Following his recent public lecture, Professor David Bates reflects on some of the questions which came from the audience.

In my Professorial Beacon Lecture on 24 April, an audience member quite rightly questioned the apparent pessimism of my analysis and conclusions.

I continue to believe that the current moment is an incredibly dangerous one. This national populist moment is not far removed from fascism. And we know what fascist movements brought to us in the 1920s, 30s and 40s.

But the audience member to whom I refer asked (I paraphrase slightly) ‘are there not some disruptive and democratic possibilities in this moment?’ Another audience member claimed that in even suggesting that it is possible for people to be misled regarding their political preferences, I was somehow a patronising elitist.

The second criticism is, I think, the easiest to deal with based, as it is, on a set of spurious ideological assumptions. Everyone – including the person asking the question – can be misinformed, or mistaken.

I have voted in ways that I now think were wrong. I have realised that those whom I have consented to be my representatives have often been ‘up to no good’.

To this extent meaningful democracy is an iterative process which involves a constant reassessment and critique of one’s own judgements. And just as individuals can be mistaken, so too can majority populations; for democracy is not the same thing as majoritarianism. Thus, meaningful democracy requires a culture of informed and critical citizenship. Important decisions take time. This includes the time to review our opinions and to change our minds. Democracy in short must embed a culture of fallibility. That is why those with misplaced certainty tend to favour demagogues rather than democrats.

The first criticism is more interesting; for it relates to the democratic potential of the current moment. That is, that the terminal crisis of neo-liberalism specifically, and liberal democracy more widely, may open a space for something new. To paraphrase the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek (2012), it again becomes possible to ‘imagine’ a world beyond capitalism. Or to reference Francis Fukuyama (1989), it becomes clear liberal democratic capitalism is no longer the ‘end of history’. Disruption, to put it crudely, can be illuminating (though this is far from always the case).

The populist moment also shines an intense light on the complicity of established political elites and the neoliberal project. It provides an amplification of previously silenced voices. These voices include those who have had their established communities in Western liberal democracies shattered by neo-liberal globalisation. Working class communities in previously relatively well-paid manual jobs who are now either unemployed or firmly part of the precariat. In the UK the New Labour project and the shift of the Labour Party’s membership (and leadership) from the unionised manual working classes to the professional middle classes is important, for it weakened the voice of the most vulnerable. It was only in this context that Tony Blair as leader of the Labour Party could give vocal support to ‘trickle down’ economics (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/events/newsnight/1372220.stm ).

So, to slightly paraphrase the words of another philosopher (this time Karl Marx) where people could not represent themselves, ‘they must be represented’ (Marx, 1852). In Marx’s time the person doing the ‘representing’ was Napoleon’s mediocre and devious nephew Louis Bonaparte, and those to be represented were the French peasantry. Today we have post-truth politicians such as Nigel Farage and Donald Trump claiming to speak for those who have lost out to globalisation.

The social media savvy advocate of right-wing national populism Professor Matt Goodwin has a point when he argues that key aspects of the left (what he terms ‘left elites’ ) do not ‘get it’. ¹ That is, the left fail to understand how working class people have clear and just grievances. Goodwin has a distorted understanding of the working class. The working class is much more than the ‘white working class’. The working class is extremely ethnically diverse (see Ainsley, 2018; Olusog, 2019; Institute for Race Relations, 2024;)). The increased number of working class people of mixed heritage attest to this fact (see McKenzie (2013) and Caballero (2018).

It is this distorted understanding which leads Goodwin to the conclusion that working class people wish to resolve these grievances through his form of national populist politics (see Eatwell and Goodwin, 2019). But where Goodwin thinks that the only way to ‘get it’ is to fuel division (and encourage ‘clicks’), what we need is to rebuild a left which takes seriously these real concerns. This involves rebuilding meaningful and substantive structures of working class representation, based on current structural and economic reality – a challenging, but essential task.

1. There are too many comments by Goodwin to list, but they are all readily available through any search engine. ↩︎

References

Ainsley, C. (2018) The New Working Class, Policy Press: London.

Blair, T. (2001) Interview with BBC News Night (See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j18_I5cV-a0 )

Caballero, C. (2018) ‘Seeing Black History as British History: recognising mixed race Britain’. British Sociological Association. (See: https://www.britsoc.co.uk/about/latest-news/2018/october/seeing-black-history-as-british-history-recognising-mixed-race-britain/ )

Eatwell, R. and Goodwin, M. (2018) National Populism: The Revolt against Liberal Democracy, Pelican: London.

Fukuyama, F. (1989) ‘The End of History’, The National Interest

No. 16 (Summer 1989), pp. 3-18.

Institute for Race Relations (2024) ‘BME Statistics on Poverty and Deprivation’ (See: https://irr.org.uk/research/statistics/poverty/ )

Marx, K. (1852) The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (See https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ )

Mckenzie, L. 2013. ‘Narratives from a Nottingham council estate: a story of white working-class mothers with mixed-race children’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36 (8), pp. 1342-1358. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2013.776698

Olusoga, D. (2019) ‘I was born black and working class. The identities need not be in opposition’, The Guardian, 13 April. (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/13/i-was-born-black-and-working-class-the-identities-need-not-be-in-opposition )

Žižek, S. (1994) ‘The Spectre of ideology’, in S. Žižek (ed), Mapping Ideology, Verso: London.