Liberal Fear

David Goodhart's career trajectory looks like a classic case of youthful radicalism giving way to mature reaction. From soi-disant "old Etonian Marxist" via the technocratic centrism of Prospect and Demos to the careful rehabilitation of the romantic bigotry of Enoch Powell. I have never read any of his books (and have no intention of starting now, though I have read much of his journalism), not least because his ideas are clearly second-hand and unredeemed by any literary or analytical interest. But he is an interesting case study of the broader phenomenon of the progression from firebrand to fogey, not because he has turned into a conservative but precisely because he remains a liberal. The trigger for this thought is the publication of his latest rumination on the state of the nation, Head Hand Heart, where he laments the decline in esteem for manual labour and the persistent undervaluing of care work, both of which he attributes to the privileging of cognitive work and thus the over-investment in education and valorising of qualifications.

The narrative of time disillusioning youth is obviously ancient, but the political form we are familiar with dates from the early-nineteenth century and specifically the struggle between monarchical reaction and persistent republicanism in restoration France. This tension was reduced to a famous epigram by the French statesman Francois Guizot: "Not to be a republican at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head". Variations on this, with socialism and communism substituted for republicanism, would later be attributed to Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Churchill. The irony of Guizot's claim is that it was his own policies as Prime Minister in 1848, specifically refusing to allow any widening of the franchise beyond the propertied elite, that would lead to the collapse of the monarchy of Louis Phillipe and the creation of the Second Republic. A lot of thirty-somethings rediscovered the attractions of republicanism thanks to Guizot.

The relevance of this historical detour is that Guizot was a constitutional monarchist who saw himself as resisting both right and left. Likewise, David Goodhart identifies as a "post-liberal centrist", and in a more emotional register as a refugee from his "liberal, metropolitan tribe". His use of that noun is intended to suggest that the old formations that historically informed politics and culture are now irrelevant, having been superseded by new "value clusters". Though he has gestured vaguely at transitional "inbetweeners", he sees society as fundamentally divided into two opposing camps: "the educated, mobile people who see the world from 'Anywhere' and who value autonomy and fluidity, versus the more rooted, generally less well-educated people who see the world from 'Somewhere' and prioritise group attachments and security". This was the theme of his 2017 book, The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics. In its typology, it is clearly a rehash of the work of Jonathan Haidt on the intrinsic differences between conservative and liberal temperaments, but given a topical gloss by the geographical and cultural divisions of Brexit.

Goodhart started out on his own road to Damascus (or perhaps Doncaster) with a 2004 essay in Prospect in which he suggested that racial and cultural diversity was eroding the solidarity needed to support the welfare state (this was later expanded into his 2013 book, The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-war Immigration). I think the timing is significant. Liberalism in practice obviously shifted to the right during the 1990s, but liberal theory also started to lean heavily on communitarianism as a counterweight to the individualism of the neoliberal order. However, lectures about rights and responsibilities remained too abstract for many liberals and the policy consequences, from ASBOS to workfare, too dull and punitive to engender much enthusiasm. What would prove liberating in the wake of 9/11 was the salutary effect of existential fear - the threat to the national community and "our way of life" - hence the many liberal theorists and commentators who talked gushingly about how the attack on the World Trade Center was a clarifying moment.

But that fear was groundless. Al Qaeda proved to be a trivial foe and Saddam Hussein a paper tiger. Later Middle-Eastern iterations, from Muammar al-Gaddafi through ISIS to Bashar al-Assad, have equally failed to live up to their billing. China has little interest in pursuing a new Cold War and the revival of Russia as a threat to the West is risible. Instead, we have gradually turned towards the enemy within, dividing society into hostile and irreconcilable camps, decrying enemies of the people, and inventing phantasms such as elite conspiracies and the woke terror. Though much of this has been presented in the frame of a conservative/liberal dichotomy, it's important to recognise that this anxiety is common to both: QAnon mirrors the belief that Russia engineered both Brexit and Trump; the idea that a metropolitan elite is subverting democracy mirrors the belief that the working class would support a dictatorship. But this equivalence of fear should not mislead us. The kernel of conservativism is not paranoia or mania but the cool and calculating defence of privilege. It is liberal fear that aspires to a universal condition.

