Last hope for the left

The liberal, secular world view may hold sway over western elites, but it is struggling to answer the conservative challenge

by David Goodhart / March 19, 2012 / Leave a comment
Published in April 2012 issue of Prospect Magazine

Elite colleges produce WEIRD people: Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic

The Righteous Mind
by Jonathan Haidt (Allen Lane, £20)

Together
by Richard Sennett (Allen Lane, £25)

A few years ago I was at a 60th birthday party for a well-known Labour MP. Many of the leading thinkers of the British centre-left were there and at one point the conversation turned to the infamous Gordon Brown slogan “British jobs for British workers,” from a speech he had given a few days before at the Labour conference.

The people around me entered a bidding war to express their outrage at Brown’s slogan which was finally triumphantly closed by one who declared, to general approval, that it was “racism, pure and simple.”

I remember thinking afterwards how odd the conversation would have sounded to most other people in this country. Gordon Brown’s phrase may have been clumsy and cynical but he didn’t actually say British jobs for white British workers.

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Comments

BenSix
March 22, 2012 at 21:24
Interesting essay, Mr Goodhart. I was intrigued to note that even the authors of a book on "where and how diversity works" concluded that "you really have to make people proud of who they are".
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RichJS
March 22, 2012 at 22:49
I'd really like to read Haidt's book, and I'd say I'm open to the thesis. However I found the following statement baffling: "The sacred is especially difficult for liberals to understand. This isn’t necessarily about religion but about the idea that humans have a nobler, more spiritual side and that life has a higher purpose than pleasure or profit." I would strongly contest this. I also find the statement a bit baffling, since it seems to be conservatives that want profit-making and wealth to be the elite principles of our society. The difference is that for liberals, humanistic values and ideas like equality and social justice, and a world view in which individuals build respect, empathy and communication with other based on our common humanity, and that should trump nationalistic and local identities, especially if they are prejudicial. I fully agree that we have to capture a sense of stronger community, but this will have to be in the context and frame of such values rather than against them - as your idea of post-liberalism seems to hint at.
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RichJS
March 22, 2012 at 22:52
Sorry, an editing error there. I meant to say that those humanistic values constitute the sacred for liberals.
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Are you WEIRD? | Curlew River
March 23, 2012 at 22:46
[...] Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic liberals; a concept discussed by David Goodhart in a fascinating review of an Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind. The key question Haidt raises (and that Goodhart [...]
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Simon
March 24, 2012 at 12:14
I rather thought the liberal elite was only too happy to see the kind of manic free-marketeering it imputes to so-called conservatives, provided this meant that it could ride the waters atop its turbulence, sipping Shiraz in a glass-bottomed boat with the delegation from China. http://www.fabians.org.uk/
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Weird global citizen
March 24, 2012 at 15:18
First, I thought the author's attempt to link social liberalism to the WEIRD acronym a little bizarre seeing as he seemed to be talking about the liberal/conservative divide amongst western industrialised rich democracies. His thesis seemed to be that tertiary education stops people being nationalist or having gender roles so only the 'E' was at all relevant. I'm not sure he meant to imply that conservatives are less educated either so I assume he means a particular kind of education. Secondly it seemed to me that the real intention of the essay was to challenge, in a round about way, the idea that we should be "suspicious of appeals to religion or to human nature to justify any departure from equal treatment". The irony of this is that 'equality for all' is a sacred belief amongst the left as much as the sanctity of heterosexual marriage is for the conservatives he was describing. Similarly I think the left just thinks that authority derives from solidarity with the marginalised and disadvantaged rather than from a utilitarian appeal to a particular monoculture. It isn't that liberals don't understand the sacred or authority in human nature they just have different conceptions of what they should look like. All that remains then to discuss is the part of human nature described as loyalty to the in-crowd. It would be easy at this point to characature the author's argument as 'consevatives are willing to appeal to the base insider/outsider part of human nature (that often leads to racism, xenophobia, misogyny etc) and that is why they are popular' but I don't think that is what he means (at least I hope not). He seems to be saying that we are better off having a strong nationalist identity in order to unite the different groups within a country as all part