Imperial ideology: how elite networks push local connections and concerns out of the public space

Much of what has been going on Western societies is a struggle between the somewhere politics of local connections and the anywhere politics of elite networks.

Social analyst David Goodhart identifies the somewheres as people who are rooted in their local communities. Suppliers of labour, small business folk and others, often without university education, somewheres typically are born, live and die within the same local area. Anywheres are typically folk with university educations, so possess human capital, many with professional qualifications, who congregate in the major metropolises. They often travel for work and frequently reside in a very different community from where they grew up. They also often have more in common with anywheres in other countries than the somewheres of their own country. The dramatic fall in transport and communication costs have tended to expand and strengthen their networks.

It is the transnational nature of the networks of the anywheres, including their transnational commonalities in outlooks, perspectives and interests, that generates much of the rhetoric about globalism.

The decline of churchgoing, the decline of private sector unionism (and the takeover of the union apparatus by the university-educated), the decline of local sporting clubs and networks, the retreat into private entertainment, the flow of newcomers into urban neighbourhoods, the flow of the educated out of local neighbourhoods, the movement of women into the workforce (and so out of local networking), the decline of mass manufacturing, have all undermined local connections.

Thus, an interlocking web of economic, social and technological changes have tended to systematically undermine local connections and expand and empower elite networks. The anywheres, and their perspectives, more or less completely dominate the cultural commanding heights — arts and entertainment, media, IT, universities and much of education generally.

The one major political lever the somewheres still have is the vote. This is a less powerful lever than one might think, as having the vote on its own is not enough, there have to people to vote for who reflect your concerns and interests. As economist Thomas Piketty has nicely documented, politics has become increasingly dominated by a struggle between possessors of human capital (who he labels the Brahmin Left) and business capital (in his terms, the Merchant Right). That is two different set of anywheres trying to get the votes of the somewheres.

Increasingly, the somewheres do not hear their concerns and interests being articulated in the public and political spaces, so they retreat into not voting. Worse, attempts to articulate their concerns and interests are often de-legitimised; are construed as racist, xenophobic or otherwise beyond the moral pale.

Here we need to distinguish between being critical — you are wrong because of (insert facts and logic) — and de-legitimising — only evil and malicious people say such things. To de-legitimise a point or concern is to say that it does not belong in the public space at all. It is not even worth arguing over. De-legitimisation is all the more powerful if the person expressing such concerns is sanctioned for saying such things.

(As an aside, much of the hatred of President Trump can be explained by the way he deliberately, even gleefully, mocks such legitimacy plays.)

The phenomena of “cancel culture” (seeking to destroy livelihoods and reputations, seeking to exclude from the public space) is an attempt to impose social norms on what can be expressed in public (and private) via social sanctioning. To set the limits of opinion legitimacy. It is typically a form of mobbing, with all the problems that mobs, and mob “justice”, has. It is a mechanism of de-legitimising, not of criticism. It is, of course, fundamentally hostile to free speech.

It is also, fairly obviously, not a tactic of the somewheres, but of anywheres.

Throughout history, the possessors of human-and-cultural capital have been a significant class in complex societies. Their origins go all the way back to the shamans of foraging societies. They are often, but not only, priesthoods and religious scholars.

The Brahmins of Indian society are an example of possessors of human-and-cultural capital. So are the ulema, the religious scholars, of Islamic society. In both cases, they have traditionally controlled legitimacy: what it was, or was not, legitimate to do or say.

Granting-and-denying legitimacy is a standard social-dominance device of the possessors of human-and-cultural capital. Provided, of course, they can coordinate well enough to wield it. In contemporary society, much of the quality media fulfils that coordination role — selling a congenial sense of being informed around the opinions packaged as being what the good-and-smart people believe. In recent years, this coordination role has been hugely augmented by online media, particularly Twitter.

We live in an age with an ever-expanding list of linguistic and opinions taboos. Setting taboos is all about setting the limits of legitimacy. Piketty’s label of Brahmin Left is very much on-point.

It does not take much to see that granting-and-denying legitimacy is a powerful weapon in the hands of anywhere networks. If they can set the norms of legitimacy in a way that supports their status and resource claims, they can channel the votes of the somewheres, who outnumber them, into directions that minimise the conflict with anywhere interests.

Voting matters because it empowers social bargaining, it makes people’s concerns and interests matter. But if you can wield the weapons of setting legitimacy successfully, you can restrict the avenues of “legitimate” political bargaining in a way that systematically restricts, and so undermines, the value of the vote. Concerns that cannot be legitimately expressed can be quarantined off among designated political untouchables or simply do not enter into the processes of political bargaining in any effective way.

You can see this process at its most perfect in totalitarian states. The ruling Party completely controls what can be legitimately expressed, sanctioning (often severely) anyone who crosses the set lines. Elections are thus turned into rituals; rituals of dominance (we can get you to go through this ritual act) and of legitimacy (see, the people voted for us).

When people respond to the current American troubles by invoking comparisons with the Chinese Cultural Revolution or the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution, there are similarities in underlying dynamics to point to. Pulling down statues, censoring cultural products, having diversity(tm) struggle sessions, street violence, mock executions and so forth have an evocative similarity with those earlier social paroxysms. We are seeing networked efforts to so narrow what it is legitimate to say or do so as to establish the dominance of the wielders of yet another ideology of socially transformative virtue.

