How Did We Get Into This Mess?

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I was having a discussion with a friend of mine about political developments in Britain, America, and Europe, and I ended up outlining my theory of just how we managed to land ourselves with leaders who are completely inadequate to meet the challenges of this new and increasingly fraught century. I make no claims that any of this is wholly new, and/or original. However, I hope it will prove food for thought.

If you don’t mind, I’m going to approach the issue from a slightly odd direction. Bear with me a little.

I grew up in Morningside, Edinburgh. It was, at the time, a solidly middle-class district. It was not quite the Morningside of Maisie Comes to Morningside, and in hindsight that world was already fading away by the time I was born (1982), but it was still very much a middle-class place to live. The principal supermarket in the district was Safeway, which was principally aimed at middle-class shoppers, and there were plenty of other shops, including proper butchers, fishmongers, and a bunch of other shops that have largely vanished from British streets. The majority of the people who lived there were fairly conventional families, the father would work while the mother stayed home and took care of the kids. It was, by and large, a decent place to live. Maisie would have recognised it, I think. I recall people who could easily have passed for Maisie’s granny (solidly middle-class) and her neighbour Mrs McKitty (also middle-class, but with pretensions to upper class).

(Morningside in 1986. I was 4.)

Times change, and Morningside changed too.

Morningside is still a nice place to live, but it is not an easy place to enter. Buying a house in Morningside and the surrounding area (Greenbank, Craiglockhart, Blackford) is incredibly expensive. A first floor flat I checked out was priced at half a million pounds, a full sized house could easily go for a million. Renting is expensive too, even if you look for a very small apartment. And if you manage to purchase or rent a place in Morningside, you will have to pay the yearly council tax, which is also fairly steep. A small flat in Morningside has a council tax bill around £2000. Not cheap!

There are other costs too. There are only three supermarkets within walking distance, all small and aimed at the upper classes. Waitrose is the only one that has any parking space (it used to be Safeway) and it also happens to be the most expensive of the three. If you happen to want to go to a bigger supermarket, you are dependent on a car or ordering groceries online: the former runs into the problem of parking space (very limited in Morningside) and the latter is, of course, expensive. The buses are fairly good, to be fair, but large parts of Morningside and the surrounding area have very limited services. Taxis are better, of course, but again … expensive.

The point I’m trying to make here is that if you want to live in somewhere like Morningside, you had better have a great deal of money and/or reasonable prospects for getting it.

This tends to limit just who can move into Morningside. The vast majority of the current population are reasonably well off. The ones who aren’t are dependent on those who are. The population is largely white and those who are not are also pretty well off. Why discriminate against skin colour when you can discriminate on the grounds of wealth?

It is fundamentally wrong to discriminate on the grounds of race, religion, sexual orientation or anything else along those lines. To have explicit laws designed to block people who happened to have the wrong skin colour, or religion, or sexual orientation, or whatever, is wrong. The Jim Crow era in America was shameful because it was openly explicit discrimination, a system that made it hard for any sort of social integration to take place before it was too late. But you don’t need Jim Crow to keep out the riffraff. You can just make the cost of living there too high for the poor to bear.

Intentionally or not, that is what has been happening in upper-class districts for decades. The rich get to live in safety, all the while telling themselves they are not actually discriminating. The poor suffer what they must.

This has interesting effects on the psyche of the people living there. Because they live in very law-abiding areas, they have a tendency to assume that everyone is law-abiding. Because they live in areas with very good services, they tend to assume that good services are available everywhere. Because they live in high-trust areas, they have no idea what it is like to live in a low-trust area. Because they send their kids to private schools, they don’t have to deal with problems of public schools. Because most of the ethnic minority population they have to deal with are upper-class themselves, they don’t know what is like to deal with people who have a very different idea of how the world should work, mediaeval ideas about the proper place and dress of woman, and a bunch of ideas that have no place in civilised society. Because they don’t have to deal with the downsides, they preach the virtues of diversity and multiculturalism, reaping the rewards while others suffer the consequences.

As a general rule, the more expensive the district (directly or indirectly) the more disconnected from reality its inhabitants are. If you talk to these people, you will discover they have very strange ideas of how the world works. They don’t realise that being poor is expensive. They don’t understand the problems caused by having no fixed abode. They see simple solutions because, in their world, they have everything they need to actually make those solutions work. And while some of them will acknowledge their privilege, and this comic shows it perfectly, very few of them will ever give it up.

Worse, because they are so disconnected from reality, they tend to believe stereotypes that are rarely, if ever, grounded in reality.(Often drawn from television.) Far too many upper-class people in Britain suffer from Oikophobia, regarding the working class as barely civilised animals and/or children rather than people in their own right. The level of contempt and scorn they feel for the working class is difficult to exaggerate, even amongst those who claim to be working on the working class’s behalf. Any expression of working class unrest is treated as a grievous threat, regardless of the cause. This is hardly a new problem in British history, but it has gotten a great deal worse as modern society destroys all the old certainties of life and opportunities for advancement are sharply curtailed. At the same time, they often believe that immigrants are always innocent, the victims of racism and xenophobia, and don’t realise just how much damage immigration has done to the working class.

