David Goodhart - The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics

The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics

HURST & COMPANY, LONDON

First published in English in the United Kingdom in 2017 by C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd.,

41 Great Russell Street, London, WC1B 3PL

David Goodhart, 2017

All rights reserved.

Distributed in the United States, Canada and Latin America by Oxford University Press, 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 0016, United States of America.

The right of David Goodhart to be identified as the author of this publication is asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

A Cataloguing-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 9781849047999
eISBN: 9781849049139

www.hurstpublishers.com

This book is in part a response to recent events. It also grew out of my earlier writing on immigration and multiculturalism (in The British Dream) and is an attempt to provide a broader critique of contemporary liberalism from the radical centre. I had planned something more abstract and timeless with Postliberal in the title. Then those events intervened and I have instead written something swifter and more specific. It draws on several things I have written in the three years since British Dream, above all the Demos Quarterly essay A Postliberal Future? This book is certainly informed by Postliberal (and Blue Labour) thinking but I have not used the word Postliberal in the title, or in the book at all, as it is too opaque and open to misinterpretation.

There are many people I would like to thank for various kinds of assistance or insight in the writing of this book and the more general evolution of my thinking (see also the at the end). Special thanks to: Andrew Adonis, Katharine Birbalsingh, Belinda Brown, Geoff Dench, Eric Kaufmann, Michael Lind, Paul Morland, Toby Mundy, Bob Rowthorn, Allen Simpson plus Michael Dwyer, Jon de Peyer, Alison Alexanian and the team at Hurst. I would also like to thank: Michelle Bannister, Jamie Bartlett, Hannah Beard, Phillip Blond, Sam Bright, Alex Brummer, Andrew Cahn, Samantha Callan, Daisy Christodoulou, Jon Cruddas, Ren Cuperus, William Davies, Swati Dhingra, Stephen Driver, Bobby Duffy, Daniel Finkelstein, Janan Ganesh, Maurice Glasman, Dean Godson, Maud Goodhart, Matthew Goodwin, Charles Grant, Andrew Green, Francis Green, Kathy Gyngell, Jonathan Haidt, Ernst Hillebrand, Sunder Katwala, Inara Khan, Shiria Khatun, Ivan Krastev, David Landsman, Tim Leunig, Warwick Lightfoot, Alexander Linklater, John Lloyd, Rebecca Lowe Coulson, Pam Meadows, Anand Menon, David Metcalf, Jasper McMahon, Richard Norrie, Liav Orgad, Geoff Owen, Marie Peacock, Trevor Phillips, John Philpott, Rachel Reeves, Christopher Roberts, Shamit Saggar, Paul Scheffer, Tom Schuller, Jonathan Simons, Jon Simmons, David Soskice, Nick Timothy, David Willetts, Max Wind-Cowie, Alison Wolf, Philip Wood, Michela Wrong.

Brexit and the election of Donald Trumpthe two biggest protest votes in modern democratic historymarked not so much the arrival of the populist era in western politics but its coming of age.

Looking back from the future, the first few years of the twenty-first century, culminating in those two votes, will come to be seen as the moment when the politics of culture and identity rose to challenge the politics of left and right. Socio-cultural politics took its place at the top table alongside traditional socio-economic politicsmeaning as much as money.

This book, conceived at the beginning of 2016, was originally intended to, among other things, warn against the coming backlash against the political status quoand in particular against the double liberalism, both economic and social, that has dominated politics, particularly in Britain and America, for more than a generation.

The backlash came earlier than I expected, but it did not come out of the blue. In fact it was widely predicted and has been several decades in the making. Britain has been catching up with more established trends in continental Europe and the US. The spirit of the new political era can be found in solid support for populist parties across Europe (many of which have been part of governing coalitions), in persistent opposition to large scale immigration, in Trumps election in the US, in Brexit, in the success of the Scottish National Party, and in the demise of the British Labour Party and much of the European centre-left. This book will focus on Britain but will consider related trends in Europe and the US.

Both Brexit and Trumps election were unexpected victories given a decisive tilt by unhappy white working class votersmotivated, it seems, more by cultural loss, related to immigration and ethnic change, than by economic calculation. But they are also very different phenomena. Trumps strongman appeal marked a more radical departure in both tone and content from what has gone before in western politics and will, of course, have more far-reaching consequences than Brexit. If Trump keeps his isolationist election promises the world may slide towards a trade war and global economic depression, not to mention a free hand for Russia in her near abroad; if he jettisons them his core supporters may not take it well.

Liberal democracy is unlikely to be toppled, even in the US. The habits of compromise and civic order are too ingrained, and America will remain a land of plenty for the vast majority. And in Britain large parts of politics will remain either technocratic or marked by left-right prioritieshow best to combine state and market in infrastructure spending, for example, or how to rein in inequality. But since the turn of the century western politics has had to make room for a new set of voices pre-occupied with national borders and pace of change, appealing to people who feel displaced by a more open, ethnically fluid, graduate-favouring economy and society, designed by and for the new elites.

Many liberal-minded people in Britain and elsewhere have been uncomfortable about granting space to these political forces and regard hostility to the openness required by European integration and a more global economy as simply irrational, if not xenophobic.

Some of those core Remainers reported waking up the day after the Brexit vote feeling, at least briefly, that they were living in a foreign country. If that was, indeed, the case they were merely experiencing, in political reverse, what a majority of people apparently feel every day.

For several years now more than half of British people have agreed with this statement (and similar ones): Britain has changed in recent times beyond recognition, it sometimes feels like a foreign country and this makes me feel uncomfortable. Older people, the least well edu cated and the least affluent are most likely to assent, but there is quite widespread support from other groups too.

Even allowing for the querulous spirit that opinion polls often seem to inspire, this is an astonishing thing for the majority of the population to agree to in a country as stable, peaceful, rich and successful as todays Britain. It is a similar story in the US where 81 per cent of Trump supporters said life was better fifty years ago. What is going on?

Much of the British commentariat see an open v closed divide as the new political fault-line. Tony Blair dedicated a speech to the distinction in 2007 just before he left office: Modern politics has less to do with traditional positions of right versus left, more to do today, with what I would call the modern choice, which is open versus closed.