Playing the victim

Here are four recent developments:

 - The University of Leicester is sacking academics because they are doing research in critical management studies. The Tories, however, are silent on this whilst at the same time condemning a handful of students who are unsuccessfully campaigning to get Eric Kaufman sacked from Birkbeck. They tolerate actual violations of academic freedom whilst deploring attempted ones.

 - Laurence Fox calls for the Leicester City players who carried a Palestinian flag after the FA Cup final to be hounded out.

 - Matthew Offord MP demands that the BBC not broadcast an edition of Desert Island Discs because of Alexei Sayle’s ant-Zionism.

 - Several people complained to the police about a tweet from an SNP councillor about the Eurovision song contest.

These are all examples of how the right (and bosses) are opposed to free speech. And of course there are countless other examples of Tory hostility to freedom such as their harsh immigration controls, clampdown on protests and erection of trade barriers within the UK.

And yet these attacks upon freedom come from people who claim to be champions of free speech and protectors of academic freedom. They present themselves as victims of repression, beleaguered by “wokesters”, “not allowed to say that these days”, and subject to no-platforming. Oliver Dowden, for example, recently whined about a “cancel culture whereby a small but vocal group of people claim to have the monopoly on virtue, and seek to bully those who dare to disagree.” In this, way, as Will Davies said:

 A reader of the Times or the Daily Mail can convince themselves that they are a marginalised minority.

It’s not just in the context of free speech that the right makes this pretence. They also claim to be victims of “EU bullies”.

This is strange. Traditionally, political movements and politicians have wanted to project power: think of things as otherwise diverse as the Nuremberg rallies; Thatcher rejoicing in the nickname “the iron lady”; the classical Marxian hope that the working class would grow strong enough to overthrow capitalism; Black Power; gay pride; Blair and Brown’s endless talk of “strong leadership”; or leftists boasting of the number of people on large demos. What we have here is the exact opposite – a claim to weakness by those who in fact are in power.  We have Harry Flashmans masquerading as Tom Brown.

What’s going on here?

In part, it’s that old saying: “when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” As Dawn Foster says, the right think free speech means the right not to be criticized. They are perturbed to find previously marginalized people and perspectives challenging their own viewpoint and their historical myths.

More troubling for them is the sense that these challenges are the shape of things to come. The right’s voting base is greying and dying whilst the future will be that of immaterial workers and graduates sympathetic to socialism; Tories are less rooted in statecraft and with the elite than they used to be; and the party has lost serious intellectual foundations (Thatcher had Popper, Hayek and Friedman: who has Johnson got?). Of course, there right are in power now, but this power is brittle.

And its pretence of victimhood serves to shore up such power. It effaces inequalities. Men can pretend they are oppressed by feminism and white people by “critical race studies”, thereby denying the realities of gender and racial inequality. 

And, of course, class inequality. The idea that privileged people are being bullied by wokesters and eurocrats has allowed public schoolboys like Johnson and Farage to pretend to be men of the people – even though the latter is so weird he doesn’t listen to music or watch TV. The revolt against elites has merely facilitated the rise of another elite.

The art of bourgeois politics has of course always been to hide the true nature of inequality. What is remarkable is just how many ways those in power have of performing this trick.

Comments

[Allan]

There may be some points in here that resonate but it's a little ... meandering and ultimately ineffective.

Many of the last posts have bemoaned the power or inclination of the wealthy to fool the rest. I think that by concentrating on this end of the issue you inadvertently reinforce feelings of powerlessness against these activities by the powerful and wealthy.

How about concentrating on the other end of the issue more? How about making simple, clear points that will help everyone be less susceptible to being conned, to be less likely to be hoodwinked? The only surefire way of helping anyone resist lies, bullshit and propaganda is to show them in action. Individually, forensically and incontrovertibly.

In short, 'don't tell me in abstract terms, show me in reality. Give me a worked example.'

That might be more meaty and forceful and ultimately more worthwhile for you.

[Nanikore]

Interesting piece. One of the interesting questions is why do the genuinely disadvantaged go along with it? They seem to be more disturbed by inflated claims about 'woke", human rights campaigners, benefit claimants, and obsessed with the evils of political correctness than what you would think would be there real enemies: Goldman Sachs bankers and ex-public school boys that take advantage of the scarcity of capital - especially land.

Or perhaps these are not the view of the genuinely disadvantaged and such people are so alienated they don't take part in the political system at all? Apparently most Brexit voters, and Tory voters in red-wall seats, were house-owners.

[Patrick Kirk]

https://nautil.us/issue/99/universality/why-people-feel-like-victims

It may be that this cult of victimhood is best treated as a mental disorder.