of the same in-crowd. To this i would say that 'loyalty to insiders' can equally be expressed as fear of outsiders and while that is part of human nature, I don't think it cannot be overcome by culture and I don't think it is a good basis for public policy. Where you were born, geographically and sociologically, continues to have far to much influence over health, well being, status and achievement. The history of humanity has been a story of finding mutually benifical outcomes between competing insider groups. Cooperation trumped insider loyalty to allow competing families to form into tribes and competing tribes to form into cities and clans. Competing cities and clans were often united by religion and formed into nation states and then these nation states were able to embrace immigration and multiculturalism. Why can't cooperation and mutual good trump the worst of our human nature again for us to become global citizens?
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Paul Dove
March 24, 2012 at 19:07
@RichJS "...for liberals, humanistic values and ideas like equality and social justice, and a world view in which individuals build respect, empathy and communication with other based on our common humanity should trump nationalistic and local identities". If people have entrenched religious or ethnic identities you can't just steam in and tell them that these should play second fiddle to the Guardian reader values of secular liberal humanism. And what you describe as 'common humanity' may not be considered as such by other groups. I agree with you though that Goodhart is very unclear about the notion of the 'sacred'.
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John Ellis
March 24, 2012 at 19:38
Just because a book has been written and Goodhart always harps on about immigration doesn't make the liberal goals any less relevant or indeed important. In the US the right has a monopoly on 'hate', which Goodhart doesn' mention: the capacity for the American right to attack anything on the left is never matched by liberals. So, forget the five morals that the right is so good at and look at the sixth (or seventh) that the right is guilty of and liberals do not comprehend.
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Valerie
March 25, 2012 at 23:06
John Ellis; You MUST be joking or willfully blind to suggest that the Right in America is preaching "hate" politics. In fact, you must be a doctrinaire Leftist to suggest such an absurdity. Dear God man, open your eyes and ears.
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Scott
March 25, 2012 at 23:10
Codswallop! "loyalty to the in-group, authority and the sacred". Give me a break. More Unions, more government and more Gaea. Methinks Jonathan Haidt is projecting. Nothing complicated with core conservative values. It's simple, get government out of my face and trust your fellow man.
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Peter from Oz
March 25, 2012 at 23:52
I cannot help but notice that this essay persists with the error that liberals are individualists. Liberalism is the movement of the collectivist, the sort of person who sees the individual as part of a group. hence, the liberal fallacious belief that all members of a group can only think one way, or that diversity of skin colour means divesrsity of thought.
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Ned Smith
March 26, 2012 at 01:19
There is no hope for the "Left" or the "Right" in the 21st century. They are anachronisms from a bygone age, like wrist watches and the Royals
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Nelson
March 26, 2012 at 01:23
"In the US the right has a monopoly on ‘hate’" I would disagree with this point very strongly. The right does not have a monopoly on hate. You only have to look to attacks on Sarah Palin's baby Trig and the certain liberal commentators suggestions that his down sydrome was due to inbreeding. Or the parties in the street that are planned for when Thatcher dies. Or at the branding of Rick Santorum and his wife as "weird" if not "sicko" for taking home his stillborn baby to be introduced to his family (which infact is recommended by midwives and doctors to provide closure for the family). These hatefilled slimings suggest to me that the right does not have a monopoly on hate.
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Gerald Barnes
March 26, 2012 at 06:55
One size fits all seems to be the logic of equalitarians. Yet this overlooks different aptitudes and abilities among individuals. In Britain there is a centuries-old snobbery against skilled manual work. Germany two centuries ago recognized the value of skilled labour and started setting up an apprentice education system to certify those who learned industrial skills to the highest standards. Such workers are well rewarded. It is time to review the assumption that people in pinstriped suits are automatically more valuable than engineers, tradespeople, industrial designers and others. Brain surgeons and heart transplanters fall outside this snobbery of social non-esteem, mainly because they spend so many years doing study and internship. The Left (by which is meant liberals and social democrats)are losing out on culture debates because so much leftist and liberal discourse is about equality and not human nature. Economistic thinking also tends to overlook nonmaterial (spiritual?) concerns. This has affected discourse about aesthetics, about faith schools, about the effects of ethnic traditions on child rearing and educational achievement. I don't think the role of mass media journalists and editors as cultural and political players, rather than as impartial reporters and commentators, is brought into the equation when considering the discourse between Left and Right in western societies. Centrist politicians on the right and the left (an oxymoron, I know) are continually in dread of the judgement of the mass media and will modify their views on a range of cultural and social issues in efforts to avoid being publicly downrated.
