Almost Medieval

The publication of Matthew Goodwin's book, Values, Voice and Virtue, has revived the debate about the "two nations" of Britain. Whereas the term was originally coined by a future Conservative Prime Minister to describe the gulf between the working class and their betters in Victorian England, the contemporary intepretation is that society is divided by culture and values, a division made politically concrete by Brexit. This is not to say that material factors have no bearing (the proletarianisation of educated professionals is obviously a factor in current industrial disputes), or that demographic dimensions such as age don't highly correlate. But what is striking about Goodwin's rather unoriginal thesis is the focus on the lack of sympathy between the groups, which echoes Disraeli's words: "Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners".

This emphasis on the alienness of the "new elite" has led Goodwin to employ the tropes of antisemitism, which is one reason why he has been accused of giving off a Fascist vibe. This has in turn resulted in demands for left media outlets like Novara to de-platform him, though you can guarantee that this would only lead to another article in the Times or Sun in which he bemoaned his cancellation at the hands of the elite. My own view is that Goodwin isn't a Fascist, though his claims will obviously be congenial to the far right. In terms of his politics, insofar as they can be deduced from his work, he is closer to the right-of-centre thinkers in Starmer's Labour Party with their obsession over socially conservative "hero voters" in small towns and their barely concealed contempt for the urban young. What stands out in Goodwin's thesis is his narrow-mindedness, which leads him to cram the variety of society into two simplistic definitions: them and us. This goes beyond an unwillingness to let go of the clarifying moment of the 2016 EU referendum to a more profound belief that everyone must pick a side, which finds its parallel in the cynical instrumentality of the current Labour leadership's refusal to regret the playground insults of its "attack ads".

I've not read Goodwin's book, but to judge from snippets posted online (e.g. by Mic Wright) I'm not missing much. What I think his critics may be missing however is the nature of the ideal society that sits behind his analysis. For example, he describes the new elite thus: "Consistently, they feel much less attached than others to the group-based identities which have long held the country together, including a strong sense of commitment to the majority group and attachment to their national identity". There's much to wonder at here, such as the insistence of that "consistently", which refuses to brook the idea that people might be varied intra-group, and the vagueness of "others", which is similarly flattening, but what stands out for me is the plural "group-based identities". Goodwin isn't advocating a uniform national identity - the Fascist national idea - but something more parochial. While "majority group" has obvious racists overtones, national identity is presented as the organic, encompassing product of multiple group identities, and it is paradoxically the absence of a group identity that defines the new elite, rather than their supposedly uniform values.

Goodwin's focus on the new elite's individualism is expressed as deracination (echoing the "anywheres" critique of David Goodhart). This has an obvious Fascist interpretation: the rejection of the organic community, rootless cosmopolitanism, and so on. But it also points towards a nostalgia for corporatism, both in the Italian Fascist sense and the Medieval sense. In other words, the idea that people should be fixed within the otherwise unchanging structures of society. This is not simply a reactionary, traditionalist impulse that seeks to revive the good old days of "natural" hierarchy but a programmatic rejection of the dynamism and mutability of capitalism ("All that is solid melts into air"). Where Goodwin takes leave of Fascist corporatism is that he clearly has no real views on the economy. His worldview is self-absorbed, hence the focus on academia and the media: the milieus with which he is most familiar. And hence too the obvious resentment he displays towards graduates of more prestigious universities than the ones he went to and now works in.

Which leaves the Medieval angle. That is perhaps fitting for someone whose persona is so intimately bound up with study and publication that he even went so far as to eat a page of one of his earlier books on live TV. In other words, it would be better to interpret Goodwin as a scholastic rather than as a critic of modernity. He has the air of a monastic scold decrying the wickedness of the world, which isn't helped by his prickly defensiveness when challenged and his habitual blocking of critics on Twitter. As a consequence, he over-estimates the importance of tertiary education: "For the new elite, their very identity as high-flying, highly accomplished graduates of elite institutions not only gives them a profoundly important and highly collective sense of unity but also shapes their values and political loyalties". The idea that a person's values and politics are fixed for life at 21 is obviously wrong, but so too is the implication that those values and politics will lean in a liberal direction, as if university Conservative societies did not exist or law schools only produced human rights lawyers. 

This highlights a general tendency in Goodwin's writing which is to avoid explaining the mechanics of social change, or to explain them in highly superficial and partial ways. For example, in placing the evolution of the new elite in a historical context, he imagines a past in which "the country was run by upper-class aristocrats, landowners and industrialists who were united by their hereditary titles, their wealth and, importantly, their instinctively conservative values. Those people still exist. They can be found in the House of Lords, the Sunday Times Rich List, the private members clubs on London's Pall Mall and holding positions of influence in the Conservative Party. But in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the axis of power in Britain and many other democracies has been tilting away from them and towards a new ruling class". This is a naive history that occludes the Edwardian Liberal Party, the postwar welfare state and the actual source of contemporary wealth in the service of a supposed unity. You'd be embarrassed to read that in an undergraduate history essay.

It gets worse: "The new elite are the product of two seismic changes which transformed the country over the last seventy years. The first was the transition from an industrial to a post-industrial and knowledge-based economy; the second was the rapid rise of the universities, which expanded to supply this economy with a new, highly-educated, highly skilled and culturally distinctive professional class." The idea that the UK was not already a post-industrial and knowledge-based economy in 1950 is fatuous, as is the implied rapidity of this change. The education system had been expanding at all levels since the 1870s to meet the growing demands of the economy for higher skilled labour. Goodwin clearly intends to lead his audience back to the 1960s as part of the origin story of "where it all went wrong". This will reliably secure him column inches in newspapers and future book deals, but the political utility of a reaction to the 60s was exhausted by the Tories over the course of the 1980s. Assuming Goodwin can read the polls as well as the next person, my guess is that he sees his future prospects being tied to a Labour government, as a critic of "elite values" and as a conscience of the "somewheres". 

We've actually been here before. The communitarianism that was en vogue in the 1990s was an attempt to supersede the individualism of the 1960s, as much as that of the 1970s and 80s, hence there was always a sepia-tinged nostalgia at its heart. But it was also motivated by a desire to not return to the class politics of the 1940s and 50s, hence it imaginatively projected itself back even further, making nods to intellectual dead-ends such as guild socialism and early twentieth century liberalism. What was notable in this was the refusal to learn anything from the 20s and 30s, tainted as they were by Marxism. Thus the Frankfurt School was ignored and more recent thinkers who abjured collective action, such as Rawls and Giddens, were promoted. George Orwell was of emblematic importance to New Labour because he provided an escape route both backwards into a nostalgic Englishness and forwards into a post-Marxist ameliorative progressivism. Goodwin seems to be positioning himself for the return of this communitarianism and a revival of the anti-immigrant rhetoric that will undoubtedly accompany it. As Oliver Eagleton astutely put it, Goodwin hasn't drifted to the Fascist extreme. Rather his trajectory shows how "establishment centrism can comfortably accommodate the ideology of the hard right".