[jim]

Well, CMS at Leicester has been in trouble for a while. I doubt the problem is the wicked old Tories but simply the sort of student who signs up for a Biz Studies course does not see CMS as a route to a £100K+ job. Quite the opposite. Not surprising it gets the chop, it does not attract paying students. CMS may have some value but not to business students who want to make money.

Regretably the days of hardworking students living cheaply on a grant and taught by obscure but brilliant tutors for the sake of pure learning seem to be over. Up or out is the name of the game.

As for Mr Offord, well, a classic social climber and on the Friends of Israel ctte so duty bound to whine about Alexei Sayle. What he's paid for, he doesn't mean it and no one takes any notice. Purely for form's sake. We have plenty of professional whiners on all sides of politics, mostly to be ignored. Nice work for the £80K+ workers, whining is a major industry.

I agree this is all out of the victimhood playbook but you can hardly blame the Tories for playing the game. The pity is that this sort of playbook is not publicised more widely and its tropes more widely explained and ridiculed. 'Your call is important to us......', "XYZ Council takes all matters of PQR seriously and .....". And so on ad nauseam. There must be armies of lawyers turning this sort of guff.

Perhaps Labour could shoot the Tory's fox more often and point out and ridicule the way the political publicity game is played. But spoiling the game has its costs.

[Guano]

Brexit was all about playing the victim. Sets of EU rules and regulations that Tory UK governments had agreed to (and in some cases written) were said to have been imposed on the UK by an unaccountable EU elite. Then when the EU said that the UK couldn't continue to trade and cooperate in the same way after opting out of the rules, the Brexiteers claimed once again that the EU was victimising them.

The Right do it as a tactic because it works - they get very little push-back against it from other political parties or the centrist media. It allows them to get away with a lot with little scrutiny.

[georgesdelatour]

@Guano

The CAP and the CFP were two of the most resented EEC/EU policies in the UK. Both were part of the Acquis Communautaire; created before the UK joined, therefore effectively impossible for the UK to amend. The CFP was created mere hours before the UK application to join was received in 1970, specifically to prevent the UK having any future veto over fishing policy.

The other policies which were deeply unpopular were connected to the Maastricht Treaty - the treaty which transformed the EEC into the EU. If the British people been asked to approve the treaty in a referendum, they would almost certainly have rejected it. John Major knew this. That’s why he threatened Tory rebels that, if they didn’t pass the Treaty, he would call a General Election and lose it.

[Impressionist]

georgesdlatour.
How lucky, then, that having probably made UK fishers worse off already , we are now in a postion to choose freely to make a trade deal with Australia which could make our farmers worse off too, not to mention choosing to sign up to an ISDS scheme which will allow companies to sue the UK for projected loss of profits which might result from our government, say, reducing inequality by establishing a living minimum wage, or by refusing to permit the proposed Cumbria coal mine. Lucky us indeed!

[Ralph Musgrave]

A truly pathetic attempt by Chris Dillow to push the lie which now comes from lefties every other day, namely that the right is as keen on censorship as the left. First, having looked at the Leicester University article on “Critical Management Studies” it’s far from clear to me that CMS is either left or right wing.

Second, as to Lawrence Fox, he’s a non-entity: hardly representative of the political right in the same way as a Tory MP might be.

Third, a number of unnamed people objected to a Tweet by an SNP politician saying it’s OK to hate the UK. Well so what? Promotion of hate is wrong isn't it?

But congratulations to Chris Dillow and other lefties currently trying to push the lie that the right is as keen on censorship as the left: they’ve obviously learned from Jospeh Goebbles who said “Always accuse the other side of that of which you yourself are most guilty.”

[Nanikore]

Georgesdlatour, Maastricht was an obsession of a section of a small, but noisy group in the Tory party. It was of little interest to most people. The EU became an issue when immigration became a prime issue. That was in the late 2000s/early 2010s. By this time immigration trumped the economy as their main concern; incredible when you consider this was shortly following a major financial crisis. But that is an indication of its scale by historical standards, especially labour flows (not refugees) that started from 1998. Once an accumulated level was reached it quickly broke out as a political issue. Add to this the already adverse economic conditions facing labour and the issue was toxic.

The short answer to the cause of Brexit was overly hasty eastern enlargement and the pace and poor management of the resulting labour inflows.

https://www.res.org.uk/resources-page/on-the-causes-of-brexit--how-migration-from-eastern-europe-contributed-to-the-rise-of-uk-euroscepticism.html

[Paulc156]

RM thinks censorship is a thing done by the left to the right. And he's hopping mad that the author points out that it ain't neccesarily so. Quelle surprise!

