Don't fear the people
Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love populism (with help from Frank Furedi)
All these years I was under the misapprehension that being left-wing meant favouring policies that strengthened the working class; policies that levelled the playing field so that children of taxi drivers and cleaning ladies could have access to the same corridors of power as the children of lawyers, bankers and politicians. I thought being left-wing meant protecting the independence of the little guy against larger, more powerful forces; I thought being left-wing meant standing for a basic sense of fairness.
Turns out, I was wrong. I was thinking of populism, not socialism.
British sociology professor and commentator Frank Furedi’s latest book, Democracy Under Siege, published late last year, has shown me another, darker side of left-wing politics. I had always thought socialism was a force for enlightenment — rights, representation, decent working and living conditions, at least here in the west where we did not succumb to the horrors of communism. It was democratic socialism, and what could be wrong with that? I wasn’t fully aware — until I started seeing it with my own eyes these last few years — the extent to which the left and democratic socialism have also been heavily influenced by elitist distain for the very people they are supposed to be defending. This distain went so far as to draw American and British socialists towards eugenics as a way of culling the poor in the years before World War II.
Furedi is Emeritus Professor of sociology at the University of Kent and a vocal inhabitant of the confusing space where “left” and “right” find common ground. He’s a former Marxist and Hungarian émigré who believes in strong borders, national sovereignty and has defended Brexit and Viktor Orban.
Turns out, the British Labour Party’s progressive wing has a history of being anti-working class and is largely to blame (or if you are that way inclined, thank) for the stifling, patronising and ultimately soul-destroying policies that have — along with globalisation and technological advances — decimated the working class.
Progressive leaders, it turns out, are actually know-it-alls who don’t want to encourage independence and strength among working people. They want the masses to be docile, weak, and easily led so that the progressive leaders can just do what they think is best, without messy democratic processes getting in the way. To them, the demos is something that needs to be controlled, not listened to.
CLASS HATRED AMONG THE PROGRESSIVE LEFT
Democracy Under Siege contains some hair-raising passages describing the roots of class hatred from which has grown the contemporary British left.
Following World War Two,
“in 1945, at a Fabian conference… leading [Labour] party intellectual, Evan Durbin, explained that ‘people were far more wicked, ie mentally ill, than was commonly supposed… they put their wickedness into their social life: and as a whole were very sick and very stupid.”
Also: Anthony Crosland, prominent socialist intellectual who was briefly Foreign Secretary in the 1970’s, “noted that the working-class people he encountered in the army were in the mass ‘rather like a lot of wild animals,’ but when alone they were ‘almost as human’ as ‘most middle class people.’”
Well now. It’s good to know that, in my visceral dislike of today’s Labour Party, I was picking up on a haughty elitism that isn’t just the flavour of the month with the party, but rather its very essence.
For anyone who thinks I’m overstating the case, just think back to 2014. Labour MP Emily Thornberry, who lost a leadership position after posting a Tweet sneering at a the occupants of a terrace house who had English flags and a white van (the British equivalent of a pick-up truck) parked outside. Journalists interviewed the man who lived in the house and he said “I think they need to get out of their mansions and visit the working class,” adding he would never vote for Labour. Five years later, when Labour ignominiously lost to Tories all across their former heartlands of Northern England, Thornberry was accused of calling those voters stupid. (A claim she denied.)
Perhaps this is what has turned the United Kingdom — in just two centuries— from a swashbuckling, jingoistic empire to a hotbed of radicalism, and finally to a fretful, bureaucratic nanny state where the police will investigate you for saying mean things on Twitter.
It’s not just a UK phenomenon, however. In fact, it is general across liberalism, and has been for a long time. From the 1920’s on, “a loss of faith in the moral integrity of the multitude also characterised the mood of a significant section of the radical left,” Furedi writes.
I spoke to Furedi in November, after reading his book. He told me “I think the left has become extremely paternalistic and unwilling to let people to take initiative.”
And that is costing the left-wing parties their traditional support base. He said: “People across Europe want to be heard and they want a sense of community: They don't want to be simply these silent individuals who everybody disregards. What they are really yearning for is a kind of basic kind of solidarity. And I think that's a really positive development, because it is through the solidarity that's forged in every day life that you can recreate a more democratic public sphere.”
