What’s Left? What’s Liberal? and What to Conserve? Why populism is a disruptive innovation but the left can’t see it. Populism, Class and Multiculturalism in Europe and America: Some basic propositi
Before I had fully come out as conservative 2016 I think
What does the long arc of human development tell us about the current disarray of liberal societies on both sides of the Atlantic? Here are a number of observations and propositions that draw upon work by Max Weber, Karl Marx, Karl Polanyi, Norbert Elias, Johan Goudsblom, Ernest Gellner, William Ophuls, Benedict Anderson and others. My aim is to condense some very basic ‘ground rules’ for thinking about liberal politics in an era of limits. So first of all, here are some guiding propositions:
i. For most of human history people lived in small communities attached to particular places. In these basic survival units, the ‘we’ dominated the ‘I’. Individuals literally didn’t understand themselves as the kind of separate egos that every single one of us living in a complex industrial society experiences as a normal frame of reference. As anthropologists discovered, it is very hard for people in modern societies to really understand how people in such pre-modern, we-dominated societies saw the world.
ii. Democratic liberal states are synonymous with a ‘society of individuals.’
iii. Societies of individuals are not natural. Nor are they universal. They are historically very specific forms that emerged first of all in the process of European state-formation.
iv. Nation-state formation is a process that invariably involved/involves the violent suppression of alternative (family, tribe, place, linguistic – based) forms of association and identity.
v. Liberal societies are rarely if ever produced by liberal means. They depend not only upon this ‘original sin’ – but on the continuing (and periodically exercised) monopoly of violence.
vi. Failed states in areas such as the Middle East often reflect the failure to complete or even start this coercive process of individualization. There may be a great deal of violence – but it has not been directed towards the creation of a society of individuals.
vii. Post-1989, the hubris and naivety of western policy was often to imagine that a society of individuals could be created by diktat, as an effect of the idea itself and without an extended process of coercion. In the absence of such a society of individuals, the institutions of liberal democracy at best provide a gloss for existing power relations between sub-national (tribal, ethnic, religious) we-groupings.
viii. In such a situation, as a Chinese student once observed ‘democracy is unfair because big families get more votes’.
ix. All forms of citizenship must be exclusive. Citizens are defined by rights and obligations not available to or incumbent upon non-citizens. In western countries, welfare states depend absolutely upon the state’s capacity to limit entitlement. Welfare states are by definition forms of exclusive solidarity. No exclusion, no solidarity, no social compact.
x. Modern citizenship is defined by the subsequent relationship between the imagined or (symbolically consanguineous) community of the nation-state (‘family’) and the individual. Every modern institution is predicated on this dyadic relation between individual and state.
xi. Such ‘imagined communities’ (the term is Benedict Anderson’s) are not rooted in empirical truths, nor ethically consistent narratives of social justice. The clue is in the name. They are ‘imagined’. But they work. They function and they are necessary prerequisites for social solidarity.
xii. This relationship between citizenship, the imagined national community and individual identity has really significant implications for both the prospects for the European Union and the possibility of progressive politics.
xiii. States are jealous gods: The EU cannot become a state nor European identity an effective basis for citizenship, without dismantling competing national forms of identity.
xiv. Within states, social homogeneity makes it easier to secure social cohesion through a social compact i.e. generous redistribution through the fiscal-welfare system. Greater diversity (though good for growth and innovation) makes such a social compact harder to sustain. Fiscal transfers between non-mutually-identifying groups are likely to be seen as less legitimate.
xv. Foregrounding class-based politics is more likely to provide the basis for a solidaristic social compact. By drawing attention to unbridgeable differences, the foregrounding of identity politics is likely to undermine a broader social compact.
xvi. All of this goes a long way to explaining what is going on in both Europe and the United States. In Europe the misadventure of the Eurozone, free movement of labour and the migrant crisis have combined to wrench apart the social compact between citizens and the state, undermining the both the state’s capacity to redistribute through the fiscal-welfare system whilst at the same time blurring the basis of entitlement and the boundary upon which the exclusive solidarity has always been based. With the emergence of identity politics, tensions around the binary basis of citizenship have spilled over into the internal political landscape.
