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

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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. Yet this vainglorious European transactional, market society’ (p.135). Its attraction pursuit of integration and immigration has, since to migrants makes it the most economically, 2008, resulted in ‘stagnant growth and high politically and ethnically polarised part of the UK. unemployment’, the inability to secure Europe’s The social liberalism of high-end service meccas like borders, and Brexit. The free movement of labour, London now contain caste systems based on extreme and the removal of borders following the Schengen wealth and income stratification, where a largely Agreement of 1985—that by 2008 witnessed

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26 of the Eurozone countries relinquish border Negotiating with the Troika to restructure the controls—has only exacerbated both high debt, Varoufakis soon discovered that real financial immigration flows and the refugee crisis of 2015. power lay not with the European Commission Meanwhile, as with the enduring Eurozone but with the Eurogroup that doesn’t officially financial crisis, an unelected establishment decides exist in European law (p.447). Presided over by any adjustment to European policy. Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Disjesselbloem and comprising the European Central Bank (ECB)’s Anywhere’s deep establishment: Mario Draghi, the International Monetary Fund A Greek detour (IMF)’s Christine Lagarde, the EU economics Yannis Varoufakis’s Adults in the Room: My Battle Commissioner, Pierre Moscovici, and assorted with Europe’s Deep Establishment offers a salutary, if finance ministers of smaller East European states, occasionally self-promoting, insight into the nature Eurogroup power actually resides with German of Europe’s progressive despotism. The Eurozone Finance Minister, Wolfgang Schauble. crisis created by the political project to create a single currency heaped debt and austerity on the For Varoufakis, it is the European elite’s weaker economies of the South. Lending hard euros desire to keep the Eurozone together to weak states created unsustainable government whatever the cost that has sparked the deficits in the case of Greece and property bubbles populist, nativist backlash that ‘ever in Spain, Ireland and Portugal. Of course, no one complained until the Crisis hit. Successive bailouts closer union’ was designed to avoid. after 2010 bankrupted Greece. Yet the European establishment vetoed any attempt to restructure At various times, Christine Lagarde, Larry repayments. Elected to government on a populist Summers and Jeffrey Sachs (who advised wave in 2015 the hard left Syriza Party leader, Alex Varoufakis), Pierre Moscovici and then former Tsirpas, persuaded Varoufakis to leave his post as an French Finance Minister now President Emmanuel economics professor and serve as the new finance Macron all considered Varoufakis’s restructuring minister tasked with restructuring Greek debt. proposals eminently reasonable. However, as Varoufakis’s tenure lasted only 162 days. His Lagarde confesses, ‘there was too much political secretly taped interviews with European insiders, capital at stake’ (p.133) for the Troika to admit their however, shows how an unelected Troika (the mistake. Instead Greece endured the equivalent European Commission, European Central Bank of fiscal waterboarding until it ‘agreed to the and International Monetary Fund) prepared to sick ritual of extend and pretend’ loans. Greece sacrifice Greece on the altar of fiscal discipline either signed up to a third bailout and even more ultimately imposed at the behest of Germany’s austerity or dropped out of the Eurozone in 2015, Wolfgang Schauble and Angela Merkel. a fate Varoufakis contemplated but Syriza evidently The two Greek bailouts between 2010-12, could not. Varoufakis continues, served the interests of Particularly disturbing is the Eurogroup’s French and German banks and their corrupt Greek contempt for democratic process. Schauble tells counterparts exposed to Greek debt. The mechanism Varoufakis that ‘elections cannot be allowed to bailed out bankers whilst piling debt and austerity change economic policy’. Of course, Varoufakis upon taxpayers. Bankruptcy repackaged as a remarks, ‘he had a point: democracy had indeed liquidity problem turned Greece into Bailoutistan, died the moment the Eurogroup acquired the ‘a sad debtors’ colony on the Mediterranean’ (p.49). authority to dictate economic policy to member In the period 2006-14, Greece’s fiscal experience states without anything resembling federal made the Great Depression look like a headache. democratic sovereignty’ (p.237). In the bonfire of The economy lost 28% of its national income, and illusions that followed the financial crisis and the unemployment rose from 7 to 21% (pp.124-5 and subsequent euro crisis, ‘Europe’s deep establishment appendix 1). lost all sense of self-restraint’ (p.481).

