In 1956, the radical American sociologist C Wright Mills wrote about what he called, in the title of a book, The Power Elite. America’s elite, he observed, forms a “compact social and psychological entity” that “towers over the underlying population of clerks and wage earners” and whose “values” are “differentiated” from those of the “lower classes”. “All their sons and daughters,” he added, “go to college, often after private schools; then they marry one another… After they are well married, they come to possess, to occupy, to decide.”
Seven decades later, the British political scientist Matthew Goodwin similarly paints, in his new book Values, Voice and Virtue, a picture of “the new elite” in Britain. The brushstrokes are familiar, drawing on the work of communitarian and “post-liberal” thinkers of recent years. Britain has “a new dominant class” that has captured its institutions and imposes its “radically progressive cultural values” on the rest of the nation, adrift as it is from the conservative instincts of the majority.
In its details, it’s a portrait that Mills would recognise. “Their very identity as high-flying, highly accomplished graduates of elite institutions,” Goodwin observes, “gives them a profoundly important and highly collective sense of unity” and “shapes their values and collective loyalties”. This sense of collective identity is “strengthened by their social networks, which are usually filled with other elite graduates from other elite universities. More often than not, people from the new graduate elite marry other members of the graduate elite.”
That there are such echoes across the decades should not surprise us. The image of a distinct, new elite, defined by its education and values, and standing over the common people, has a long history, popping up throughout the 20th century. The roots of the contemporary debate about the new elite lie in the 1970s. The late Barbara Ehrenreich published with her husband, John, an essay in 1977 in which they coined the term “professional-managerial class” (PMC). There had developed, they argued, a new class of college-educated professionals, from engineers and middle managers to social workers and culture producers, that was distinct from the middle class of old but essential to the functioning of capitalism. The Ehrenreichs were hopeful that this class could be mobilised for progressive causes. They warned, however, that it could also give rise to “what may at first sight seem to be a contradiction in terms: anti-working class radicalism”.
And that, many on the left have argued in recent years, is just what has happened. One of the most uncompromising analyses of “anti-working class radicalism” came in the American academic Catherine Liu’s acerbic tract, Virtue Hoarders.
Drawing on the Ehrenreichs’ work, Liu argues that the PMC, ensconced in universities and thinktanks and NGOs, has turned into an elite that “finds in its particular tastes and cultural proclivities the justification for its unshakable sense of superiority to ordinary working-class people”; one that “prefers obscurantism, balkanization, and management of interest groups to a transformative reimagining of the social order”. They are “virtue hoarders” because of their desire to accumulate virtue as a means of enhancing self-worth. And they are in many ways synonymous with Goodwin’s “new elite”.
Liu’s portrait of the PMC is far more astringent and over-the-top than anything Goodwin has produced. Yet, it is also more realistic. Liu does not pretend that the virtue hoarders constitute a new ruling class. As a supporter of Bernie Sanders, what provokes her ire is that they stand in the way of real social change, having abandoned class politics for what she calls “performative transgression”. And where Goodwin argues that the “radical woke” capture of society lies at “the roots of today’s more turbulent politics”, Liu understands that the new elite is the product, not the cause, of political turbulence, the consequence of the evisceration of mass movements for social change.
For Goodwin, though, the new elite are the “people who really run Britain”, having largely displaced the old ruling class of “upper-class aristocrats, landowners and industrialists”. The idea that Gary Lineker or the US-based British journalist Mehdi Hasan or Sam Freedman, a fellow at the Institute for Government thinktank (all of whom Goodwin has namechecked as key members of the new elite) shape our lives more than Rishi Sunak or Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England is, to put it politely, stretching credulity. Similarly, the suggestion that those who have been responsible for austerity, anti-trade union laws and the imposition of real-terms wage cuts on nurses and railway workers are not the ones who really have power over our lives is bafflingly myopic. It exposes the postliberal concern for the working class as being as performative as the antiracism of the “new elite”.
It is true that a new generation of thinkers and activists has helped consolidate a culture more given to identitarian thinking and more censorious in its outlook (though also one that is less racist, more accepting of women’s equality and more welcoming of gay people). To confuse that, however, with the claim that it constitutes the new ruling class is to have a weak understanding of how power works and where it lies.
Liberals in the media, thinktanks and universities certainly help shape the national conversation. But, again, the issue is not nearly as straightforward as Goodwin suggests. He points to studies showing that most journalists are left wing. Yet, the media coverage of, and national conversation about, say, “stop the boats” policy or the Rwanda scheme has hardly been “left wing”. On the contrary, language once confined to the far right is now casually exploited by mainstream commentators. One could plausibly argue that someone like Goodwin himself shapes public debate more than most of the “new elite” to whom he points.
A decade ago, Goodwin warned of voters being pulled in a reactionary direction by “a toxic and – to be frank – nasty group of opinion-makers in our society who appear to relish sowing the seeds of xenophobia, protest and division”, through their exploitation of the immigration issue. Today, Goodwin welcomes the Rwanda deportation scheme and advises the Tories to raise “the salience of cultural issues”. In that shift we can see how too great an obsession with the “new elite”, and too little acknowledgment of the real sources of social and economic power, creates a pull towards a form of politics that the earlier Goodwin would have recognised as “toxic”.
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
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