xvii. In the United States, ethnic and religious diversity and the historical legacy with respect to slavery and colonization, have always weakened the possibility for a redistributive social compact (compare Sweden in the 1970s). But economic crisis combined, the absolute failure of Democratic presidencies to tackle class-based inequality and create an enduring social compact and now with the re-racialization of American politics
And on this basis, what tentative conclusions may be drawn about our present predicament? Assuming for a moment, the continuing viability of liberal growth societies:
i. Identity politics is killing the left, making liberal pluralism untenable, undermining the legitimacy of the redistributive social compact and opening up opportunities for right wing populists to develop an agenda around welfare and a different kind of social compact. It is having this effect because it inevitably draws a ring around and validates intermediate we-groupings that contravene the relationship between state and individual.
ii. A discourse of ‘white privilege’ can only create an essential division – because it relates to a historical narrative of ‘sins of fathers’. Its embrace on campus gives a misleading impression of its effects and consequences in society – because, by definition, it makes a solidaristic cross-class, cross-racial imagined community impossible.
· Black pride, must evoke white pride.
· Scottish nationalism, pushed far enough will evoke English nationalism – such that the ‘Barnett formula’ that secures disproportionate fiscal transfers between southern England and Scotland (‘we are all British after all’), breaks down (‘why are English taxpayers funding Scottish unemployment?’) .
iii. Class politics has a more muted impact in this regard because class identity is not essential and can in principle bring the great mass of the population into a symbolically consanguineous national family (as in 1970s Sweden or Norway).
iv. But we also need to ensure social-cohesion and national ‘we identities’. The multiculturalist world of infinitely spiralling differences and identities – has either failed or is becoming frail, and certainly continues to undermine our collective capacities to solve problems and look after each other. This is because collective action problems hinge on trust, confidence and mutual understanding.
v. At the very least, this implies that for a social compact to function, there needs to be universal access to a common language. Left-liberal unease with coercive link between social citizenship and language learning fails to recognise the sociological basis of solidarity in mutual identification. The latter is not a rational choice made by ethically progressive (or not) individuals. It is a pre-cognitive affective-emotional function of culture and psychology. Separate language groups are incompatible with the society of individuals.
Breaking with the assumption of business as usual and recognising biophysical limits to growth, the background assumption of a society of individuals – and therefore the functioning of liberal /democratic societies – becomes problematic.
vi. Left/liberal progressives and free market conservatives understand the world in terms of a series of binary oppositions between left/right, market/state. Problems of ecology and the resurgent small ‘c’ conservative understanding of community, sufficiency and virtue (e.g. associated with the social catholic tradition of Distributism) open up all sorts of different possibilities and combinations. The left has been much slower in recognising these possibilities than the right.
vii. You can’t have everything. Finger-pointing, ad hominem attacks on identifiable baddies, obscure the need for very difficult trade-offs, compromises and wicked tensions.
viii. There is a real tension between the exclusive solidarity of a national society of individuals on the one hand, and diversity and mass migration on the other.
ix. There is equally a tension between the fiscal transfers that underpin the social compact of capitalist welfare states (and so social cohesion and political stability) and the integrity of the biosphere.
· Migration and diversity promote growth: bad for the environment/good for social cohesion.
· Conditions of greater diversity require greater social expenditures to secure social cohesion (e.g. 250 languages spoken in London, require enormous expenditures in translation services to secure a minimally functioning legal system in which individuals are equal under the law).
x. In an ecologically-constrained post-capitalist world, we probably need less state and more community, less corporate monopoly and more small scale, place-bound livelihood, less global Market and more local markets.
xi. But this intimates a real tension with the society of individuals as local, place, familial and community affiliations disrupt the unitary relation between individual and state.
xii. A viable future is likely to be more communitarian: We need less emphasis on rights and more on obligations. Individuals can’t and shouldn’t escape from the duty of care to each other, to families, to communities, to children – but that care can’t be routinely outsourced to either the market or the state. A viable future will involve much more breaking bread, reciprocity and mutual obligation – but much less expansion of welfare services provided by the state. The expansion of childcare, social services, disability services – can’t be guaranteed, should not be expected and certainly should not become the over-arching focus for progressive politics. If gender equality in both the labour market and the household, are priorities, we need to find other ways to secure these objectives – ways that don’t lean so heavily on fiscal transfers from a growing economy.
xiii. Spirituality and re-enchantment are vital for any kind of sane relationship with the biosphere. The individualization and rationalization of motivation and behaviour have been a hallmark of modernity. But an economy and society premised upon preference seeking individual rationality provide little basis for self-restraint. It is an open question as to whether re-discovering the technics of ritual, embracing the narrative of ‘Big History’ and finding some positive way to accommodate cognitive dissonance, the ‘re-enchantment of the world’ can be reconciled with a broadly scientific worldview.
