The Road To Somewhere

David Goodhart, “The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics,” Hurst & Co., 2017, 233 pp.

Although the focus of this book is Britain, the author additionally considers the same trends in Europe and the US.  Goodhart especially identifies three basic groups that are in the US, Europe, and Britain: Anywheres, Somewheres, and Inbetweeners.   The Anywheres, 25% of Britains, contain urban, mobile, relatively young, wealthy, and highly educated elites of various ethnicities.  They are found in elite education, the financial services industry, major media outlets, and the government technocracy—all of which are clustered in and around London; they are the Globalists.  The Anywheres, although only constituting about 25 percent of the British population, dominate the political class, and it is their concerns that are paramount in public policy.  Then we have the Somewheres, 50 % of Britains, who are more rooted and socially conservative, older, with less formal education but a greater attachment to tradition, the Crown, and the nation and are almost all white.  Last, we have the In-betweens (25%), the name sums their position relative to the other two.  Goodhart claims these three groups are similarly present in Europe and the US in the same proportions. 

Goodhart describes Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as the “two biggest protest votes in modern democratic history.” They constitute a backlash against what he calls the political status quo of “double liberalism.” By this, Goodhart means the economic liberalism of open borders and markets and the social liberalism of individualist lifestyle liberation.

My Notes:

Pg. 2:  Both Brexit and Trumps’ election were unexpected victories given a decisive tilt by unhappy white working-class voters—motivated, it seems, more by cultural loss, related to immigration and ethnic change than by economic calculation.  These two voting blocks will come to be seen as the moment when the politics of culture and identity rose to challenge the politics of left and right. 

Pg. 3ff:  Anywheres dominate our culture and society.  They tend to do well at school and then usually move from home to a residential university in their late teens and on to a career in the professions.  Such people have portable ‘achieved’ identities, based on educational and career success which makes them generally comfortable and confident with new places and people.  They broadly welcome change and are not nostalgic for a lost Britain; they fully embrace egalitarian and meritocratic attitudes on race, sexuality, and gender; they do not in the main embrace a borderless world but they are individualists and internationalists who are not strongly attached to larger group identities, including national ones; they value autonomy and self-realization before stability, community and tradition. (p. 24).

Somewheres are more rooted and usually have ‘ascribed’ identities—Scottish farmer, working-class, Cornish housewife—based on group belonging and particular places, which is why they often find rapid change more unsettling.  One core sub-group of Somewheres has been called the ‘left behind’—mainly older white working-class men with little education.  Somewheres get by on a middling income, with significantly less education than Anywheres.  They lean toward the Conservatives in voting.  They are most likely to be in the bottom three quartiles of the income and social class spectrum. Even though this group is significantly larger than the Anywheres, their political voice is much weaker.  They tend to be older and come from the more rooted middle and lower sections of society, from small towns and suburbia and the former industrial and maritime areas.  They do not generally welcome change and older Somewheres are nostalgic for a lost Britain, they place a high value on security and familiarity and have strong group attachments, local and national. (p. 24).

Pg. 9:  If globalization is defined as the emergence of a single global economy, with transnational corporations with worldwide production networks and few barriers to the free flow of goods, labor, and capital, then it has barely started.

Pg. 11:  Author defines liberalism as belief in the rule of law, individual rights and checks and balances on power.  Then there are the more specific liberalisms that the word is more generally associated with today: the rights and equality revolution starting in the 1960s that we call economic liberalism.  (This definition of liberalism has been hijacked and now stands for political correctness, identity political groups, etc…)

Pg. 22:  Good societies are characterized by high levels of trust and what academics call social capital—the existence of networks and institutions that make it easier to cooperate for the common good.  High levels of immigration and ethnic diversity reduce trust and familiarity, at least in the short-term.

Pg. 25:  More than 75 percent of the British population in 2013 wanted to reduce immigration a little or a lot.

Pg. 28:  See Jonathan Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind”: six psychological foundations of morality that are found in and across all cultures and are part of every human being, albeit in less or larger proportions in each person: 1) harm/care, 2) fairness/reciprocity (including issues of rights), 3) ingroup/loyalty, 4) authority/respect, 5) purity/sanctity, and 6) liberty/oppression.    Research has shown that Liberals morality tends to rest most strongly on the Care/harm, Liberty/oppression, Fairness/cheating foundations when confronted with a dilemma; Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to balance all six when confronted with a moral choice.  Morality is the key to understanding humanity & Morality is defined by these six foundations.

The idea of the sacred is especially difficult for liberals to understand.  Sacred isn’t necessarily about religion, but about the idea that some things should be untouchable.  If your only meaningful moral concepts are suffering and injustice, then it is hard to understand conservative reservations about such things as swearing in public, defending the flag, or most of today’s biomedical controversies.

