The Elites Theory of Everything Is Dying
But Liberals Still Have Lessons To Learn
“The Elite” is a great buzz-term for people who don’t want to take responsibility for their shortcomings. Switch on the TV or pick up a newspaper and you can’t go far without reading an angry member of the conservative right moaning about how the elites have blunted their 13 years in government and brought down the last two prime ministers. I’ve been so inspired by this get-out-of-jail-free card for failure that I’ve decided to start using it in my own life. The reason I’ve forgotten to clean the bathroom and left my shoes in the living room again? The elites. Thus far, neither my flatmate nor my girlfriend have been as accepting of this excuse as the average Telegraph reader or GB News contrarian, but I’ll keep trying.
If there’s anyone to learn from on the elite front, it’s Matthew Goodwin, a professor of politics at the University of Kent who has written a new book chiding the graduate class. The central thesis of Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics is that a socially liberal elite is enforcing their woke views on an unwilling populace: people who live outside the M25. If you went to a top university and support immigration, then that seems to make you a member of the elite as far as Goodwin is concerned. He has spent much of the last week attacking anyone who disagrees with him on Twitter.
One of the main problems with the elites theory of everything is that if us socially liberal types really are Britannia’s overlords, then we’ve done an awfully good job of hiding it. The last decade has seen a broken housing market lock graduates out of homeownership, stagnant wages create a hostile environment for degree-bearers just starting their careers, tuition fees treble, migrants and refugees demonized, and our departure from the EU. Ten years ago, you could confuse the internationalist centre-right Conservative party for an AI trained on the pages of The Economist. These days, the Tory center of gravity is isolationism and illiberalism. Liberals have lost almost every battle in British politics since 2010. If we are the elite, we’re so spectacularly bad at eliting that Goodwin et al. shouldn’t be worrying at all.
The elites theory of everything brigade would probably say that is precisely the point. They’ve won most of the political battles of recent years, and yet still their policy priorities have not been implemented. Why has an anti-migration government so spectacularly failed to cut the number of people entering the country? How has a pro-free-speech government allowed university campuses to become hotbeds of woke radicalism? It never seems to occur to them the reason could be that the people in charge just aren’t very good. If you pick those as incompetent as Johnson or Braverman to be your flag-bearers, then you might win elections for a while, but you won’t get much done. That’s what the elites theory of everything is really about: a howl of rage from the small-c conservative right as they realize they have squandered their opportunity to change the country. The Tories are on the way out, and they will soon lose their political vehicle.
The decline of this brand of politics shouldn’t provide cover for liberals losing the argument for so long. We need to get much better at making our case, particularly as Starmer looks alarmingly statist to my eyes. The sad truth is that the elites theory of everything and the liberal backlash to it have only taken hold because no one in British politics has got what they wanted of late. In a way, we have all lost the argument because we stopped arguing. Our discourse hasn’t been defined by the merits of different policies and political approaches. Everything has been a battle to push forward “the will of the people” or to paint everyone as either an oppressor or the oppressed.
This latest attempt to defend a decaying populism is just a byproduct of the politics of failure. But rather than celebrating that fact, we have to energize ourselves to build something better. The 2020s cannot be another decade of stasis and misery. I’m not yet sure whether we will achieve that goal, but I am sure of one thing: I’m not part of the elite - they have people to clean their bathrooms for them.
Otterly Intriguing
Now that I’ve done the boring political stuff I can briefly dwell on the important information the Substack is really for. I recently learnt that sea otters have a special pocket under their armpit that they use to store food and special rocks. This is extremely cool and naturally I’ve been wondering what I’d store in my pocket if I were a sea otter; probably a copy of the FT and one of those amazing wafer Twix’s you used to be able to get. Stretching the fantasy I know, but I can dream.