Strange times. Back home in the UK, many of my activist friends are increasingly distraught. Brexit takes the country into uncharted waters, and threatens the Union. Under Theresa May, the government is adopting more stringent rhetoric on immigration and putting pressure on companies to monitor their dependence on foreign workers. There has been an increasingly febrile discourse of national identity in the media and the usual EU-bashing. And just when we need a cohesive opposition, the Labour Party has sailed off into a self-imposed exile – an incoherent never-land of 1980s-styled ‘socialism’ or bust.
Of course, this would all be notable but perhaps parochial if it were not that the political weather has gone crazy across the western world. Looking across this emerging landscape, there is a discernable pattern. I think that with the help of some basic sociology the problems that we face in Europe and North America can be illuminated. Light doesn’t always bring comfort. And it depends upon putting aside a deeply engrained habit to look for binary solutions (right or wrong) and to identify (usually with ad hominem finger pointing arguments) clearly distinguished political friends and enemies: left /right, conservative/liberal, progressive/reactionary. A more difficult but far more productive strategy is to assume that all solutions are associated with a shadow, that we are confronted by many overlapping wicked dilemmas that involve trade-offs and compromises. More specifically, the left/right spectrum that has served to map the landscape of politics for two hundred years is now demonstrably moribund and misleading. ‘Progress’ will almost certainly depend on combining and reconciling in new ways priorities, institutions, values and ideas from ostensibly antonymical political traditions.
1. The Nation State versus ‘Citizens of the World’ or ‘Europeans’
First of all, some basics on the sociology of state formation. Theresa May raised a great deal of eyebrows this weekend and made some of you pretty angry by claiming that to be a ‘citizen of the world was to be a citizen of nowhere’ (or words to that effect). ‘No’ people exclaimed, ‘we have multiple identities and allegiances, we are Europeans, Scots, English... human beings… we are indeed citizens of the world’. May’s denial was deemed symptomatic of the small minded, Little England xenophobia that is apparently gripping (uniquely) my homeland. Weighing into this debate (and literally wringing their hands) liberal minded men and women of letters, the length and breadth of the land, mulled their exit options. ‘Nice’ and ‘civilized’ counties for this prospective exodus included Norway, Sweden and Canada (no one favoured Somalia or Syria! ).
Now as a long time liberal/libertarian leftie, this whole response pained me quite a bit. On one level proclaiming oneself a ‘citizen of the world’ is a rhetorical device to signal one’s cosmopolitan, humanitarian credentials, one’s commitment to diversity and identity politics and the whole raft of emancipations that have put flesh on Tom Paine’s declaration of the ‘Rights of Man’ (and Woman – thanks Ms Wollstonecraft). This signals a commitment to one side in the ‘culture wars’ – as if there could be any doubt. But sociologically speaking, it is as May pointed out a meaningless nonsense. Citizens exist only in relation to a polis – a very specific state. To the extent that people like me are global citizens, this just reflects our wealth (plane tickets, hotels), cultural capital (comfort to embrace strange foods, customs etc.), linguistic capital [speaking English, French or Spanish opens doors in a way that Swahili does not] and also our British (Canadian/American/EU) passports – because our travel plans are legitimated, protected and underwritten by the economic, political and diplomatic power of our home nation-states. Most people from Somalia or the rougher neighbourhoods of Mumbai or Nairrobi are not and cannot be ‘citizens of the world’ in either sense. Now we might not like that reality. We may want to change it. But Theresa May’s comment reflected reality. The chorus of disbelief from educated denizens of Facebook represented an aspiration.
We should start by resisting the temptation to talk at cross purposes, seize upon a juicy phraselet and point fingers. Given the chaos and turbulence in our political landscape, we might be better to observe, understand and work out what is going on. In that spirit, I will continue.
