Revolt of the Masses

REVIEW ESSAY REVOLT OF THE MASSES Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis By J.D. Vance The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics By David Goodhart Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe’s Deep Establishment By Yannis Varoufakis The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam By Douglas Murray Reviewed by David Martin Jones n 2016, Brexit, the election of Donald Trump Populism is not a new phenomenon. The to the US presidency, and the rise of nativist American historian, Richard Hofstadter, identified political movements, like the French National in 1960s America a paranoid style of politics that Front across Europe, announced a wave of he linked to earlier, late 19th century movements Ipopulism crashing on the rapidly eroding shore like the Midwestern, agrarian, small farmers’ revolt of Western democracy. This new wave represents against Wall Street and the East Coast plutocracy. an inchoate mass reaction to the elite-led liberal ‘Politics’, Hofstadter observed, ‘has often been internationalism that dominated global politics an arena for angry minds’ and identified in the after the end of the Cold War. populist style a ‘heated mix of Since the Northern financial crisis of 2008 suspiciousness, exaggeration, and and the decade of bank bailouts and austerity conspiratorial fantasy’.1 that followed, a mounting sense that something is rotten in the governance of Western Europe Hillbilly yearning and the United States has animated a loss of This inflammatory mixture confidence in established political parties. Trump accounts for the wilder fears and Brexit signalled a revolt of the masses against an expressed by contemporary intransigent elitism more committed to the global than the local. It also spawned a literature about David Martin Jones is a Visiting Professor at King’s the character of populism, its social and economic College, University of London. causes and the political fragmentation it intimates. 52 POLICY • Vol. 33 No. 3 • Spring 2017 DAVID MARTIN JONES nativist movements. However, it by no means ‘subterranean value blocs’ in modern Britain (p.253). explains the success of Brexit and Trump. As J.D. Goodhart calls these two subsets ‘Anywhere’ and Vance shows in his bestselling Hillbilly Elegy: A ‘Somewhere’ and painstakingly analyses how they Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, ‘rich and evolved over the past quarter of a century. poor; educated and uneducated; upper class and Anywheres, Goodhart estimates, on the basis working class’ now inhabit ‘two separate worlds’ of survey data (that sometimes overwhelms the (p.253). reader), represent 20-25% of the UK population. It is the gulf between these worlds and worldviews Meanwhile Somewheres constitute more than 50% that largely explains the rise of Western populism. whilst a further 5-7% of the population subscribe Vance portrays himself as a rare ‘cultural migrant’ to ‘hard authoritarianism’. Somewheres are socially traversing the chasm between his white Scots-Irish conservative political ‘outsiders’, uncomfortable working class, rustbelt, Midwest hometown, and with ‘mass immigration, an achievement society in the ivy league law school of the East Coast, where which they struggle to achieve, the reduced status of he discovers that ‘the wealthy and powerful, are not non-graduate employment and more fluid gender just wealthy and powerful, they follow a different roles’ (p.5). Forty years ago, Somewhere values set of norms’ (p.253). were the norm. Their Brexit brand of ‘restrained’ These norms are the antithesis of the ‘hillbilly, populism represents then an instinctive response to redneck or white trash’ culture of the Midwest. rapid change which has not benefited everyone. Vance provides a deeply personal account of the economic decline and social breakdown of the Unlike Somewheres, Anywheres are white working class identified by Charles Murray in comfortable with mass immigration, Coming Apart: The State of White America (2012).2 Through his memoir, Vance traces how a white European integration and the spread of working class culture disintegrated as they watched universal human rights all of which dilute manufacturing jobs disappear overseas. At the same the claims of national citizenship. time, he also acknowledges that whilst globalisation undermined the local political economy, the Goodhart, founding editor of the centre- Scots-Irish culture of antiquated honour codes left Prospect magazine, is, by contrast, a natural and suspicion of outsiders also reinforced a wider Anywhere. However, his work on demography after demoralisation.3 20015 led him to become increasingly sceptical of Vance’s extraordinary personal story chimed its ‘double liberalism’ that is market-friendly and with the political revenge of the white working class pro-globalisation in economics ‘combined with upon the Democrat and Republican establishments more individualistic social and cultural politics in November 2016. After Yale law school, Vance and state enforcement of greater racial and gender worked for the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter equality’ (p.63). This ‘progressive individualism’ is a Thiel, but has since returned to the Midwest to start worldview for ‘more or less successful individuals’. a non-profit venture. San Francisco, he explains, It places a high value on autonomy, mobility and represents a ‘dystopian view of what middle America novelty and a much lower value on group identity, sees in the future. Two fundamental subsets of the tradition and national social contracts (p.5). population . completely separated by culture and Unlike Somewheres, Anywheres are comfortable wealth . [who] don’t really interact with each with mass immigration, European integration and other or feel any kinship’.4 the spread of universal human rights all of which dilute the claims of national citizenship. Although Road to Nowhere meritocracy is their official creed, this insider nation’s These subsets are also evident in Western Europe allegedly self-made men and women are ‘almost where, as David Goodhart argues in The Road to always born into the wealthy or professional classes’ Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of (p.61). Education at elite universities and inter- Politics, a ‘great divide’ has emerged between two marriage reinforce this transnational, multicultural POLICY • Vol. 33 No. 3 • Spring 2017 53 REVOLT OF THE MASSES oligarchy’s shared values that ‘bind and blind’. immigrant menial class services a free spending, Before Brexit their viewpoint dominated the media, Anywhere oligarchy. As recently as 1971 the white business and academe and set the agenda of the British comprised 86% of the London population. mainstream political parties. By the 2011 census, London had become a ‘majority The baleful consequences of this agenda, however, minority city’. Anywhere London mayor, Ken were all too evident by the second decade of the Livingstone, celebrated the diversity but there were 21st century. Before the Blair government’s decision no cockneys left in the East End. to open the immigration floodgates, Britain in the The major group that has lost out from the most mid-1990s was a multi-racial society with a settled recent wave of migration and globalisation are minority migrant population of around four million poorer people in rich countries. Thus, in working or 7% (p.124).6 By 2016, 18% of the UK’s working class towns of the Midlands and North-East, young age population was born overseas and Britain’s white males aged between 18-24 without education official immigrant and minority population had or training enter a twilight world of low status trebled to about 12 million or over 20% (pp.122-3).7 jobs. At the same time, ‘hillbilly’-like Stoke-on- After 2004 and the emphasis on the free movement Trent witnessed a 200% increase in its foreign-born of labour, successive governments struggled to keep population between 2001-14. Significantly, like the migration levels below 300,000 a year. As Goodhart industrial North East and South Wales, Stoke voted emphasises, migration was not an ‘unstoppable for Brexit in 2016 and for Corbyn’s anti-market force of nature’ but official European policy. brand of left populism in the 2017 general election. Across Europe the move to ‘ever closer union’ The social liberalism of high-end service and the emphasis on the free movement of labour meccas like London now contain caste since 2004 has notably exacerbated the problem of identity and the burgeoning gap between Anywheres systems based on extreme wealth and and Somewheres. It used to be the case that the income stratification, where a largely educated and affluent were more nationalistic than immigrant menial class services a free the masses because they had a larger stake in the spending, Anywhere oligarchy. country. Not anymore. The Anywhere worldview instead embraces The effects, Goodhart argues, were not entirely the philosophy and international legal practice of negative. The impact on jobs was less negative human rights, ‘almost as a substitute for national than many people assume and employers were able identity’. The moral equality of all humans is to cut training and wage bills. However, wages taken to mean that national borders have become also stagnated, the middle was squeezed and ‘the irrelevant and that partiality for fellow nationals fiscal contribution of newcomers rapidly turned is somehow flawed (p.109). Gus O’Donnell, ‘the negative, placing additional pressure on already most senior civil servant in the land’ tells Goodhart stretched state schools, housing, health and welfare at an Oxford college party in 2011, ‘it’s my job services. An economic system that once had a place to maximise global welfare, not national welfare’ for those of middling and even lower abilities now (p.15). His dinner companion, Mark Thompson, privileges ‘the cognitive elites and the educationally Director-General of the BBC, concurred. endowed—in other words the Anywheres’ (p.177). Anywheres passionately believe that European London, which dominates the UK economy, states must dissolve into some form of single is the capital of Anywhere, ‘the apotheosis of the political entity.

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