An ideology that manages to combine the worst of the Counter-Enlightenment — the primacy of emotion and feeling, the primacy of racial identity — and the worst of the Radical Enlightenment — the belief that social transformation is achieved by forcing everyone to act and believe together — in a single, highly potent, set of status claims presented as being what the virtuous believe. Virtue that requires adherence to a matrix of very specific assertions, paraded as moral necessities, opposition to which is declared to be inherently illegitimate.

As economist Glenn Loury and linguist John McWhorter have pointed out, the way racist! is currently being bandied about is much the same as previous uses of witch!. I would add in the examples of heretic!, infidel! and counter-revolutionary!. They are all ways of saying “evil and so not-legitimate”.

Even in its relatively mild forms, the politics of de-legitimising advantages the anywheres and disadvantages the somewheres.

Once the de-legitimising dynamic starts, however, it has no natural stopping point. On the contrary, it has an inherent tendency to spiral towards violence, as it empowers the virtuous to take any “necessary” actions to block those designated as evil and illegitimate.

Multiculturalism as cultural marker

In the struggle between the somewhere politics of local connection and the anywhere politics of elite networks, the shift in migration policy from assimilation to multiculturalism was a major cultural milestone.

The flood of new people into a local area can obviously break up local connections. The local connections that working folk in particular rely for various forms of social protection and ability to organise for common interests. The policy of assimilation was the implicit promise that newcomers would be brought in at a sufficiently low rate, from sufficiently diverse origins, and with strong expectations of “fitting in”, so as to minimise the disruption of local connections, either in their local communities or their workplaces.

While working-class concerns were still dominant in centre-left politics, migration was tied with assimilation.

With the postwar expansion of higher education, the number and reach of university-educated possessors of human-and-cultural capital steadily expanded. These were elite-network anywheres, not local-connection somewheres. Moreover, the social position of the anywheres is improved if their elite-network politics trumps local-connection politics.

As possessors of capital, anywheres generally get significantly more economic benefit from migration than do providers of labour. Migrants are much less likely to directly compete with anywheres (as anywhere skills are much more likely to be niche or otherwise remain relatively scarce). Generally migrants increase the demand for anywhere services/return on their capital (and do so whether or not the migrants work). The downward pressure on labour incomes increases access to goods and services by making them cheaper. An effect that is magnified, as anywheres have higher incomes.

So, on one hand, anywheres disproportionately benefit from migration. On the other, the disruption of local connections not only does not adversely affect them, it increases the relative power of their networks as against the politics of local connections.

It is not hard to see that anywheres will tend to be very pro-migration and not only indifferent to the costs of large-scale migration for local connections, but actually benefit from that disruption. It is even better if these effects can also be turned into a status play: such as getting a sense of moral prestige from one’s support of migration.

We see here a social selection opportunity laid out before us. A social selection opportunity that was, indeed, fulfilled.

Enter multiculturalism. (Or, as it has since become, diversity-inclusion-equity.)

Whereas the implicit promise of assimilation was that local connections would not be seriously disrupted, multiculturalism made no such promise. On the contrary, it rules any complaint about the newcomers not “fitting in” out of court. Their ability to do their own things in their own ways becomes sacrosanct. If newcomers come in in large numbers, if they stick to their own, that is just a wonderful contribution to cultural diversity, it being hard to maintain a culture in a new land without plenty of specific connections. And any complaints are clearly motivated by nothing more than racism and xenophobia.

Multiculturalism (and, in its expanded version, diversity-inclusion-equity) is more or less perfect anywhere politics. It serves anywhere economic interests. It serves their status interests — it being what good-and-smart people support and so shows their moral goodness. It breaks up local connection politics and elevates elite-network politics, not merely by relatively advantaging elite-network politics but by actively supporting and empowering such politics.

How so? By creating a multicultural bureaucracies, multicultural advocacy groups and multicultural political networks. (All now re-packaged as diversity bureaucracies, diversity advocacy groups, diversity training firms and diversity political networks.) All of them providing jobs, status and institutional power to the anywheres and their networks. A process nicely documented by political writer Ben Cobley in his book The Tribe.

Multiculturalism is an imperial ideology. It is so in two sense. First, because it can expand into almost any institutional or organisational space. As its expanded version, diversity, inclusion and equity, is currently demonstrating.

But multiculturalism is also an imperial ideology in a much more direct sense. All empires are, in one sense or another, multicultural. They are all diverse. It is inherent tendency of empire. It increases the number of subjects, it divides subjects into competing groups and generates jobs for imperial officials in managing those divisions.

When the British Empire imported Tamils into what is now Sri Lanka and Indians into East Africa, the West Indies, South Africa and Fiji, this was justified on the grounds that the newcomers would increase local commerce, local economic activity. Which they did. But scholars since have had no problem identifying that it also served imperial control by generating divide-and-dominate politics, creating competing groups that the imperial authorities could “manage” and who were unlikely to combine against the imperial authorities.

Well quite. But what is different about doing the very same thing in Birmingham, London’s East End or any major American city?

That it is being done within a democracy instead of an empire? Except, as we can see, it can be an excellent mechanism for breaking up the effective bargaining power of local, especially working class, voters.

So, how different is it really?

In American cities we can see rioters burning down local businesses in the name of classic anywhere diversity and anti-racism political tropes. This is not the somewheres fighting back (though there are now some signs of that), this is the next stage in anywhere politics. (With folk who like rioting along for the ride.)

And the politics of control through controlling legitimacy are not the politics of free speech, free citizens or open political bargaining.

We have in various forms, experienced patterns like these before. A good hard look at the events and patterns of the Cultural Revolution, and the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution, is entirely appropriate.