Zones of Interest

Elections focus our understanding of society not only in terms of political preference but in terms of geography and demography. Though there has long been a vogue among political scientists to divide society into competing blocs defined by "values", as opposed to the more traditional socio-economic dimension that dominated twentieth century psephology, these have usually been interpreted through a combination of the where and the who: the "left behind" regions of a post-industrial society and the fortunate generation of "boomers" who have monopolised property wealth. In recent decades the where has perhaps been dominant, certainly in the UK where Brexit and immigration focused politics on national boundaries more than social composition and where "levelling up" has been presented as a matter of spatial equality rather than class differentials. That may now be changing as the focus shifts towards the antagonisms evident between the young and the old (much of what is classed as "culture wars" is really just inter-generational conflict). We are then in a transitional moment in which social tensions appear specific to place one moment and then particular to age cohorts the next. This is particularly evident in the flexible use of the idea of "zones".

No-go zones are a longstanding fixation of the political right. While this is often couched in lurid tales of foreign lands - think of American claims that London toils under the yoke of Sharia law - the typical no-go zone is very much domestic: the slums, the wrong side of the tracks, the lower depths. That said, these days you will see foreign horror stories imported wholesale, thus British reactionaries will trust Fox News reports about London over the evidence of their own eyes. These territories are usually defined by an alien population, whether in the form of a immigrant ghetto or a lumpen proletariat of scroungers and welfare queens - i.e. people we have neither sympathy for nor empathy with because they are culturally or morally other. A common theme in the characterisation of these areas is violence. This is not just a feral disregard for law and order, where the ostensible focus on the former ("knife crime") is really about the necessity of enforcing the latter ("robust policing"), but the product of an intrinsic barbarity: a propensity to "mindless violence", which must be distinguished from the judicious volence of the state. In this, the threat of Islamist or other radicalisation and the prevalence of vice are, despite their apparent contradictions, of a piece.

A variation on the no-go zone defined by territory and a fixed population is that of public spaces occupied by a transient crowd whose very presence excludes others. This isn't always presented negatively in the media as a "mob" challenging our way of life. It may even evoke fulsome praise - think of the anti-Brexit protests or marches against antisemitism of a few years ago. What's noticeable is that occupying space has expanded from a tactic favoured by the disempowered to a performance of privilege and the defence of hierarchies, even at the risk of challenging order. A recent example was Gideon Falter of the Campaign Against Antisemitism goading police officers. In its intent and execution this was no different to the Football Lads Alliance claiming to be defending statues from BLM "thugs". The premise of the protests against the dystopian fantasy of 15-minute cities is that control of public spaces by the "elite" is a vector of the "woke" conspiracy. This extends beyond the far-right protesting drag queen story hours at public libraries to gender critical feminists obsessing over public toilets.

One of the more bizarre sights of recent years has been the focus on college campuses as the highest form of public square, where cherishing freedom of speech is paramount. This despite them being mostly private institutions deliberately shielded from wider society through by-laws and the power of money. That the NYPD can descend on Columbia University and arrest students protesting in support of Palestinians is precisely because it isn't the public square. Some liberal commentators have been disturbed by the apparent hypocrisy of rightwing commentators who previously berated students as "snowflakes" incapable of accommodating different views and their new insistence that disputing US (or UK) support for Israel's actions in Gaza must be stopped for fear of making Jewish students feel uncomfortable (which, incidentally, in equating Jewishness with Israel is antisemitic). But there is no hypocrisy here. They see colleges as sites of privilege; they're just insistent that it should be their own worldview that is privileged.

Liberals are less likely to fixate on territorial zones, recognising that this would require consideration of the socio-economic factors that clearly define their spatial reality, such as power differentials and ingrained poverty, but they can divert their feelings of disgust towards the hoi polloi into idealised zones that have been corrupted. Perhaps the most telling of these has been the family unit, which is typically described in terms that are all too obviously class-based: the "problem families" of the working class versus the "high achievers" of the middle class. This is in a long tradition of the sanctification of the (nuclear) family unit that goes back to the Protestant Reformation and which achieved a peak of idealisation in contrast to the harsh reality of capitalism during the Victorian era (i.e. as a refuge, not as a rebuke). A specific aspect of this is the zone of childhood innocence (think Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies), which offers the opportunity to indulge in the grief of the individual as a distraction from the grief of a people.

Today the zone of innocence manifests chiefly in a paranoia, shared by both liberals and conservatives, about the negative effects of smartphones and social media. This goes beyond banning TikTok as a security risk to attempting to micromanage childhood. As this latest moral panic has gathered momentum, it is clear that the concern resides chiefly - as ever - with middle-class children, hence the threat is couched in terms of traditional virtue, such as educational achievement - e.g. Jonathan Haidt's "Smartphones vs smart kids". In contrast, the cultural expressions of working-class children are still more likely to evoke baffled disgust, rather than sympathy, not to mention legal censure. A secondary manifestation, though necessarily narrower in scope, has been the rise of trans scepticism, the idea that children who believe they should be another gender are simply confused and ought to be encouraged to think otherwise. The delay in the use of puberty-blockers is presented as a precautionary concern over irreversible change, but it looks a lot like a desire to preserve childhood innocence by paradoxically embracing puberty.

What all of these expressions share is a concern with property rights, whether in the negative sense that property values may be undermined by too close a proximity to the poor or immigrant, or in the positive sense that existing property must be defended against the importunate and naive claims of the young (that the Mayor of New York is desperately searching for evidence that Columbia students are being led astray by middle-aged "outside agitators" is telling). Beneath the anxiety about social media lurks the traditional fear that childhood could be "stolen", which is really a fear that children themselves could be spirited away, either physically or by being alienated from their parents. Once it was Gypsies who were thought to steal children, now it's "groomers", a term so capacious it covers trans rights activists, Islamists and the Chinese government. As we have increasingly delayed adulthood as a social life stage, through low wages and unaffordable housing, so we have extended the ideal of innocent childhood past 18 and increasingly now past 21. With politicians reversing course on trans rights and climate change, thereby making it clear that they don't value the opinions of the young, the idea that you should be able to vote at 16 increasingly looks out of step with our reactionary times.