The Road to Somewhere

THE ROAD TO SOMEWHERE: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics

DAVID GOODHART

Hurst & Co, 2017, 278 pages

A decade and a half ago, when David Goodhart began engaging with the arguments of the critics of immigration instead of galvanically jerking a knee into their groins and shouting ‘racist scum’ at them, his liberal peers raised a stonking great “hullabaloo”, he writes in The Road to Somewhere. Hell hath no spite like that of the intolerant, ‘liberal’ multiculturalist spurned, whether by the BREXIT-voting throng, the Trump-rallying pleb or one of their own ‘anti-racism’-obsessed tribe who ventures into open-minded enquiry on key texts of the ‘Diversity’ scripture.

For Goodhart had been one of the clan. Inhabiting the world of the metropolitan elite, this son of a knighted Tory politician, educated at private school and prestigious university, a Financial Times editor and currently a centrist think-tank director, Goodhart has now become “an internal critic of contemporary liberalism” who dares to challenge conventional liberal orthodoxy on “immigration, race, multiculturalism and national identity”.

For Goodhart, the BREXIT and Trump shocks in 2016 crystallised the growing divergence between a liberal elite celebrating rapid socio-cultural change (the globalist, liberal ‘Anywheres’) and the low-to-middling-income victims of such change (the populist ‘Somewheres’ affiliated to familiar communities and nations). Whilst the specifically economic driver of such change (job-destroying, wage-lowering, factory-shuttering globalisation) is a compelling “recruiting sergeant” for the surge of populist protest in the West, a stronger motivator, says Goodhart, is the profound discomfort of pell-mell ethno-demographic “cultural loss” resulting from open borders mass immigration to the West.

It is true, agrees Goodhart, that a core group of Somewheres are the economically ‘left-behinds’ (older, working class white men with little formal education) but the populist ranks have been greatly swollen by the culturally ‘left-behinds’ of the non-minority population who see their settled, neighbourly communities, and recognisably cherished country, wrenched out of shape by an influx of immigrants and their descendants, with English eroding as a shared language, integration-averse ethnic enclaves blooming, distasteful cultural practices multiplying, crime and other social disorders metastasising, and schools, health services, public housing, transport, infrastructure and other public services choked by escalating immigration-driven demand.

Cohesive societies, says Goodhart, are bonded together by such “non-material” factors as language, traditions and culture shared amongst a largely homogeneous people – “the idea of people like us … is a simple reality of life”, he says. This preference for living in such group-based communities, however, is simplistically dismissed by liberals as racism. Identity-infatuated liberals accept the concept of in-group exclusiveness for ethnic minorities (“it is called multiculturalism”) but, inconsistently, they reject it for majorities (which are still largely white, though increasingly less so in ‘Anywhere’ London or other Western urban magnets for immigrants).

Ethnic and racial outsiders, when they rapidly achieve demographic critical mass in the West, are the prime agents of the cultural disruption to, and economic theft from, the tax-paying white citizens who have painstakingly contributed to the physical and social capital of their societies and who should have the major call on the rights and benefits of citizenship over the recent blow-ins, especially the opportunistic moochers. As Goodhart says, “countries belong to their citizens”, a once-common premise which is now scoffed at by offended left-liberals as racist, ‘tabloid’ poison.

If it was mainly economic loss underlying the new populist revolt, argues Goodhart, then the left should be capitalising on what is their traditionally strong suit (and there would be a President Bernie Sanders in the White House) but the left has been almost uniformly “on the wrong side” on the immigration issue. This has politically marginalised the liberal-left from the pulse of the popular backlash against loss of national democratic sovereignty, and the social degradation of local community life, resulting from the lack of border control.

When immigration, at sub-mass levels, was just one political issue amongst many, the left’s focus on “class and economic issues” did not harm its public influence or alienate its social base. As large-scale immigration, especially high-profile illegal, uninvited immigration, has become more pronounced in the West, however, and as it more visibly inserts an outsize finger in every troublesome social pie (housing, education, health, the environment, etc.) the left, wedded to anti-discrimination and clutching its security blanket of ‘anti-racism’ and obsessing ever more about migrants and refugees, has gone missing concerning the new social reality and the desires of the affected citizenry concerning immigration.

The liberal-left’s resultant class desertion of legacy (white) workers, and its obsession with identity politics has resulted in the left’s political marginalisation. This process is hastened by the left’s doctrinaire, intolerant and hostile reaction to populism, its “angry contempt” for, and “elitist condescension” towards, the populist ranks. The left, says Goodhart, refuses to see that when, for example, sceptics of multiculturalism target such outward manifestations of ethno-religious ‘diversity’ as skin colour or distinctive dress (hijabs, burkinis, etc.), or differential crime rates between blacks and whites, this is not a venting of crude bigotry but the vehicle for legitimate criticism of different, and often inferior, cultural values which have turned white localities, and their larger nation, into places they increasingly don’t recognise and feel estranged from.

Identity politics is now the left’s major selling point for brand differentiation from a populism which is both economically left and culturally ‘right’). Populism, says Goodhart, can now legitimately claim the title of “the new socialism”. The flip-side of this role reversal is that the liberal left has now become part of the new Establishment. Whilst raw “business self-interest” leads capitalists to favour a borderless world by allowing profit maximisation through the free movement of goods, services, capital and labour, the liberal-left of multiculturalist Anywheres, acting from self-righteous “moral self-regard” rather than base material greed, says Goodhart, have joined their once class enemy as masters of the new economic, political and social hegemony of multiculturalism.

Goodhart’s main point throughout his book is that the problems addressed by populism are real and that populist political leaders “channel discontents that are legitimate and salient”. His solution? He wants a “new settlement” between a “less headstrong Anywhere liberalism” and a “decent populism”. He advocates being “tough on populism” and “tough on the causes of populism”.

The latter would involve, for example, a “sane globalisation” that would involve resurrecting some economic barriers to cheap imports, “fewer, much fewer” numbers of immigrants, ring-fencing the welfare state from immigrant instant gratification, a higher valuation placed on citizenship, not placing certain “minority practices” above criticism for reasons of ‘cultural sensitivity’, withdrawing state funding from exclusively-immigrant activities (“Bangladeshi mothers groups or Colombian football teams”, for example), an ID card (to rigorously connect citizenship to entitlement), and more stringent language and cultural fluency tests for public sector jobs requiring public contact.

The ‘tough on populism’ part of Goodhart’s equation, however, involves gratuitous abuse of populist leaders as “unappealing”, as “opportunists, narcissists and sociopaths” with a “coarsening influence” on politics whilst propounding “simplistic solutions to complex problems”. Unlike many liberals (such as Hillary Clinton and her infamously candid dismissal of populist Trump voters as ‘deplorables’), Goodhart, however, does not direct his censure at the rank-and-file subscribers to the resurgent political creed.

Goodhart can’t quite shake his Anywhere-nurtured, liberal-at-heart past, however, and his ‘tough on populism’ line still posits populism as politically flawed, democracy as unreliable and the demos as fundamentally untrustworthy, all needing a liberal corrective, if with much looser reins controlled by a populist-sympathetic elite (including heretical think-tank directors).

Although Goodhart is reluctant to go the whole hog on the ills of and cures for immigration, his book is a refreshingly, if depressingly rare (for a liberal), critical exploration of populism and its emblematic issue of immigration.