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td
March 28, 2012 at 09:12
What you have to remember is that the left's main goal is the destruction and eradication of Western/white culture by any means. Anything else is secondary to them. That's why they support extremist religious groups who advocate the murder of gays, Jews, apostates etc, despite ostensibly having a "human rights" agenda. You couldn't make it up really. Now that England is in its death throes there is only one option: emigrate.
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Simon
March 30, 2012 at 01:18
Peter from Oz says: "I cannot help but notice that this essay persists with the error that liberals are individualists. Liberalism is the movement of the collectivist" The sort of liberals the author lists in his piece actually strike me as being very individualistic in their way, albeit the individualism of competition carried out by throwing noisy public poses of moral perfection that avow quasi-socialist politics from which these advocates have made themselves a handy opt-out trap-door.
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RichJS
March 30, 2012 at 12:09
@ Paul Dove That's a very fair point, and its the crux of the confrontation in many ways. My main point was that the liberal idea of the sacred is different, but those values, however differently constructed, can still be powerfully connected to an ideal in the dimension of the sacred or spiritual in many people's lives. Of course biting off such great generalities is always goin to throw up these co tradictions - broad spectrums on the table here
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Jake Gillespie
March 30, 2012 at 17:19
Sadly, my Generation X died with Kurt Cobain - or at least the Boomers pronounced us dead. Then it was Y and Z? Creatively condescending bunch... At any rate, I'd replace the E with "Entitled". Governments and their bureaucracies have proven over and over again that those in power only seek to retain and extend that power, by any means necessary. So when McCain and Obama both agreed to the Baby Boomer Bailout - the ruse of any "left" or "right" was exposed. They can talk endlessly about any so-called differences - but their actions speak MUCH louder. Any "believers" are just blissfully ignorant, thanks to whatever connections that led them to feel "protected" enough to blather on about a single-minded collective that rules us all - the greed of government and its supporting corporations. The only "intellectual" solution is to act independently of it all - in my case, that action was to leave a comfortable well-paying job in NYC to actively support the growth of small businesses. I hope it pans out. If not, at least I've liberated myself.
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Libertarian
March 30, 2012 at 20:19
RichJS, you are a true IDIOT and another fine example of a brainwashed 2 dimensional WEIRD. Please don't speak further, your nonsense has given me quite a headache.
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Enxyme
March 30, 2012 at 21:58
Oh dear god! Why didn't you make everyone jump out the box at the same time? Duh!? Some are still inside while others are already out. Liberals can't care less about those left inside, for their hatred towards the drivers inside are much stronger than what they wish to preach.
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BlackSaint
April 2, 2012 at 13:46
Our government refuses to fulfill the most basic, primary task and duty of any government of any kind, anywhere in the world, and that is to protect its citizens and the Nation from invasion and enforce its Laws. Our Government, past & present, Republican & Democrat, have allowed the invasion of 20 to 30 million criminals and uneducated parasites which is the largest invasion of any Nation, at any time, by any means & in direct violation of Article IV Section IV of our Constitution. This refusal to abide by our Constitution or enforce our Immigration Laws should be classified as Treason & as grounds for impeachment & trials for Treason! Not only have they allowed the invasion, they force American tax payers to pay Billions on Billions of dollars to provide Welfare, Prison cells, Educate the invaders numerous children, and free medical care, at the same time the invading horde break numerous laws and massive document fraud, & are destroying our schools, hospitals, communities, culture and standard of living while Robbing, Raping, Killing & Assaulting American Citizens at an rate the terrorist can only dream about. Statements in Mexico from both President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary something needs to be done. "Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the deaths of police officers, soldiers, and civilians," Hillary whined. But no