Pg. 39:  There has been a sharp decline in racism, homophobic and male chauvinist attitudes since records of this began in 1983 (it may go back before such records into the 60s).  There has been an equally sharp decline in religious observance and a sharp rise in acceptance of sex before marriage.  Some attitudes have become less liberal: welfare payments to the unemployed and welfare spending more generally, on European integration, on immigration, and on Muslims and attitudes to multiculturalism.  

Pg. 53:  The campaign to remain in the European Union focused on money and how much people would lose if Britain exited the EU.  The Leave campaign was all about restoring a semblance of meaning to people’s lives, despite not having much money.  It was a vote for something more than money—for pride, belonging, community, identity, and a sense of ‘home.’

Pg. 62:  In America, Democrats used to be the party of the working class but now remain so only on social welfare issues.   Democrats now focus on gender equality, environmentalism and so on which is of little interest to lower-income Americans who are far closer to Republicans than Democrats on cultural and religious issues.  Until Trump, neither party represented the anti-free trade, anti-big business, especially since the Democrats shifted in a more free-market, free trade, direction twenty years ago.  The policy preferences of the affluent Anywhere classes have been similarly dominant in Britain in the past generation. 

Pg. 65:  The median household income of $53,600 ($62,175 in 2018) is down nearly 7.5 percent from the peak twenty years ago—but while the incomes of college graduates have risen 22 percent in that time those of white men who didn’t progress beyond high school have fallen by 9 percent.  (And although headline unemployment remains low in America there has been a sharp decline in the employment rate of prime-age men.)

Pg. 67:  The US had a long immigration pause between 1924 and the late 1960s.  In 1970 America was about 84 percent white and only 4 percent foreign-born.  Since an immigration surge, the non-Hispanic white population has fallen to just 62 percent.  The immigration debate, prior to Trump, was only about what to do about the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the US and even in that debate opponents of paths to citizenship measures were routinely accused of racism.  In another twenty years the US will be one-third Hispanic—one of the factors behind the rise of Trump.

Pg. 92:  The European Union has stagnant growth and high unemployment (since 2008 the Eurozone economy has been almost flat while the US has grown 27 percent), the Eurozone seems unable to secure external borders, and now Brexit.

Pg. 124:  In 2004 the former communist countries of central and Eastern Europe joined the EU and Britain was the only big EU country to allow them immediate access to the labor market.  A few thousand a year were expected; however, more than a million came in the next four years. 

Pg. 155: The OECD reported in January 2016 that Britain has the lowest literacy rate and the second-lowest numeracy rate of the twenty-three richest countries.  Even allowing for the fact that cognitive ability experts assume that there is a low IQ group of about 20 percent in most populations.  The traditional apprenticeship system has collapsed.

Pg. 193:  The 1960s began value shifts that have had an enormous impact on family life and the roles of women and men within it.  Individualism was stressed in Britain and the US which stressed personal freedom and meritocracy and offered the welfare state as a partial replacement for conventional family support.   The 1920s political equalization of women continued by providing much greater legal and economic autonomy from men and from the traditional family—easier divorce, more female-friendly employment and greater equality in the jobs market, benefits paid direct to women and later individual taxation of husband and wife.  At the same time the arrival of the pill and easier abortion further separated sex from association with family and long-term commitment.

The traditional family was not, in fact, traditional and only lasted a few generations.   It emerged in the late nineteenth century.  Before then both man and women had usually worked in paid roles (though the women often in the home) and bringing up children was an extended family task with siblings, aunts, cousins, grandparents all playing a role.

Pg. 208:  Most recent social trends favor female advance, not male.  As female employment rates have risen from about 50 percent in the early 1970s to close to 70 percent today, so male employment rates have fallen from over 92 percent to 79 percent in the same time period, with a significant increase in male inactivity. 

Boys trail girls at almost all levels of the education system.   Nearly a quarter of boys in the state school system are labeled as having special educational needs.  Boys slip further behind girls every year in GCE’s* and girls outperform boys in the vast majority of subjects at A level, including further maths, physics, and economics.  Women now account for receiving 60 percent of the university degrees in Britain.

* The General Certificate of Education (GCE) is a subject-specific family of academic qualifications that awarding bodies in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland confer on students.

The GCE is composed of three levels; they are, in increasing order of difficulty:

Ordinary Level ("O Level");

Advanced Subsidiary Level ("A1 Level" or "AS Level"), higher than the O Level, serving as a level in its own right, and functioning as a precursor to the full Advanced Level; and

Advanced Level ("A Level").

Pg. 230:  In Britain it is estimated that 70 percent of students with loans will not repay them.

Addenda:

In August 2015, Germany opened its doors to an inrush of asylum seekers from the Middle East, West Africa, and South Asia. By the time the doors were closed again, 1.2 million people had gained residency rights in Germany. Once those new residents gained German citizenship, they would be entitled under EU rules to move to the United Kingdom. Under the U.K.’s own rules, they could then claim social benefits, including free health care.  Ten months later was the Brexit vote.