This sort of problem is not unknown. Ambassadors have a tendency to miss signs of real trouble in unstable host countries. Why? Because they are wined and dined by the ruling class, and kept well away from trouble spots, they are left to believe that they understand what is really going on even though they don’t. They are therefore caught by surprise when all hell breaks loose.

What does this have to do with Britain, America, and Europe?

Our leadership comes from these people. They attend the same schools, speak the same lingo, consciously or not, they scratch each other’s back. Like just about every social group worth mentioning, the elite finds comfort in the familiar and excludes, sometimes subtly and sometimes overtly, everyone who does not fit into their pattern. Worse, they draw their lessons from fiction because they lack the experience to understand the limits of fiction. It was highly amusing to watch Keir Starmer hold up Adolescence as some kind of insight into the crisis of young teenage boys/men, and snicker at his demands that the Tory leader watch the series, but it was funny in a very sad way. It was all too apparent, even at the time, that Starmer and Labour would do everything to address the crisis apart from methods that might actually work.

They are not evil in the sense they commit conscious acts of evil, but their lack of self-awareness and empathy for those less fortunate than themselves ensures they do a great deal of damage quite by accident. Not being short of money, they fail to realise that others are struggling to survive: not being professionally or personally threatened by immigrants, illegal or otherwise, they fail to recognise the challenges faced by others who are professionally or personally threatened. Not having to confront unpleasant realities headlong, they are able to dismiss dissidents as bigots and something-phobes because, given their lack of awareness of the world around them, this actually appears to make a certain amount of sense.

The problem is actually worse in America, where a sizeable number of politicians are so old that whatever life experience they have of being outside politics is heavily outdated. It is easy for someone born and bred in the 60s to hold forth about the ease of job-hunting, homeownership, and a number of other factors (such as racial and ethnic tensions); harder for them to realise that the realities of their childhood and early adulthood no longer exist. Indeed, many such politicians and public figures are unwilling to acknowledge that the time has come for them to take a bow and step off the stage, clearing room for younger more grounded politicians. This tends to store up trouble for the future. Ruth Bader Ginsburg's decision to remain on the Supreme Court, for example, despite pleas from Democratic politicians smart enough to realise that there was no way to guarantee Ginsburg would remain in office until the next Democratic President was elected, ensured that her successor would be nominated by Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

For an alternate approach to the problem of elite disconnection, consider Peggy McIntosh's White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.

She lists fifty examples of white privilege she experiences in her daily life. These privileges may be true for her. They are not true for the vast majority of white men. The vast majority of her examples simply don’t apply to me, let alone someone much less fortunate. The idea that I can find a publisher for anything I might happen to write, for example, is absurd. The points she outlines are not white privilege, in any real sense of the word, but class privilege. It does not seem to occur to her that anyone outside academia, or writing on a topic a little less hot than white privilege, would be extremely lucky to find a publisher. There would certainly be no guarantees. This is the same sort of disconnect that breeds a lack of empathy for less well off white people, that in turn fuels hatred and resentment from those who feel burned and dismissed by elite scorn.

If you tell people who are not privileged, or at least don’t feel they are privileged, that they are privileged, you should not be surprised when they roll their eyes and you as much as possible. Why shouldn’t they? You’re talking nonsense. Their experience tells them so.

This is one of the points when I think privilege discourse actually has a point, if not one most of the activists would consider discussing. If you grew up in a wealthy and safe community, it is easy to forget (if you ever knew) what it is like to grow up in a community that is poor and extremely unsafe. If your schools are well funded and this behaving children receive therapy or simply expelled when they go too far, you will never know what is like to go to a school that isn’t well funded and the misbehaving children cannot be given any sort of realistic punishment or even expelled. If your experiences of ethnic minorities are wealthy people like yourself or servants, neither having any real reason to rock the boat, you don’t know what it can be like to grow up in an area blighted by ethnic tension and elite unconcern. If you have no reason to feel threatened or to panic, you will not empathise with people who really do feel threatened.

And if you have no real-life experience of the world outside your bubble, your policies will be, at best, severely misguided.

Far much of our modern day politics are dominated by people who believe that their truth is reality, that they can pretend everything is normal and that if they silence all dissent they can keep pretending for the rest of time. This has provoked a savage counter reaction in which governments are no longer given the benefit of the doubt, elite news media is regarded with extreme suspicion and the slightest mistake, no matter how innocent, taken as absolute proof the media is lying. Again.

I’d like to close this essay with an observation.

I don’t think very highly of David Hogg, for a number of reasons. But he was quite right to argue that the Democratic Party needs new blood in the wake of Donald Trump’s decisive victory last year. Far too many Democrats have lost touch with the voters, to the point that even Trump seems a preferable candidate. But the crux of the problem is that the elite do not want to give up their power, even though it is the only way to bring in fresh blood and get back in touch with the voters. This is true of almost all pre-revolutionary eras. The elite, however defined, will do everything in their power to solve the problems facing the country, except giving up the power that is the cause of their problems. And by refusing to do so, they undermine and destroy what little is left of their credibility.

And then they act surprised when they can no longer hide from the truth. They are hated. They sowed the wind and now the whirlwind will tear them apart. And no one gives them the benefit of the doubt.

Why should they?