Broken Men of the New Society, by Tanveer Ahmed.
The Left had its foundations on the valorisation of the working class in the twentieth century, but it has now abandoned them to some degree, and they now hold some of the most conservative social views of any group, particularly on race. Debates on racism are an area where the sneering at the working classes is most obvious. The representations of people attending patriotic protests are an obvious example. The protesters are depicted in tattooed, pierced splendour holding angry signs at racist rallies.
An accusation of racism is often veiled class-sneering, using Muslims and other ethnic groups as cover, evidence of French philosopher Pascal Bruckner’s observation that multiculturalism is sometimes the racism of the anti-racists. What progressive groups fail to realise is that by their expressions of concern for ethnic groups, and thereby separating themselves from the unsophisticated people who don’t express adequate sympathy, progressives are effectively clearing a space for themselves to enjoy the advantages of white privilege. …
No collective group or organisation, other than perhaps the football leagues, is actively representing the white working class. Race-based politics has helped entrench the resentment, for it has led the working class to view themselves as an aggrieved racial group left out in the cold. …
Economically the white working class have much in common with newly arrived immigrants, but they seldom have the same drive and determination to rise up the social ladder. The working class is perhaps now a holding bay for those transitioning to the middle class, with a portion falling through the cracks to take their place in the entrenched, welfare-dependent underclass. …
A British sociologist, Will Davies, writes that the Leave campaign slogan “Take Back Control” was ingenious because of the way people like Darryl felt. Their inner experience was one of what is known in psychology as “learned helplessness”, where sufferers feel like a rickety boat being tossed around in choppy waters. This diagnosis has traditionally been applied to survivors of trauma, particularly women subjected to long-term domestic violence. But in politics as used by Trump, the Leave campaign and to some extent Pauline Hanson, the slogan spoke directly to the inadequacy and embarrassment felt by the white working-class man and magnified by the sneering of the inner-city bourgeoisie. As Davies writes, what such voters crave more than anything else is “the dignity of being self-sufficient, not necessarily in a neo-liberal sense, but certainly in a communal, familial and fraternal sense”.