It is curious that in all this Britain-bashing, people on the left and centre (as was), seem to think other countries might be better. A quick scan shows this to be wide of the mark. Britain has not descended into an abyss of racist xenophobia. It is experiencing only a mild fever compared to what is going on in many countries. In Sweden, Finland, France, Austria, Italy Germany and the Netherlands (far)right populist parties are polling in the low to mid 20s. In Germany refugee centres have been burned to the ground. Even Norway has a problem with the extreme right. Partly this is a function of the proportional electoral systems which allow parties at the far ends of the spectrum to be expressed. ‘First past the post’ hides swathes of less moderate opinion and suppresses dissent, until that is the mainstream parties begin to enter a terminal tail spin – then all bets are off. Anyway, the cases of Sweden and Germany are instructive. Germans were happy to absorb the trillion Euro cost of reunification, but will not fork out for another Greek bailout that would cost a fraction of this. Why? Quite clearly because a state operates on the basis of quasi-familiarity – a symbolic consanguinity (more of this later). Germans we will pay for because they are ‘like us’, Greeks we will not pay for because they are ‘not like us’. This intimates what seems to be a more general rule. Homogeneous societies are more likely to sustain higher taxes, a more generous social compact, greater investment in public goods and a culture of shared commitment to public – infrastructure because fiscal transfers between haves and have nots are more easily legitimated between individuals and groups that share a cohesive ‘we identity’ and easily recognise a shared ‘community of fate’. Cosmopolitan societies, with high levels of ethnic, religious, linguistic and social diversity, generally have much poorer welfare systems, less public investment, less shared use of public infrastructure (schools, transport systems, health systems) and less social solidarity – because it is harder to legitimate high levels of taxation and fiscal transfers to minority groups who are not experienced as being ‘the same as us’. Because of the terrible legacy of slavery and colonialism, America is an exemplar of the latter, with Britain and America moving in that direction over many decades. Scandinavian countries have traditionally been at the other end of the spectrum.
A complicating factor is that certainly in the economic boom times, migration is good for growth and diversity drives innovation. Hence the paradox that America has consistently been the most economically dynamic and innovative economy whilst scoring terribly on education, welfare, health and happiness. This all becomes more problematic during periods of economic stagnation [And it becomes possibly terminal for the body politic if the global economy begins to experience systemic, irrevocable, biophysical and ecological limits to growth – which is a different and even more shocking possibility. More of that in another post]. So even from the perspective of mainstream political economy, this very simple trade off tells us immediately something about what is going on in Europe. By embracing mass immigration for a combination of ethical and economic/demographic reasons, Sweden and German can expect [other things being equal, which they are not] to receive an economic boost and higher levels of innovation, but at the same time enormous political problems with sustaining a generous, inclusive welfare system. Sweden is beginning to look more like Britain and America – and I am guessing that for many Swedes this will be the cause of mixed feelings.
OK, back to state formation. For those liberal/lefties who have been so victorious in the culture wars, BREXIT has been a disaster. The European Union, it is assumed represents a viable beacon of progressive unity and regulation in a globalised world that desperately needs common sense solutions and solidarity. The problem is that this narrative politely ignores some very basic aspects of state formation. As everyone by now should know, the Eurozone has been an unmitigated disaster. Germany has benefited from an artificially low currency, whilst peripheral countries have been locked into an overvalued currency which has created a downward spiral from which they can’t recover. Max Weber (a German appropriately enough) defined the state in terms of its twin monopolies of violence and taxation. The impact of the Eurozone on peripheral economies is not unprecedented. It happens anytime you impose a single currency across regions at different levels of development. This was the experience of all national currencies in newly created national economic systems in the 18th and 19th centuries. But of course, the pattern is usually that with a single currency, you get a single fiscal-welfare system – which allows for systematic tax transfers to individuals, families and to regions (what we in the UK used to call ‘Regional Policy’). Each year millions of pounds are transferred from the south east of England to the North East and West, South West, Wales and Scotland. Until recently, this was all unremarkable and unremarked. Such transfers were seen as legitimate because they took place within a single nation state (the UK) – and we are all British (yes ok there is Northern Ireland, but you get the drift). The same thing can’t happen in Europe because (protestations from my righteous Europhiles and citizens of the world aside), none of us are, as yet, European – not primarily. We are French, German, Greek …or Catelonian, English or Scottish perhaps, but not European.
This is not necessarily a problem. French people were not always French, nor Italians Italian. Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, America, France, Sweden etc. were created, over a long period. And this process of state formation is instructive. It tells us quite a lot as to what would be necessary for us to be truly ‘world citizens’ or ‘Europeans’. The first thing to recognise is that all modern institutions involve individuals. Individualism is the condicio sine qua non of modernity. We vote as individual citizens. We have individual rights under the law. We have individual obligations to the state. Market economies are driven by individually rational actors expressing individual preferences. Our individualist ontology and epistemology is captured by the Cartesian epithet ‘I think therefor I am’.. Whether of the political right or the left, individualism is the assumed base-line architecture. Collectivism aggregates the activity and sensibility of rights-bearing individuals. This is all quite new. ‘Honour killings’ or blood feuds (the Italian mafia ‘vendetta’ or Albanian ‘kanun’) shock us because they offend the basic tenets of individualist moral philosophy: we can only be held accountable for our own actions, not those of our family or tribe or any other ‘we’. At Nuremburg, we tried individual Nazis, not ‘Germany’ or ‘Germans’.
