The counter-revolution against the professional-managerial class

Matt Goodwin argues the crucial political divide is now traditionalists vs cosmopolitans

Photo by Edward Howell on Unsplash

Your pages overflow with predictions of disaster brought on by the Brexit/Trump axis. Leaving aside the depressing and repetitive pointlessness of this mass guesswork, its underlying assumption – that things were better when People Like Us [PLU] were in charge – is at best dubious, at worst delusional. Under PLU rule we have two failed wars and the Middle East in flames, China expansionist, Europe enfeebled, America ineffective and Russia resurgent. At home, we have banking crises, stagnant median incomes, uncontrolled borders, record indebtedness, profiteering by the ‘professional’ classes and general social polarisation. This is the Eden from which the rude and licentious electorates have expelled us? Face it. We FT readers had our decades in charge, and we blew it for everyone but us.
Keith Craig in the Financial Times letters page on 19/12/2016  

I first became aware of Matt Goodwin about 18 months ago when I started seeing him on British podcasts such as Triggernometry, Spiked and New Culture Forum. I’m now about halfway through his book Value, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics and keen to tease out how some of his observations about the UK also apply to Australia.

Goodwin is a 41-year-old Professor of Politics at the University of Kent. (Given his frequent harping about Oxbridge graduates’ outsized influence, it’s perhaps worth noting that Goodwin hasn’t studied or taught at any top-tier universities in the UK or elsewhere.) It appears Goodwin has, most unusually for an academic nowadays, a ‘small c’ Conservative political outlook. Very unusually for a member of the professional-managerial class (PMC) with a public platform, he doesn’t seem much interested in lecturing others about what he believes are the correct political opinions.

Indeed, Goodwin is capable of writing about those on both the Left and the Right insightfully and sympathetically. In Values, Voice and Virtue, he details how the ‘cosmopolitan’ PMC seized control of Britain’s universities, media, arts industry, political parties, large companies, civil service, charities, not-for-profits and even its military.

Inevitably, this eventually engendered a backlash, mainly from non-graduate, working-class ‘traditionalists’ with profound reservations about the dominant (socially and economically liberal) ideology. Much to the ongoing fury of the previously all-conquering PMC cosmopolitans, British traditionalists first voted for Brexit, then abandoned the Labour Party in vast numbers at the last general election. With the Tories having failed to reduce migration, either legal or illegal, there are now fears the traditionalists will swing their support behind a Trump/Orban/Meloni/Le Pen-style populist.  

Time for some PMC self-reflection
Before going any further, it’s worth noting that Goodwin is a member of the PMC par excellence. I, too, am a member of the PMC. And you, dear reader, are very likely a member of the PMC as well.

The PMC typically seeks to marginalise, traduce or outright destroy anybody who has the unmitigated gall to question its cherished assumptions. Nonetheless, given the reign of the PMC over the last four decades has had, shall we say, one or two downsides, I believe it’s worth following the noble lead of the afore-quoted Keith Craig and engaging in some critical self-reflection (i.e. “doing the work”, to use the appropriate PMC lingo.)  

Even if that does invite all the usual contumely heaped upon class traitors.

British politics vs Australian politics     
In the interests of space, I’ll summarise Goodwin’s points about the UK’s PMC – aka, the new class, the creative class, symbolic analysts or simply ‘the elites’ – then reflect on how relevant they are to the Australian political scene.   

The UK: If you want to be part of the PMC, the price of admission is a university qualification. If you want to be a prominent member of the PMC – say, the leader of a political party – you best get a prestigious degree from a top-tier institution. (Oxford, Cambridge or, at a stretch, one of the other Russell Group universities.)    
Australia: Ditto. A disproportionately large number of recent Australian Prime Ministers, including the currently serving one, graduated from Sydney University. Those that didn’t typically went to one of the other Sandstone universities.

The UK: The PMC is strangely reluctant to acknowledge it now wields significant economic power, unchallenged cultural power and, most of the time, sets the political agenda. There are presumably several reasons for this, but one may simply be that the PMC is no longer practised in thinking in class terms, having long ago gone all in on identity politics.
Australia: Ditto

The UK: Two main political parties: one that champions economic liberalism but accepts social liberalism and one that advocates social liberalism but tolerates economic liberalism. (Both these parties have long been seeing their vote decline as voters who haven’t drunk the economic and social liberalism Kool-Aid desperately seek alternatives.)
Australia: Ditto, though there is a rump of the Liberal Party that remains, in stark contrast to their moderate colleagues, opposed to ever-greater social liberalism. (Unless Peter Dutton’s fortunes improve, this rump is likely to be permanently sidelined prior to the next federal election.)

