Over the course of this Autumn, I’m going to set out some of the areas and arguments that I will be writing about while conducting my Leverhulme Trust funded project, ‘Self-Reflexivity, Class Consciousness, Culture Wars and Social Change in Britain’. One of my aims with the project is to relate the territorial break-up of Britain, as originally outlined by Tom Nairn in the 1970s, with a wider social, cultural and psychological break-up. I will have more to say about this over the coming weeks but a recent opinion column in the New York Times provides a nice opportunity for briefly noting how the devolution settlement within Britain, part of the above-mentioned territorial break-up, has become dragged into the ‘Culture Wars’. The article in question, by conservative columnist Ross Douthat, appeared on 6th September: ‘How America Made James Bond “Woke”’. The immediate point of reference is the ‘latest Bond book’, On His Majesty’s Secret Service by Charlie Higson, which has attracted some criticism in the right-wing British press. For example, Niall Gooch fulminated in the Spectator about ‘The terribleness of a progressive Bond’, a headline with the added tag that ‘The new Bond book has turned 007 into a Centrist Dad’. Amusing while the discussion of Bond is, Douthat’s wider point is that:
the progressive Bond also usefully illustrates an interesting feature of contemporary politics in the English-speaking world. It isn’t just that American progressivism supplies an ideological lingua franca that extends across the Anglosphere, such that what we call wokeness naturally influences the fictional MI6 no less than the real C.I.A. It’s that forms of progressivism that originated in the United States, under specific American conditions, can seem more potent among our English-speaking friends and neighbors than they do in America itself.
Actually, it is not clear from Douthat’s fleeting description what happens in the Bond novel that shows the influence of American progressivism, unless we assume that the default state of British politics without American influence would be old-school conservativism (the implication being that all progressivism is inherently American?). The point is that, for Douthat, the novel provides a handy peg to illustrate the apparent susceptibility of the English-speaking world to American progressivism, which chimes with his experience on recent visits to Canada and Britain. Of the latter, he notes: ‘In British conversations, the talk was all about how elections don’t have consequences and how notional conservative rule has done nothing to halt the resilience of progressive biases in government and the advance of American-style wokeness in the culture’. One wonders about what kind of people Douthat was talking to, if they believed that the Government should be able to control culture.
Moreover, his article is short of actual examples, apart from the factually inaccurate claim that ‘England’s deeply homogeneous history — well, since 1066, at least’ is being rewritten in schools ‘into an American-style nation-of-immigrants narrative’. But the fun really begins when he starts listing the reasons that he feels explain why the margins are absorbing the centre’s progressive discourse: ‘The first is a general tendency of provincial leaders to go overboard in establishing their solidarity and identification with the elites of the imperial core. Both Ottawa and London can feel like provincial capitals within the American imperium…’ Really!?! The second is that both ‘the British Isles’ (an interesting designation, which allows Ireland to be lumped into the story too) and Canada have lapsed further into secularisation than the Christian centre. While ‘the third point is that smaller countries with smaller elites can find it easier to enforce ideological conformity than countries that are more sprawling and diverse’.
This brings us to the part of the column that is of particular interest to thinking about the break-up of Britain in relation to culture wars. After claiming that the British nations and Canada are more elitist and less meritocratic than the USA (this question of meritocracy and education is one that I will return to later this autumn), Douthat goes on to argue that the elites of small countries (he means the ‘Celtic nations’ rather than Britain or Canada) are particularly susceptible to capture by ascendant ideologies:
A recent essay by the Cardiff academic Thomas Prosser makes a related point about other small Celtic polities, noting that Scotland and Wales, as well as Ireland, have governments that are more progressive than their voters, a pattern he attributes to the way that ascendant ideologies (neoliberalism in the 1990s and woke progressivism now) can sometimes achieve a kind of full elite “capture” more easily in smaller countries.
Prosser’s substack essay, ‘Why are the Celtic nations so progressive?’, begins:
To an unusual degree, governments in Celtic nations (Ireland, Scotland and Wales) are more progressive than Celtic voters. Relevant measures reflect social justice ideology – recently, the Irish hate speech law has been controversial – yet have a wider basis than social justice ideology, the Welsh government regulating speeding and plastic bag use. This phenomenon is fascinating, shedding light on divisions between elites and voters which occur across the West.
So, to be clear, the only specific example given of ‘evidence’ underpinning Douthat’s claims of British elites being captured by American woke ideology is Welsh legislation on ‘speeding and plastic bag use’. In what way is this ‘policy capture’, as both Douthat and Prosser suggest? What is the evidence that governments in ‘Celtic nations’ are more progressive than ‘Celtic voters’? Given that the voters elect the governments, the real problem here seems to be with democracy enabling social change. The only American influence on the UK displayed in any of this is an attempt by the political Right to import the ‘anti-woke’ tactics deployed by those like Trump and De Santis in order to contest the legitimacy of such democratic decisions. Obviously, these types of articles are not worth devoting much energy to rebutting, reliant as they are on innuendo rather than anything approaching reasoned argument. However, their existence testifies to the existence of a terrain of difference which creates an audience for this type of innuendo. My working hypothesis is that the mechanisms of self-reflexivity maintaining that audience of people – who, for example, are prepared to see a reduced speeding limit or the concept of ‘the 15-minute city’ as manifesting the threat of woke ideology – are just as complex as the mechanisms of self-reflexivity that open people to progressive outlooks. Moreover, I think the differentiation in self-reflexivity precedes the ideology, or, in other words, these differences were not directly created by competing ideologies. The ideologies seem to explain the differences, but they don’t. Therefore, a lot of existing political discourse isn’t particularly helpful to us in trying to understand social change in Britain. Over the next few weeks, I intend to try and map out some of that ongoing social change in order to understand how and why it is being framed in terms of culture war, beginning with the questions of devolution, independence and the territorial break-up of Britain.
Social Humanities 