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European exhaustion The immigration fixation required three For Varoufakis, it is the European elite and interlinked social facts that proved to be fake particularly the bizarre certainties of Europe’s most news. First, that mass migration was an economic powerful head of state Angela Merkel’s desire to boon rather than a cost to the overstretched keep the Eurozone together whatever the cost that European welfare state. Second, that an ageing has sparked the populist, nativist backlash that Northern European population desperately ‘ever closer union’ was designed to avoid. Douglas needed replacement by younger and culturally Murray, Associate Editor of The Spectator, is also very different people from countries like Pakistan, alive to this paradox. The Strange Death of Europe sub-Saharan Africa or the Middle East. Third, that summates how the progressive liberal desire for this new population would somehow integrate or diversity, multiculturalism and immigration created alternatively contribute a much-needed diversity a Europe sans frontieres. In Murray’s account the rise to an otherwise staid culture in urgent need of a of populism is an entirely explicable, if sometimes multicultural infusion. Even after the disastrous angry-minded, response to the betrayal of European failure of the German orchestrated refugee crisis civilisation by the political class entrusted with its of 2015, European Commission President Jean- preservation. Engaging with Anywhere discourse, Claude Juncker still asserted ‘that borders are the Murray elegantly dismantles the ruling ideological worst invention ever made by politicians’ (p.258). and political assumptions that he argues drove That the migrants brought with them Europe to suicide.8 religious and sexual mores that sat uneasily with Anywheredom’s relaxed secular tolerance was Like Goodhart, Murray considers a conveniently overlooked. Consequently, ‘if there European elite’s ideological commitment is a bit more beheading and sexual assault than there used to be in Europe, then we also benefit to mass migration, coupled with the failure from a much wider range of cuisines’ (p.57). In to integrate new arrivals, central to the the wake of growing homegrown Islamist terror dissolution of modern European democracy. attacks, rather than admit that sexual assaults on women and the emergence of communities within Murray, of course, is not the first to diagnose Europe leading very intolerant lives demonstrates Europe’s death throes. Nietzsche detected its how multiculturalism had not worked, elite policy premonitory snuffling in the late 19th century retreated into Orwellian doublethink. and Oswald Spengler examined the decline of an exhausted West after 1918. In 1942, Stefan Zweig, It’s us not them an early enthusiast for a united Europe, thought that The problem, of course, is that it’s us not them. ‘in its state of derangement, (Europe) had passed its Nothing demonstrated the failure of the multicultural own death sentence’. 9 It took another three quarters era more than the fact that ‘the ideologies—political of a century, Murray contends, to execute it. and religious—of the incomers . . . were almost Like Goodhart, Murray considers a European never a permissible subject of debate’ (p.127). The elite’s ideological commitment to mass migration, secular continent blandly assumed it ‘could leave coupled with the failure to integrate new arrivals, religion behind’, only to wake up to the fact that central to the dissolution of modern European Islamists considered ‘death for blasphemy’ a core democracy. Prior to the Bataclan attacks that rocked value forcefully asserted from the 1989 fatwah on Paris and the establishment worldview in November Salman Rushdie to the massacre of Charlie Hebdo 2015, the political class and their public intellectuals journalists in 2015. held migration and diversity an incontrovertibly In a further Orwellian twist, writers, politicians, good thing. Migration was Europe’s fate (p.57). cartoonists and journalists who drew attention to Applauding the 2011 UK census data, novelist Will fundamentalist intolerance like Pym Fortun, Theo Self advised shocked Somewheres to ‘get over it . . . Van Gogh and Ayaan Hirsi Ali in Holland, Oriana you were terrible. Now you are nothing’ (p.35). Fallacci in Italy, Lars Vilks in Denmark, and of