whines, concern or care that their refusal to stop the Massive Invasion of Illegal Aliens pouring across our borders or enforce our immigration laws that causes an estimated 25 Americans deaths per day and 10,s of thousands victims of Assault, Robberies, Rapes, Identify thief, and other assorted crimes committed by the invading horde of Illegal Aliens from our Southern border on American citizens each year! It is a telling indictment & shows their Empathy & Compassion of our Politicians & their priorities are not for the American citizens when they express more concern over Mexicans deaths mostly connected to the Drug trade, than the murders, havoc & crimes of Illegal Aliens against American Citizens! Most of our Politicians in Wash. DC are wading knee deep in innocent American blood and suffering because they put Self Interest ahead of the welfare of American Citizens & the future of this Nation! The Democrats view the invading horde of Criminals and Uneducated third world rejects as Undocumented Welfare Democrats & the Republicans as Undocumented Slave labor for their Pay Masters in the Chamber of Commerce & Businesses! The Citizens of this Nation of all races that have sacrificed with blood, sweat & tears for over 200 years & obeyed the Laws of the land, paid the taxes, and fought the wars & built this Nation are now letting Corrupt/Treasonous politicians turn this Nation into the United States of Mexico without a shot being fired, to serve their demented, nefarious goals!
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Charlie
April 6, 2012 at 19:42
Most upper middle class leftwing/liberal types ignore the economic argument. For most working class and lower middle class people immigration means reduced increases in salary and increased housing costs. If upper middle class left wingers and liberals were replaced by Indians and Chinese, then they would consider economic patriotism. The reality is that the UK could probably recruit far better educated yet cheaper upper middle class left wingers and liberals from India and China. Outsourcing the Guardian,the BBC,most of the state education and university systems and much of the legal system to Bangalore and Shanghai would probably provide a better quality service at a cheaper price.
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Laban Tall
April 6, 2012 at 23:39
But liberals also care strongly about loyalty to the in-group - expressed in its worst form, as hatred of the out-group. You need to read the Guardian comments, where conservatives with both big and small C are routinely demonised as evil and subhuman. When Mrs Thatcher dies we'll see this in full effect. I was reading a left London blogger last year, and two posts struck me. The first was a reasoned discussion of what to do about hateful commenters on blog posts - the kind of thing we can all relate to. The second, soon after, was a discussion of, not the morality, but the utility of murdering "fascists" - which obviously from the post and comments included BNP members. No cognitive dissonance among the commenters (mostly the same people on the two posts) at all. Plenty of loyalty to the in-group - in its most extreme form - on the Left.
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davkk
April 9, 2012 at 00:25
“it has taken modern science to remind liberals what our grandparents knew.” In otherwords tradition which also wisely tells that "charity begins at home" with particular people. Then also it is not enough to want to do good, one has know what is good. For example to be concerned for starving children in Africa is great, but to support abortion at the same time undermines that "universal love". Liberalism is in love with universal fairness, etc but denies univeral moral norms.
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Alyson
April 22, 2012 at 08:28
This article is written from the perspective of the far right which says it is okay to make huge profits off the backs of workers in countries which do not have health and safety labour laws. The Lib Dems are the good guys in the UK coalition This aricle is trying to vilify community values in favour of the free market. That makes it much harder to raise social capital in the face of lawful greed. Globalism is attractive to the rich, who are happy to let their own communities lose out in the interests of their small minority of successful global economic interests. Liberal values have the lower octaves of building solid foundations for the Tory high fliers to sing their individualistic successes from. Labour voters have the collective and community at their heart, sustaining the workers in their daily grind. For Britain to be the morally good place it has been ideologically since the 2 world wars it needs to see itself as a model society, leading the world in democratic values. Cricket and footbal spring to mind as team-work examples. The way forward is to open up the tax loophole of charitable giving to include funding social infra-structure, making donations rather than investments, and sharing in benefits for everyone instead of looking for exclusive gain. Perhaps this needs to be the new mantra for Labour. Or perhaps Vince Cable can stop the pound of flesh from being taxed from too close to the country's beating heart, and can get this new means of breaking the stagnant stranglehold of the higher octaves on the full orchestral diversity of multi-cultural Britain. Britain is no longer a class war of bosses and workers but of share-holders and the out of work. The idea of robbing pensioners not only of their nest egg that they have paid into all their working lives, not only of the feathering that they have worked so hard to put in place for retirement but also of the nests they call home, that they have built up, in personal property and private goods is mean in the extreme. The small band of very rich people are keeping fluid finance out of Britain because profits are higher elsewhere. To claim this is in favour of the poor in other countries is a half truth and a diversion from the responsibilities we have towards our own communities.