This is all quite new. In pre-modern societies it would be more accurate to have said ‘we think therefor we are.’ The balance between the ‘I’ and the ‘We’ tilted very much towards the latter. Rights were tied to obligations and these were understood in terms of membership of place/tribe/community based groups. So how did what Norbert Elias refers to as the ‘society of Individuals’ emerge from a society of clans and tribes? Well this has been the subject of intensive study for two hundred years, with major contributions from Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Elias, Huizinga – and a raft of others. But by far the most useful for present purposes was the contribution of Karl Polanyi (The Great Transformation 1944 and a whole bunch of essays published in the 50s and 60s). Polanyi describes in great detail the violent and tumultuous process that saw the collapse of the feudal social order from the 16th century. The enclosure movement in England, the highland clearances and the famine in Ireland were part of a largely unintended transformation of social relations that saw millions of peasants kicked off the land and enter the cities to become wage workers. The key things about this rather double-edged process of emancipation were that millions died, it was violent and traumatic but it also constructed people as individuals as they were forced out of traditional place-bound and family/clan structures of care and welfare. For many people, this spelled disaster. The reaction when it came took the form of early-modern innovations such as guilds, friendly societies, unions – institutions that created symbolic, quasi familial forms of mutual care and obligation. We should also note in passing that, violence notwithstanding, millions of young women continue to flood out of the traditional patriarchal tribal society of places like rural Pakistan, to embrace a life in the city which is often dangerous, precarious and highly vulnerable. Anyway, to stabilise these new nascent nation-state societies, it was necessary for the state actively to consolidate a direct line between the individual citizen and the state. The protestant notion of an individual, unmediated relation between the individual and God had established a template which the state now took over. Through mechanisms like the monetary monopoly (single currency), cultural monopoly (e.g. the brutal suppression of linguistic diversity – ask the Celts, Cornish, or Basques, or Geordies for that matter), the imposition of demographic accounting systems in which individuals were numbered and recorded (for legal and tax reasons), national conscription – individuals were wrought, clans and tribes dissolved and nations formed. Eugene Weber describes this brilliantly in From Peasants into Frenchmen. These processes were in many ways involuntary. They were the unintended concomitants of what Scott refers to as ‘Seeing like a State’.
The bottom line is that if you want a state, these are the things you have to do. It is not that Napoleon and Cromwell looked ahead and thought …’hmmm, you have to be cruel to be kind. We need to do these things so that in the 20th century people can experience democracy and the rule of law’. But the original sin of all liberal societies is that liberalism and tribes do not go together. Democracy doesn’t work in the absence of a society of individuals and creating such a society has always, always been violent – and relies on the continuing threat or actuality of violence in the background.
Ok, so far so good. How does this relate to Europe? Or America and ‘Black Lives Matter’? Well let’s start with Europe. A (mainland) Chinese student said to me in a seminar once, ‘Is not democracy unfair’? ‘How so?’ I replied. ‘Because big families get more votes’. Brilliant insight. Just brilliant In a tribal society, individuals do not express individual preferences which are then aggregated at the level of the polity. They vote for the family. Big families always dominate. Democracy is a non-starter somewhere like Iraq or Saudi Arabia. To democratize you would first need a very violent suppression of tribes and an economically violent disembedding of individuals from traditional support systems. But the same thing is true in Europe. Everyone knows that there is a democratic deficit. But it is not solvable. Definitively so. Because unless individual citizens do think of themselves as Europeans (and they don’t), they will vote for tribal interests and the ‘big families’ (Germans, French) will dominate. Which is why Europe is not run by the parliament but by committees and hacks making deals behind closed doors – which is why European institutions will not be able to overcome the legitimation crisis and correct the democratic deficit. It is also why the ECB will not be able to harmonize fiscal systems and organize the bailouts necessary to save the Eurozone.