The role of race in this landscape is to provide a domestic equivalent for the "clash of civilisations" that we were denied in the early-00s. Goodhart's thesis - that stable societies with generous welfare systems tend to be culturally homogenous and that immigration tends to undermine this and thus citizens' willingness to pay the taxes to support public services - was an example of the importing of a classic conundrum in the sphere of international relations - how can we agree a modus vivendi when our national interests must necessarily differ? - to the field of social policy. There are two obvious problems with this approach. First, in transplanting the "realist" theory that international relations are zero-sum, it assumes that social diversity is destabilising short of full integration (i.e. the subsuming of immigrant identity). Second, it assumes that the native culture was homogenous at the time the welfare state was established and that diversity is a novel challenge that has arisen since. Implicit in this is the belief that the welfare state was largely in place by the 1950s, but this ignores the extension of benefits in the 1960s and the reform and expansion of education in the 1970s. The welfare state continued to grow and develop over time.

We do know that the erosion of tax morale in the UK from the 1970s onwards correlates with increasing immigration, but if this were really causal, you'd expect tax morale to start to erode in the 1950s, after the arrival of the Empire Windrush, and then accelerate during the 1960s. There is no evidence it did. The electoral victories of the Conservatives between 1951 and 1959 were based in large part on a commitment to generous public expenditure, notably preserving the NHS and building more council houses. The 1958 Notting Hill riots, the 1963 Bristol bus boycott and the 1965 and 1968 Race Relations Acts show that race was a salient issue in the 60s, but there was no significant linkage of it to the welfare state. The formal discourse on race concerned civil rights; the informal discourse miscegenation. The increasing reluctance of conservative voters to pay high taxes actually correlates with industrial militancy, squeezed profits (due to international competition as much as wage demands), and the associated inflation of the 1970s. The questioning of the "burden" of welfare then was a class issue. The introduction of a racial dimension is much more recent, dating to the 1990s and the emergence of the "bogus asylum-seeker" in the media.

Having made ethnic diversity the problematic of welfare in The British Dream, Goodhart proceeded to explain Brexit in The Road to Somewhere as an essentially cultural reaction to both the ongoing legacy of that diversity (the desire to defend a rooted identify and ethnic solidarity) and the metropolitan elite's unwillingness to acknowledge the problem. This obviously occludes any material explanation for people voting leave, such as the legacy of deindustrialisation or increasing inequality, unless you imagine that lots of them had read and absorbed the rationale of The British Dream, but it also flattens the motivations of remainers, as if 48% of voters could reasonably be defined as rootless cosmopolitans when even he admits that his definition of "Anywheres" only extends to about 25% of the population. Goodhart isn't crude enough to employ the phrase "race betrayal", but in hitching a dichotomy centred on ethnic solidarity to a referendum, it is pretty clear that this is part of the subtext. If you voted for the EU, you voted against the national community.

One obvious problem with the somewhere/anywhere dichotomy is that most people are a mix of the two. One of Goodhart's favourite stats is that 60% of people have never moved more than 20 miles since they were aged 14, but he fails to note that a large proportion of them are Londoners and other big city-dwellers, including many who would otherwise be viewed in his scheme as anywheres. He also ignores that the inverse - 40% of the population have moved around the country - is not some recent development but reflects a history of significant internal migration since the Agricultural Revolution of the 18th century. The British population has always been relatively mobile, with the ironic exception of the city-born who were less likely to move, or at least only move between boroughs. The people we characterise as somewheres are often themselves migrants or their children. Many "small towns" were created by wholesale transplantation, and often quite recently (e.g. Scottish steelworkers in Corby). 

Of course Goodhart isn't presenting somewhere as simply a synonym of indigenous, but once you acknowledge that the majority of the population combine both somewhere and anywhere tendencies, his dichotomy loses much of its explanatory value unless you assume there is an ethnic correlation. As Jonathan Freedland noted, Goodhart sees ethnic and religious minorities "as the cloud on the Somewheres’ horizon, the blot that has darkened the Somewheres’ previously sunny landscape. It is their arrival that has changed Britain beyond recognition, their presence that has to be dealt with". If the somewhere/anywhere binary is not simply a proxy for native/foreign, is it perhaps just a reductive euphemism for class, with the definition of somewheres serving to unite the otherwise disparate "traditional" working class and comfortable middle-class in a conservative bloc opposed to a "woke" upper middle-class that dominates public life? You'll note that this occludes the actual working class, many of whom happen to be from ethnic minorities, unless of course you believe that a Pakistani-heritage bus driver really is indistinguishable from a BBC producer who went to Harrow.