56 POLICY • Vol. 33 No. 3 • Spring 2017 DAVID MARTIN JONES course, the Charlie Hebdo satirists were dismissed as Europeans, it seems, ‘are happy to be self-loathing ‘Islamophobes’. Europe’s deep establishment could in an international marketplace of sadists’ (p.176). not confront the problem of Islamic values, because, As the aftermath of homegrown terror like Greek debt, they helped create the problem in demonstrated, European societies were the ‘first the first place. in history to pay people to attack themselves’ Instead the media and the political class (p.204). Yet the ‘combination of very high visibility’ encouraged a sense that those ‘who were shouting homegrown terror attacks combined with the fire were the actual arsonists’ (p.152). From the elite awareness that what ‘lies beneath the terrorism perspective, the problem was the racism of those who constitutes an even bigger problem means that in thought there might be an issue with the celebration recent years the views of the European publics have of any identity other than European. Sweden’s lead increasingly diverged from those of their leaders’ integration official, Lise Bergh, declared in 2005 (p.234). The predictable Anywhere response is that there’s ‘no such thing as European culture’ to brand the resurgence of populist parties and (p.107). States that had been so open and liberal movements, like the Dutch Freedom Party, the that they encouraged large-scale migration were English Defence League or Pegida in Germany, as instead portrayed as uniquely racist. While all ‘other ‘fascist’ and ‘racist’. cultures in the world could be celebrated within Europe, to celebrate even the good things within Historical wrongs that require atonement Europe became suspect’ (p.101). in the present only ever apply to Western What accounts for this bizarre betrayal of liberal democracies. The historic cruelties Europe’s own Enlightenment values? Murray perpetrated by Russian, Ottoman, Chinese convincingly attributes this to two recent trends in Western thought. Firstly, the guilt induced by or Japanese autocrats do not qualify. Europe’s colonial past. Western academe, the media and the political classes acquired after 1968 ‘a Such a response constitutes not only a political unique, abiding and perhaps finally fatal sense of but also a psychological affliction. A loss of self- and obsession with guilt’ (p.163). This complex was belief combined with a post-1968 academic by no means confined to Europe. The US, Australia preoccupation with doubt reinforce it. By the end and Canada became similarly obsessed with the of the 20th century Europe had tried religion and original sin of colonialism. Ingrained guilt has anti-religion, belief and non-belief. ‘Europe had caused ‘a palpable change in the world’s impression originated nearly every one of the great political and of Australia . . . from a generally sunny and optimistic philosophic projects. And Europe had not just tried place to one that has become palpably darker’ them all and suffered them all but—perhaps most (p.164) The academic practice of anachronistically devastatingly—seen through them all’ (p.220). upgrading what might be considered policy errors Such a culture of self-doubt is unlikely to persuade into genocides advanced the careers of ambitious others, especially those brought up in cultures of scholars and politicians, but the focus on apparent moral certitude, to adopt its relativist stance. ‘wrongdoing . . . may eventually burrow not only Ultimately, European elites have grown weary into the world’s view of a particular nation, but of their history. The free secular states of Europe deep into the nation’s view of itself’ (p.165). are now based on normative propositions they can Orwellian doublethink is once again apparent. neither defend or guarantee. Contra to all assurances ‘Europeans going anywhere else in the world and expectations, non-Western migrants to Europe is colonialism whereas everyone else coming to did not immerse themselves in its culture. Instead Europe is just and fair’ (p.296). Historical wrongs they brought their own cultures. And they did so that require atonement in the present only ever at the precise moment that the host culture lacked apply to Western liberal democracies. The historic the confidence to argue its own case. The Olympian cruelties perpetrated by Russian, Ottoman, Chinese faith in liberal universalism combined with the or Japanese autocrats do not qualify. Only modern demographic revolution means that by the mid-

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century Europe will have become internationalised, probably still look like China, India will still look as unassimilated minorities transform themselves like India, Russia like Russia’ while Western Europe into majorities. Sweden predictably leads the way, will ‘at best resemble a large-scale version of the raising the question whether Swedish identity will United Nations’ (p.309). Anywheres everywhere no survive this generation. As Murray observes, Europe doubt find this prospect alluring. But no European is proud of its international cities but how will its electorate voted for this. No wonder the masses are publics react to having international countries? revolting. (p.263).

By the mid-century, ‘China will probably still Endnotes 1 Richard Hofstadter, ‘The Paranoid Style in American look like China, India will still look like India, Politics’, Harpers Magazine (November 1964), 77. Russia like Russia’ while Western Europe will 2 See Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White ‘at best resemble a large-scale version America 1960-2010 (Crown Forum, 2012) and, for a more recent take on the same problems, Robert D. Putnam, Our of the United Nations’. Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (Simon and Schuster, 2015). The main villain in all this is ultimately not 3 The hillbilly lifestyle was one of ‘truly irrational behaviour’ liberal progressivism but the delusional project of (p.156). When his mother, a qualified nurse, fed him Pepsi at nine months and asked him, as a young boy, to urinate a European establishment, led by a guilt-obsessed into a bottle so she could pass a drug test, he clearly has a Germany that after 1990 set about ‘fundamentally point. changing the nature of European society out of 4 Josh Glancy, ‘J.D. Vance’, The Sunday Times Magazine personal comfort, lazy thinking and political Interview (16 July 2017). ineptitude’ (p.296). Populists who fail to sign up to 5 He is currently head of the Demography, Immigration and Integration Unit at the centre-right think tank Policy this consensus are marginalised as racists or fascists. Exchange. A society cannot survive, Murray argues, if it 6 In the mid 1980s net migration to the UK had been almost suppresses its own origins. Yet there is no evidence zero (p.124). post Brexit that Western bien pensants are prepared 7 The unofficial figures are of course much higher. to interrogate their stance. The political elites found 8 Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe (London: their publics wanting and solved the problem Bloomsbury, 2017), 1. 9 See Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (London: Pushkin by dissolving the people and appointing another Press, 2011), 215. in their place. By the mid-century, ‘China will

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