The UK: Pre-2016, the PMC assumes it is invariably on the “right side of history” and that all but a small number of deplorable troglodytes share its outlook and values. Post-2016, there is a shocking realisation that an electorally significant slice of the population inexplicably doesn’t share the PMC worldview. This demoralising realisation is combined with the comforting but inaccurate belief that most of the recalcitrant reactionaries are ‘angry white men’ of a certain age who will die off soon. (As I and many others have noted, the migrants the PMC is so keen on rarely share their progressive values on gender, sexuality, child-rearing or even immigration.)    

Like the ‘moral middle class’ of yore, today’s PMC types feel they must bear the burden of improving society. But rather than attempting to prohibit drinking, stamp out sex work or censor racy books, the PMC devotes itself to advancing the interests of some – though certainly not all – ethnic, religious and sexual minorities.

As Goodwin frequently points out, PMC types tend to be ‘hyperglobalists’ with an unshakeable belief that ever-higher levels of mass migration will be all upside. Especially if that results in lots more citizens who are members of suitably exotic ethnic, religious and sexual minorities and comparatively fewer dull, unenlightened, working-class white people. The kind of people members of the British PMC privately refer to as ‘gammon’.

(The tendency of members of the PMC, who are overwhelmingly white, to relentlessly attack their fellow Caucasians and all their works, is one of the more bemusing aspects of PMC political activism and has led to accusations of ethnomasochism, oikophobia and ‘asymmetrical multiculturalism’.)        
Australia: Ditto, except the relevant term of class-based abuse is bogan rather than gammon. Also, the inter-class disillusionment set in 15 years earlier, when John Howard won a “dark victory” off the back of the Tampa affair.

The UK: An ongoing anti-PMC revolution since 2016 that has seen the Brits leave the European Union then cycle through prime ministers in a way that makes we Australians look like rank amateurs. (Famously, Liz Truss – who somehow believed British voters were crying out for even more extreme forms of economic liberalism and even more migration – only lasted 44 days. Even Tony Abbott – a similarly tin-eared, neo-Thatcherite PM – lasted a couple of years.)
Australia: You could argue, as I have, that non-PMC Australians voted against Australia becoming a republic in 1999 not out of any great love of Queen Elizabeth, or well-though-out preference for a monarch over a president, but rather to take advantage of a rare opportunity to kick their smugly self-satisfied PMC overlords hard in the nuts. If the Voice fails, as I suspect it will, it will probably be in large part because a lot of disenfranchised and disgruntled non-PMC Australians opt to play dog in the manger once more. That noted, there’s not much evidence of anti-PMC counter-revolution in Australia. There’s been nothing remotely equivalent to the Trump or Brexit phenomena down under.

Yet.

Can Albo balance the ALP’s – and the nation’s – dual constituencies?
I suspect Australia hasn’t experienced the hyperpolarisation seen in the UK and the US due to the centripetal force created by compulsory voting. For instance, voters in many first-world nations have had to cop far higher levels of migration than they are comfortable with for at least the last quarter of a century. But when many traditionalist Australians – not least first- and second-generation migrants in ALP electorates – grew concerned about illegal immigration, both major political parties had no option but to respond to their concerns.

Granted, it took the ALP, which is more thoroughly dominated by PMC types than the Liberal Party, significantly longer to respond to voters’ concerns. But simply ignoring those concerns and labelling anybody who expressed them a bigot – the way the Democrat and Labour Party politicians have for many years – simply wasn’t an option for any ALP leader hoping to win a federal election.

Albo was a belated convert to economic liberalism. And, as a cultural Catholic from a hardscrabble background, he doesn’t seem to be as instinctively drawn to the progressive cause célèbres around gender and sexuality that so obsess those from more privileged backgrounds. (Unlike his British counterpart, the Oxford-educated barrister Sir Keir Starmer, Albo wasn’t reduced to a gibbering mess by the now standard gotcha question for left-leaning politicians – “What is a woman?”.) At the time of writing, nobody is complaining that Albo is out of touch or has been captured by special interests. He seems, the Voice aside, firmly focused on bread-and-butter issues.

All that noted, Albo faces an enormous challenge in balancing the interests of the PMC – who long ago seized control of the commanding heights of Australia’s economy and culture – with the 70 per cent of voters who don’t have a university degree and aren’t particularly economically or socially liberal.

To take just one obvious and timely example, PMC types, especially older PMC types, are notorious NIMBYs. They know how the system works, know how to strong-arm politicians, and have spent the last few decades making it increasingly difficult to build new housing, at least in areas PMC types like to congregate in.

(It’s an article of PMC faith that if the lower orders do demand to be housed, they should do the decent thing and go build their garish McMansions on the distant outskirts of major cities, well out of sight of their more civilised compatriots.)

But PMC NIMBYism sits rather awkwardly with the PMC enthusiasm for importing lots of new Australians. That conflict was placed on the back burner during the pandemic era. But I’d wager it will roar back into life, especially in Sydney and Melbourne, in the second half of 2023 when the first of the 650,000 migrants expected over the next couple of years start to arrive.  

Which is a topic I might explore more fully in my next Precariat Musings.