Goodhart's latest foray, Head Hand Heart, appears to be an attempt to explain why the "Anywheres" were not merely unwilling to acknowledge the problem of diversity but incapable of thinking about it. In effect, he posits a form of false consciousness embedded through the brainwashing of further education. This obviously overlaps with fashionable nonsense about cultural Marxism, but it also means that he provides an excuse for liberal refugees like himself: I was misled by groupthink into supporting liberal shibboleths about the progressive value of multiculturalism. The title suggests a more determined attempt to avoid a crude binary this time round, but his argument is still a simple opposition of graduates and the rest, with the latter subdivided by gendered occupations. This gendering suggests a further step towards conservative orthodoxy, valorising the traditional family and womanly virtues, but Goodhart misunderstands that these ideals were always promoted as being untainted by the market, not a subdivision of it. His is a liberal interpretation of conservativism that strays towards caricature.

That Goodhart doesn't quite get conservatism is evident from some of the reviews. For example, David Willetts, who Goodhart credits with stimulating his original interest in the relationship of diversity and welfare, suggests that universities are far more somewhere than anywhere: "Universities are exceptional among modern institutions in having geographical names. They are somewhere. They stay in the same place for centuries. They are crucial to the local economy and civic life and are the best anchor for a town facing the gales of globalisation. The university is the institution where the tensions Goodhart identifies are most often played out. He worries about students moving out and moving up, but he forgets that the university, with its staff and its services, remains rooted in a town, bringing people in and keeping some of them there. The evidence is clear: universities help towns and cities retain home-grown graduates; cities without a university are least likely to attract back students born there after they have graduated."

Despite his own background, Goodhart appears to have a poor grasp of the sociology of British upper and middle-class life. For all the romance of heritage, landowners have historically been anywheres, owning and moving between multiple properties across often great distances. Speaking a foreign language, wintering abroad and being au fait with international culture were the characteristics of the aristocracy, rather than the middle class, until well into the second half of the twentieth century. The impact of Elizabeth David and Terence Conran on middle class taste was only a little ahead of the exposure of the working class to foreign culture through cheap package holidays to Spain, and most sociologists would agree that there has been greater shared cultural capital between the classes over the last half century. The chasm of sensibility that Goodhart imagines depends on extrapolating the preferences and social capital of a much smaller minority, the actual metropolitan elite, to the larger graduate population, and flattening the heterogeneity and variety of the actual working class (which now includes many graduates).

This highlights the shallowness of Goodhart's thinking and his tendency to ignore actual sociology for the ephemera of opinion polls and journalistic commentary, where anxiety about "white loss of identity" is considered as real as myths about campus assaults on free-speech. That shallowness is also evident in his notion that people (or jobs) can be neatly put into one of three boxes. The vast majority of jobs combine cognitive, manual & social skills, not one to the exclusion of the others. Think of a butcher, a nurse or a car mechanic. The history of industrial relations in the UK is of the refusal of manual workers to be limited by the definition of hand, displaying both head (strikes, go-slows etc) and heart (solidarity) in opposition. The contemporary undervaluing of care work has nothing to do with the dominance of heart in the roles, or the disproportionate employment of women, and everything to do with the exploitative structure of the care sector.

Despite his reactionary gestures, Goodhart hasn't become a conservative and evidence of this is the importance he places on fear. For a true Tory, the strong emotion of fear is very much subordinate to more stable ideas such as hierarchy, duty and caution. Goodhart's pessimistic liberalism is founded on the fear of the other as a threat to enlightenment values and its origins lie in the reaction to 9/11. As Corey Robin put it in Fear: The History of a Political Idea, "At moments of doubt about the ability of positive principles to animate moral perception or inspire public action, fear has seemed an ideal source of political insight and energy". The failure of liberal interventionism in Iraq did not dissipate that fear, it simply redirected it to the domestic sphere in the form of an anxiety about diversity. The failure of neoliberal economics in 2008 did not lead to the triumphant return of material politics, let alone socialism, in part because that simmering fear could be leveraged to divide society along the lines of culture and values. Brexit and Trump are conservative epiphenomena of that debilitating liberal fear.

Though Goodhart presents the welfare state as vulnerable, what he actually fears is not the privatisation of the NHS but the undermining of liberal values. His focus on diversity is not simple bigotry but the belief that multiculturalism entails relativism and that this will ultimately erode those values. In expanding his critique to higher education, he isn't railing against strawmen such as postmodernism or no-platforming but suggesting that the goods of academia can only be preserved if they are rationed and their pursuit limited to those who possess a native sympathy for the enlightenment that underpins them. It is clear that the values Goodhart really wishes to preserve are not those of small town conservatives, just as it is a liberal elite, albeit one that is more sensitive to somewheres, that he still envisages attending Russell Group universities once the former polytechnics are converted back to vocational colleges. In desiring parity of esteem for hand and heart, he is hoping to better preserve the head. Figuratively, he wishes to ensure that the mind of the body politic is focused and self-aware and to that end it must be motivated by a fear of its own dissolution.