Certainly the cancel culture claims here in the UK are a bit of a misnomer at the very least they are exaggerated. Two few folks have been cancelled for a start!

https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/2020/07/cancel-culture-does-not-exist

Glen Grenwald makes the following point back in January:
"Censorship never was a left-wing tactic. Opposing censorship was never the hallmark of right-wing values. And censorship is never aimed at one ideology or the other, but at *dissent* from the ruling class wherever it comes from."

Chomsky found likewise when he defended holocaust revisionist Faurisson from academic censorship knowing full well that same censorship would in turn be used against himself, Howard Zinn and others on the left.

RM is trying to reinvent the wheel...but in his own image. Calm down. You doth protest too much. ;)

https://www.nytimes.com/1981/01/01/world/chomsky-stirs-french-storm-in-a-demitasse.html

[Nanikore]

"that migration may have contributed to an up to 20% increase in disapproval of British EU
membership among the British electorate in the span of just 10 years."

Here's the link to the actual paper:

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/manage/publications/306-2016_becker_fetzer.pdf

[Blissex]

«The right’s voting base is greying and dying»

That is the usual delusional "woke" and "whig" conceit that voting for the right is based on "reactionary" identity-based attitudes by a bunch of old dinosaurs, so when they become extinct, "woke" "whig" youngsters will inevitable vote for LibDems and New Labour.

But actually most tory voters do so to protect the profits of their incumbency in some sort of asset, and when a "colonel Blimp"-alike dies, the heir(s) of his London flat or Home Counties semi-detached turn tory too, because they really don't want to lose those huge, life-changing, profits from housing cost inflation.

«whilst the future will be that of immaterial workers and graduates sympathetic to socialism»

The fashion of talking about "immaterial workers" is ridiculous, because all they are is white collar working class, which has always existed, and anyhow the manual working class has far from disappeared, being still around 40% of the workforce.

And many in the old working class, whether manual or white collar, are now effectively rentiers as they get the fat final salary pensions won for them by the socialdemocrats and the labor unions, and have turned tory because they want lower wages and lower taxes to make the most of their pensions, and higher housing costs as often they could afford to buy property when it was cheap thanks to the socialdemocrats and the labor unions.

As to the recent deluge of graduates, a lot of them will become property heirs, even if many are way underemployed, and many don't vote.

The hope for the left is that the number of winners from mass rentierism is shrinking, regardless of whether old reactionaries are dying, because property and shares are being concentrated in fewer hands, and the areas where many new jobs attract new tenants and new buyers are shrinking.

[Ralph Musgrave]

Paulc 156, Your claim that “few folks have been cancelled” is naïve in the extreme. Censors always make that claim. Muslims do not need to chop hundreds of blasphemers’ heads off or murder hundreds of cartoonists in order to clamp down on blasphemy or anti-Islam cartoons: just one murder a year will do, and other would be blasphemers and cartoonists get the message. Likewise, cancelling a speaker at a university and/or trying to end their career only needs to be done once a year, and others with the “wrong” political views get the message.

Re the Chomsky video, I can’t get sound on that, but our point that “Censorship never was a left wing tactic” is wrong in the sense that no one ever said it has been a left wing tactic for any length of time. I.e. the anti free speech element in the political left is NEW DEVELOPMENT.

Having been banned from Twitter about three times for expressing right wing views (once for making the obviously true statement that Muslims were responsible for 9/11), my personal experience is that censorship has been very much a left wing tactic in recent years, though Facebook and Twitter seem to have recently made the amazing discovery that wife beating, FGM, homophobia, head chopping etc are not very nice. I.e. they now allow criticism of Islam.

[MJW]

The whole schtick about the Tory base is dying off and will be overwhelmed by the new generation of progressives is questionable. People who currently fetishise 'woke' narrative will get older, will grow-up, and many will become more concerned with more tangible, pragmatic matters and the Conservatives will duly sweep many of them up. There will always be a cohort who buy into student union politics and there will always be an industry of professionals marketing suitably 'wokish' stuff to them, but who falls into that market is constantly churning as age and the real world takes it toll.

[ltr]

Musgrave:

Muslims do not need to...

[ What a vile racist, simply disgusting. ]

[rsm]

Nanikore said: "... Goldman Sachs bankers and ex-public school boys that take advantage of the scarcity of capital - especially land."

GS securitizes land and sells the contracts, thus profiting without owning land itself. Weyerhauser owns land (some 11 million acres); but GS is a trillion-dollar company while Weyerhauser is only worth $16 billion or some 2% of GS, despite owning so much land.

Economists are too focused on "ground rent" and other stone age economic notions. Study finance!

Chris Dillow in the blog wrote about "the realities of gender and racial inequality." But these are ergodic realities. Individual white men get discriminated against when buying street drugs, for example. (The best public policy answer to this sort of inequality is drug legalization, of course. Drug dealers are fierce entrepreneurs ...)