That yearning for solidarity has expressed itself as a populist roar in recent years, the election of Trump and Brexit being the most consequential examples. And of course, both of those events were interpreted, almost without exception, in the mainstream media as dangerous, malevolent, and deranged threats to the status quo. Never did I see or read an opinion in the mainstream media that asked, genuinely, what the people were striving for. They have been written off, en masse, as sad troglodytes who “cling to their religion and their guns.”
HOW TO CREATE A STRONG DEMOS? DON’T BE A PROGRESSIVE PARENT
One of the interesting things about Furedi’s work is his focus on parenting, a topic that is of far greater political import than most commentators give it credit for. (He wrote a book, Paranoid Parenting, in 2002.) But how can you think about making government apparatus less paternalistic, if you have a population that was raised to believe everything could harm them? The terrible disempowerment of two generations of young people, the race-based defeatism of critical race theory, a health and safety culture and an educational system that doesn’t allow children to run around at playtime because someone might get hurt — these are all issues that are driven by the left, by ‘progressives,’ and by large swathes of middle-class parents who fear any adversity for their offspring, however slight. What happened to making children strong and capable?
“Progress” has meant trusting credentialed experts over your own kin; listening to government and school telling you that children must be, above all else, protected from anything that might challenge notions of self-esteem, including the activities that kept children busy for millennia — playing with other children, unsupervised by adults. Progress has meant ignoring the obvious and terrible toll over-parenting takes on children’s mental health. Because when it goes wrong, the devouring mother state will be there to make all the bad feelings go away.
“For a very long time now, there's been a systematic attempt to detach people from the community, to detach the younger generations from the older generation; to detach people from their nation, from national sovereignty, to almost create this incredible psychic distance between them and what has gone on beforehand,” Furedi told me. For the last several decades, the trend has been “don't listen to your grandparents because their knowledge of how to bring up a child is based on superstition and outmoded ideas, but instead listen the latest insight of parenting experts.”
INDEPENDENCE IS KEY
My own political shift away from statist to populist was a direct result of my opening a small bricks-and-mortar business. It’s thrilling what can be achieved when you seize the means of production, to borrow a phrase, of your own life. Generating your own wage is the most liberating of experiences. To see the fruits of your own labour, to earn a living directly from the strength of your own ideas and execution, is to be beholden to no one. It’s democracy in its purest form, removed from the toxic politics that normally accompany it.
Furedi writes:
“Through living democratically, people gain a sense of independence and inner strength… ‘As Lasch explains, democracy works best when men and women do things for themselves, with the help of friends and neighbours, instead of depending on the state.”
One obvious problem with a boot-strapping, build-your-own wealth, don’t-rely-on-government approach is that it is quite difficult. It’s the harder of the two options by far. It allows for zero excuses. Did your business not make enough to meet payroll this month? That’s your fault. Did a piece of equipment break and cause your whole operation to slow down? That is your problem. No civil servant is coming to rescue you with “support.” Did a customer leave your toilet blocked? Guess who’s going in there to pull out the shit? Not the janitor or the cleaning lady. It’s you.
Before we started raising children like hot-house orchids, competence was the higher virtue, self-esteem did not even make the list. It’s hard for me to visualise how we can create economic independence among young adults when we’ve raised them to be helpless — never mind that the forces of global capital are also stacked against them.
IS POPULISM DEAD?
The youth-driven fervour of identity politics (the enemy of populism) has reached all the way to the White House and is now driving policy at the highest levels. That is because the establishment media and permanent political class succeeded in draping populism in the garb of Nazis and white supremacists. (We collectively glossed over the fact that Nazis were national SOCIALISTS, not national populists.)
The establishment correctly recognised that the woke movement could be weaponised as a way to return to power and defeat the populist leanings of Trump and his voters. They never were white supremacists or crypto-fascists. They were populists. (And I say that as someone who has been listening intently to Trump supporters for the better part of a year.)
Back in November, Furedi told me “I think that people like us need to take a step back. We have to adopt a a kind of cool, critical orientation — use whatever intellectual resources that we have to call into question and expose what they’re saying because so much of what they argue and so much of what they put forward are really not based upon serious political reflection. They don't need to do that because they got the whole of the establishment behind them.”
That is true now more than ever. But the unprecedentedly strange campaign, election and inauguration of Joe Biden showed an elite so desperate to win that it may have overplayed its hand and exposed its true anti-democratic nature to the world. That may be our only silver lining as we are swept towards an oligarchical future ruled by technocrats and not by our peers