Scotland is part of a modern nation state and might become a modern nation state in its own right. But it is not a tribal society. Individuals relate to the state. The gathering of the clans notwithstanding, no McDonald or Campbell engages in blood feud or demands rights of hospitality based on tribal membership. And where such loyalties do re-emerge in criminal gangs, they meet with a chorus of condemnation and are put down ruthlessly. If Jacques Delors, Junkers and company really want to indulge in European state formation – which might be a good idea in the long term given the global challenges that we face – they would have to be willing to use institutional and probably military force to disorganise and dissolve the intermediate forms of association that we call nation-states.
2. Right-wing populism, the culture wars and social cohesion
Ok, so much for state formation. What about the specifics of right wing populism? Watching events unfurl, most liberals are rightly askance. ‘What has gone wrong? What can we do? How should we react?’ This is very understandable in the UK where Her Majesty’s Opposition has disappeared down a very deep rabbit hole. But in focusing on the electoral short comings of Corbyn, left and liberal commentators are often missing a very importance piece of the jig saw. In America and Europe, the left has won ‘the culture wars’ hands down. Extending the architecture and terminology of civil rights to issues of gender, disability and sexuality – the social and cultural revolution has extended far off the campus to touch all areas of culture and society. The most ubiquitous marker of this new culture is the pervasive insistence that (sexual, social, ethnic) cosmopolitan diversity is a good thing. This leads to a strange paradox. In an era of globalization, since the early 1990s the left has all but given up trying to resist the new economic world order. Since the fall of the Soviet empire the left has been bereft of an economic model. But by way of compensation, the embrace of migration, diversity and identity politics has opened the way for a series of victories in the cultural sphere. An unintended and often unacknowledged consequence of this post-soviet political landscape has been a de facto alignment between economic globalization and the cosmopolitanism and identity politics of the left. It was Tony Blair who opened the doors to large flows of inward migration as a deliberate strategy. Part of the calculation was to construct a multi-racial, multi-cultural block of urban labour voters that would consolidate permanent New Labour majorities in parliament. A similar contingency has transformed countries such as Sweden. In the United States, the Democrats under the Clinton have embraced identity politics with enthusiasm – linking the discourse of civil rights and black pride, with LGBT, Hispanic and migrant liberation. But at the same time, they have moved to the right on the economy. NAFTA and prospective deals such as TTIP have become the unchallengeable architecture of a global economic order that the Clintons have not only accepted but celebrated and endorsed. Hilary Clinton’s rather transparent and venal relationship with Wall Street and corporate America is the flipside of her celebrity diversity politics that dominates Hollywood, the Oscars and the liberal media. Of course the reason for this is very clear. Identity politics opens the way to innumerable mini-wins against the backdrop of a political-economic landscape that is closed, in which there truly is [it is claimed] no alternative. In both the American and Canadian media, there is an unprecedented level of comfort in talking about racism, disability, bullying, eating disorders, sexuality, decolonization and problems faced by First Nation. Anything that speaks to subaltern identities and the prime imperative of North American culture which has become ‘personal experience’. Chat show hosts are in their comfort zone when they can ask ‘how does that make you feel?’ Anorexia: How does that make you feel? Racism in sport: How does that make you feel as a…. The formerly arcane argot of ‘LGBT’ trips of the tongue in a discussion as easily in a discussion of baseball as it a commentary on the Oscars. But class….almost never! The structural inequality that is a necessary concomitant of capitalism? The cultural and political monopoly exercised by the 1 %? Almost never. It is almost the case that in North America, the language of class is no longer spoken… which is a shame, because class you can do something about.
In both Europe and America, the priorities of cosmopolitan diversity combined with a de facto commitment to the global economic order, has opened up a growing gap between parties of the left and their traditional white working class constituencies. In the United States it is 30 years since the protagonist in Bruce Springsteen’s ‘The River’ was struggling to find well paid manufacturing employment and ‘do like his daddy’s done’. Since then, the rust belt got rustier, the jobs migrated south, employment became more precarious and income inequality has grown dramatically.
Now what happens in this context, when black men get killed by the police. The fact of the matter is that more young white men get shot, but blacks are disproportionately affected. Racism is clearly at play in the police: there are racist policemen as well as institutionalised patterns of discrimination. But quite frequently, black policemen have also been involved as shooters or colleagues. And any sociological analysis would focus just as much on gun culture – because the mere presence of guns makes shooting much more likely in any context. And it would also foreground problems of class and poverty – because blacks are disproportionately represented in economically disadvantaged groups and are more likely to come into contact with the police.