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Brian H
May 21, 2012 at 01:47
John Ellis Just because a book has been written and Goodhart always harps on about immigration doesn’t make the liberal goals any less relevant or indeed important. In the US the right has a monopoly on ‘hate’, which Goodhart doesn’ mention: the capacity for the American right to attack anything on the left is never matched by liberals. So, forget the five morals that the right is so good at and look at the sixth (or seventh) that the right is guilty of and liberals do not comprehend. Illustrating precisely the contra-factual nature of the liberal view of conservatives. In fact, if you film Tea Party gatherings, e.g., they are polite and friendly (and they spontaneously police the grounds before and after using them, leaving them cleaner than when they came), while leftist rallies are virulent, filthy, and often include such amusements as car-burning and window-smashing (with subsequent "liberation" of shop goods). As for the grounds, bring BIG dump trucks and backhoes, and be prepared for numerous deposits of human faeces. Being so "caring", you see, is carte blanche for any and every kind of excess. And Ellis-like delusion.
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Last
August 1, 2012 at 21:01
"Liberals care about harm and suffering (appealing to our capacities for sympathy and nurturing) and fairness and injustice. All human cultures care about these two things but they also care about three other things: loyalty to the in-group, authority and the sacred." This is too simplistic. There are many, 'liberals who care about loyalty, authority and even the sacred. There are also many, many conservatives who are totally lacking in sympathy, fairness and justice. So I would say this book is nonsense!
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News Feed 20120413 | Gates of Vienna
February 2, 2013 at 04:40
[...] Last Hope for the Left [...]
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The Nation Looms… | Back Towards the Locus
March 17, 2014 at 02:16
[...] to prioritise the interests of some people over others is, in the apparently pejorative phrase of Oliver Kamm, “fellow citizen favouritism”. Jet-setting capitalists, meanwhile, want cheap labour and do not [...]
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Kavod
April 23, 2014 at 21:06
I think your first anecdote sums up all that is wrong with the Left and why poor and working class people have such negative perceptions of it. A bunch of Labour elites discussing how it was more moral to give jobs to foreigners who were more poor (greater need) rather than Brits who are less poor. At first blush that does sound proper: very fair and charitable. Of course one OUGHT to help those most in need first. And then you sift that about and wonder....if these generally well-off people care so much about the Congolese, how much of their own above average incomes are they giving charitably to them? Are they willing for their class to be taxed to provide them aid? Or in the opposite scenario, to be taxed to give better benefits to those Brits who could have been working but are now left on the dole? Isn't it so very easy to speak, from a place of security and advantage, of throwing your fellow Brits from another class under the bus so that you can feel morally good about helping the Congolese, and bask in what a kindly, good person you are for helping them? And then to look down smugly at those same poor and call them racist to boot?Wow, the arrogance and hubris in that is actually quite stunning. Admitting that your fellow Brit has, all other things being equal, a greater moral claim on you than a foreigner is not racist; Black Britons share in that greater claim, after all, the same as ethnic Britons. And it doesn't deny the essential equality of the two parties, either. A person's own children have a greater moral claim on them than someone else's do, that doesn't imply they are of greater moral worth or intrinsic value, or that other people's children have no moral claims at all. Yes there are times when that moral claim of kinship or nationality is legitimately trumped by other more pressing claims but I think the poor at home could accept those occasions with less bitterness if they felt that their moral claim were even just recognized in the first place, rather than dismissed out of hand. Wealthy liberals who want the good feelings that come from charitableness need to ante up and provide that charity out of their own pockets, and demand the sacrifice from their own class, first. To often, liberals are people who feel good about giving someone further away a hand up while standing on the backs of people nearer at hand.
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