both financial security and cultural influence. Some have one or the other. An unlucky cohort has neither. But Goodwin has never claimed otherwise. So, his broader argument – that the PMC punches massively above its demographic weight in shaping social norms – stands.
Argument #2 – What about the declining material conditions of the working class?Eagleton argues Goodwin pays too little attention to material conditions, especially the ravages neoliberalism has visited upon the British working class.
Just like grandfather was, a working-class Brit will be more culturally conservative than a Guardian journalist or sociology lecturer. But unlike their grandfather, the modern-day working-class individual isn’t likely to be able to buy a home or find a secure job that provides a liveable wage and a measure of self-respect and social esteem. Not unreasonably, that working-class individual is likely to feel aggrieved. It typically doesn’t take much to convince that individual that their grim fate is a result of effete intellectuals rather than the politicians and CEOs who’ve spent decades championing globalisation, free trade and labour-market deregulation.
Verdict: Regular readers will be unsurprised to learn I sympathise with this argument. Almost by definition, the intelligentsia of any society will have different values from the rest of the population. Usually, these values will seem outlandishly progressive to those who don’t share them.
But in a society where the economic pie is growing and being shared around reasonably equitably, different classes having different values doesn’t necessarily result in deep social divides. Indeed, one of the reasons many people on both the Left and Right look back fondly on the prosperous post-war decades is because cross-class relationships were more common. Before we all started Bowling Alone and self-segregating along class lines, it wasn’t uncommon for a patrician judge, middle-class teacher and humble cleaner to all live in the same area, or attend the same church, or drink at the same pub, or play on the same sporting team.
So, I’m classifying as a valid criticism Eagleton’s charge that Goodwin overemphasises how unusual the PMC’s values are and underplays how “free-market dogma had aggravated inequality and deprivation”. This leads him to argue that “material grievances – falling wages, gutted public services, decimated trade unions – have little to do with the ascent of Farage and Johnson”.
Argument #3 – The PMC is focused on personal contentment not social change
In this amusing Unherd article, the Oxford-educated Kathleen Stock details just how profoundly apolitical most members of the putatively all-powerful, out-of-touch liberal elite are.
Here are some choice quotes:
Britain’s institutions have allegedly been captured by a bunch of Oxbridge-educated she/her types who equate any disagreement with fascism, and who are gripped with existential dread whenever they glance at their post-Brexit blue passports on their way to the Italian lakes…
The majority of my university contemporaries are now at the peak of successful and lucrative senior careers. To my knowledge, only one person from my college year group is unemployed — and that’s Dominic Cummings. The idea that any of these people sit around performatively extolling the joys of open borders or the sexualisation of children to each other is simply not true.
Today, most of them work long hours in finance, business, the civil service, or the law. They earn large amounts of money, live in nice houses cleaned by other people, and send their children to private schools. They aren’t on Twitter; they don’t have the time or inclination. They are often cultural philistines and rarely talk about politics. They are as baffled as most of the rest of the country about the ideological capture of major institutions, and just as disconcerted.
Verdict: Albeit half a world away, I grew up among the people Stock describes and have regularly interacted with them during my adult life. She is exactly right when she argues that most members of the PMC – like most members of all classes – are chiefly and often exclusively focused on living their best life. Few members of the PMC are penning op-eds calling for open borders or campaigning to get Jordan Peterson (or, indeed, Kathleen Stock) cancelled.
But so what?
As Stock concedes in her article, Goodwin distinguishes between a small group of “radical progressives” and the broader “new elite”. Regardless of what class they hail from, it’s almost always a tiny, highly motivated group of activists who transform societies. Hence Margaret Mead’s much-quoted advice to “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”
Most members of the PMC are, for good or ill, self-interested utility maximisers rather than revolutionaries. But the values of the PMC radicals aren’t a million miles removed from the PMC moderates. As Stock notes, most of those working “long hours in finance, business, the civil service, or the law” aren’t actively agitating for open borders. But, unlike many of their less fortunate compatriots, they are enthusiastic about multiculturalism and mass immigration. Especially if it means they have access to a deeper pool of cheap cleaners, gardeners and nannies.
Argument #4 – Rightists have long banged on about the majority of voters being overruled by a vocal leftist minority
This might be termed the trahison des clercs defence. Progressives (accurately) point out that, for at least a century, conservatives have been making political hay by insisting intellectuals have an instinctively hostile attitude towards the ‘faith, family and flag’ traditionalist values of the working class and petite bourgeoisie.
Arguably, the politician who most successfully exploited this ‘values gap’ between progressive PMC types and the rest of society was Richard Nixon. Nixon argued that while the “silent majority” might have reservations about the war in Vietnam, they were sickened by the sight of privileged, long-haired – gender non-conforming, in today’s PMC lingo – college students burning draft cards and American flags. Given Nixon won one of the largest election victories ever in 1972, it does seem to be the case that the American intelligentsia’s priorities in the late 1960s and early 1970s (i.e. stop the war in Vietnam, end racial segregation, take a less punitive approach to crime and disorder, decriminalise drug use) were not those of most American voters.
Verdict: It’s tiresome listening to opportunistic right-wing politicians drone on about how they are heroically standing up for the ignored majority of voters whose cherished beliefs are sneered at by ivory tower academics and ‘fake news’ journalists.
But that doesn’t change the fact that members of the intelligentsia do frequently hold the cherished beliefs of most voters in contempt. (Trust me, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time listening to journalists and, to a lesser extent, academics mocking the cherished values of mainstream Australian voters.)
With regular reference to reputable, independent studies, Goodwin convincingly argues that the British PMC is far more socially liberal than their non-PMC compatriots. To take just one example, lots of non-PMC Brits say they would have no problem with the death penalty being reintroduced, a prospect that fills the majority of PMC Brits with revulsion and horror.
To summarise, the fact the PMC has long been accused of being out of touch doesn’t negate Goodwin’s argument it is now really out of touch.
Is a cross-class alliance possible?
Even Goodwin’s harshest critics don’t quibble with his claim that there is now a yawning chasm between the cosmopolitan PMC and the traditionalist working class. The pertinent question – possibly the most important political question of the age – is whether that divide will continue to widen or if it can start to be narrowed.