At this point, there is a choice. If the response is all about race and identity, just a little bit about guns and almost nothing about class – how does that play out? If the discourse construes all whites as indelibly stamped by the mark of Cain or ‘white privilege’, there are very little grounds for the Bruce Springsteen, Woody Guthrie or Huddy Leadbetter politics of class coalition. In such circumstances, against the backdrop of the story narrated by Black Lives Matters, ‘black pride’ will evoke ‘white pride’ as sure as night follows day. Identity politics cajoles people to reach immediately for terms like ‘white privilege’ and by doing so, to undermines the potential for common cause (and there is an enormous potential because, at least in absolute terms, even more white men are shot than blacks). Identity politics has the unintended (but unsurprising) consequence of pushing working class whites (who after all don’t choose their colour any more than anyone else) to think of themselves as separate – and both sides to see the politics of race as natural and immutable. Welcome to 21st century America. This is what has happened. America speaks only the language of identity. It has lost the capacity to talk about class. This is truly a disaster. Momentarily, Bernie Sanders offered to counter Trump with a politics that recognised race and racism but targeted the 1 %a and corporate America. But in the end, the Democrat establishment chose NAFTA, TTIP and Wall Street over working class America. It has embraced identity politics as a bulwark against Trump, but opened the way for large sections of the white working class migrate new space in the political landscape.
Populism and economic protectionism
Now it is important to note that this is not simply a ‘shift to the right.’ Something much stranger is going on. The political landscape is turning inside out. In order to appeal to this newly cut-loose political constituency, populists on both sides of the Atlantic have turned their guns on globalization. Since the 1990s the mainstream left has been quiescent on the broad parameters of political economy. Globalization was taken as a given. For sure, people ranted about neo-liberalism in all sorts of contexts. But there has been no serious left wing alternative to global market integration and the model of a ‘rising tide floating all boats.’ For all intents, the left has accepted the primacy and legitimacy of ‘comparative advantage’ on a global scale. Even in Europe, a crisis of sluggish economies and low productivity had persuaded the technocrats in the European commission of the need to free up labour markets and capital flows and embrace more fully the benefits of global free trade.
But in America it is the otherwise incoherent Trump who is railing against NAFTA (the ‘worst trade deal in history’), against free trade and in favour of protecting American jobs. Even in the UK, the new post-Brexit Tory slogan is ‘A country that works for everyone’ with the NHS protected, austerity postponed and firms instructed to employ British workers. And in Europe, right wing populist parties have made a deliberate strategy to take over defence of welfare arrangements against the incursions of both free trade and mass migration. But when the Swedish Democrats or Danish Freedom Party pose the question ‘welfare OR immigration’, they are touching on a real truth (see https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/26/scandinavia-far-right-stolen-left-ground-welfare) . The Keynesian Welfare State was built upon a protected national economic space and a link between national insurance payments by citizens and welfare benefits for citizens. This doesn’t and can’t work, without a boundary. So repeated calls for unhindered migration, opening up borders and even the acceptance of a completely free flow of global labour – all this really does directly threaten the social compact that has, since the war, protected European workers from the vagaries of the market. Even when nothing like this was on the cards, the unwillingness of left parties and intellectuals to acknowledge this wicked dilemma has made their pronouncements seem incoherent, flaccid and ‘unreal’. Belatedly now, Labour Party remainers are trying to catch up by acknowledging the need to curb free movement of labour (http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/labour-mp-freedom-of-movement-brexit_uk_57dfb7eae4b0d584f7f1b89b) . But in the UK the BREXIT horse has bolted.
For the most part, the left in America and Europe seem unable to articulate a coherent case against globalization. Cosmopolitanism and identity politics, combined with very understandable humanitarian concerns about the plight of refugees and vulnerable populations in failing states, have tied the mainstream liberal /left to what is now routinely referred to as ‘globalism’ – a term that was coined by the shock jocks and bloggers of the ‘Alternative Right’. The problem is that identity politics is polarising.
Of course this is dangerous territory and we have been here before. National Socialism was not a misnomer. The political economy of fascism tied the imagined community of the nation-state to economic protectionism and a class-based social compact defined by an exclusive solidarity. The similarity of the tripartite corporatist forms of social democracy that dominated European politics after the war was not accidental. The experience of the war in all countries consolidated an expectation of the state as a central player and arbiter in the economy.