There is a political movement that is slowly dying before our very eyes. It lives under a variety of names, but the phrase I use for it is Nice Right Liberalism. This is, in essence, like a souped-up version of the polite, soft-Right, intensely-relaxed-about-everything form of wet Toryism embodied by David Cameron – slightly more sceptical of the state, slightly more ‘Brexity’, slightly more willing to be called nasty names by the Guardian, but still firmly committed to remaining on mainstream ground. Think Daniel Hannan; think Rishi Sunak; think James Cleverly; think in the end, Boris Johnson.
Nice Right Liberalism stands for many things, but above all it is insistent on the idea that, deep down inside every human heart, there is a polite, well-meaning, privately educated British schoolboy waiting to burst out. Liberalism always and everywhere relies on the construction of a rational, reasonable, deracinated individual capable of functioning autonomously in the absence of a history, culture, religion or background – and this is always and everywhere totally fake. (As Roger Scruton once said, the vision of humanity espoused by Marx – driven ineluctably by class interests and conflict – is in its own way preferable to the liberal one, because at least Marx provided a description of human nature that could be plausibly believed.) The Nice Right iteration of liberalism, though, is especially fake, because it espouses human interoperability and objective reason while being transparently rooted in a particular worldview and mindset: that of a well-to-do, well-brought up boy who grew up in a pleasant, prosperous, orderly place, where people are generally tolerant, hard-working, considerate of one another and community-minded, and where social conflict is more or less unknown.
Nice Right Liberalism is dying because the Nice Right Liberals are simply not equipped, precisely by dint of their backgrounds, to understand that human beings are always rooted in a place, a culture, a context, an upbringing, a class, and a circumstance – and that this informs how they see the world. We are all of us now I think familiar with David Goodhart’s description of modern societies as being torn between a division between ‘somewheres’ and ‘anywheres’, but the quibble that I have always had with this argument is that even the so-called anywheres have a ‘somewhere’ – they emerge from a very specific background and class that forms their views just as strongly as do the cultural roots of the ‘somewheres’ proper. And it is precisely this background and class origin that leads them to the hyper-liberal positions they adopt, informed by an idea that all other human beings can be just as nice as them if only they could be persuaded to abandon their foolish deplorability.
If ever there was an advert for the argument that people are distinctly products of their environment and ineluctably shaped by the culture and society in which they were raised, it is the journalist Fraser Nelson – former editor of the Spectator and now a columnist for the Times. Fraser Nelson is, evidently, a very nice, bright, thoughtful and well-meaning man – precisely the kind of man any father would wish to have for a son-in-law. And his very niceness arises from the fact that he is veritably permeated by his background as a well brought-up, posh boy from a pleasant, small, safe and homogeneous town (Nairn, in the Scottish Highlands), who went to a good fee-paying boarding school and was raised in a church. These are precisely the conditions within which the liberal mindset – that is, why can’t we all just be reasonable and tolerant and non-hierarchical, and respect each other’s autonomy? – emerges, because it is precisely the conditions within which those impulses work and in which they originated. And it is no surprise then that Nelson is a thoroughgoing liberal above all else.
Nelson gained a little bit of, probably unwanted, attention towards the end of last year when he wrote an almost wince-inducingly naïve and tone deaf column in the Telegraph (shortly before jumping ship to the Times) about the wonderful future of multiculturalism that awaits Britain in the coming decades – his main evidence for this premise being that fabulously wealthy Premier League footballers seem to have no problem integrating and that the King’s coronation was a ‘multifaith’ event. This column was widely shared around the internet and pilloried on various grounds, but the kicker was really Nelson’s insistence that since “Britishness” is only a “a set of values that anyone can adopt”, there is absolutely no reason to be concerned about net migration figures of, say, a million a year, nor any reason to be anxious about whether all these people can successfully integrate into British society.
Nelson recently appeared on the popular Triggernometry podcast, where he was questioned by Konstantin Kisin about this column. You can watch the discussion below and make up your own mind – I think Kisin takes Nelson to the cleaners, and only refrains from going for the jugular out of politeness to his guest, but you can make up your own mind about that. The way he takes him to the cleaners, however, and the ground on which he does so, is especially instructive.
Nelson reveals in the conversation that in his view, although he does not say it in quite so many words, any relationship between ethnicity, culture and nationality is essentially a myth. National allegiance is basically like a middle-class person’s idea of what supporting a football team is like – you just choose a team and support it. If you, as a Scottish couple, go and live in Japan, for example, and have children there and raise them, then, hey presto!, they’re Japanese. Whereas, if you had gone to live in Egypt and had them there instead, they’d presumably be Arabs. It’s as simple as that – and therefore it’s the same thing for the English: somebody is English simply by dint of having been born and raised in England.
Nelson bases this assertion on a characteristically liberal idea: there’s not really any such thing as ethnic identity because we are all essentially mongrels anyway; the English nation has been forged by waves of immigration over the centuries (the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings, the Normans, etc.) so there is no meaningful sense in which you could say ‘Englishness’ has any sort of continuity; isn’t it terribly foolish and irrational to imagine that human beings should have to be tied to a tribe rather than being free to go and live where they wish?; and so on and so forth. The picture that he paints of British ethno-politics, if I can call it that, therefore, is one in which there is an overarching identity of ‘Britishness’ that defines certain ‘British values’ (tolerance, freedom, democracy, etc.), and then, underneath it, certain sub-identities (English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish) that are just thumbnail descriptions of where a person is from and which national sports teams they support.
The irony, of course, is completely lost on Nelson that it is precisely because he heralds from a very tolerant, liberal, relatively homogeneous background that he is able to say such things and hold such a worldview – thereby unwittingly proving precisely the opposite point to that he wishes to make: immigrants to any given society don’t necessarily subscribe to the ‘values’ of that society, nor raise their children to do so, and the result of that might be the undermining of precisely the ‘values’ which purportedly make the country what it is. If sufficient numbers of people who do not subscribe to ‘British values’ come to Britain, then is there a point at which ‘British values’ cease to be British? Nelson does not have a good answer to this and does not seem to have thought very hard about it (except in the sense that we should be more ‘robust’ about defending our values).
Kisin, though, emphasises precisely the right point in his questioning of Nelson, which is that, whatever Nice Right Liberals (Kisin obviously doesn’t use this phrase) might think, almost nobody anywhere in the world believes that the relationship between ethnicity, culture and nationality is a myth and that simply by being born and raised in a place a person automatically takes on the identity in question. Japanese people, for example, would in my experience (I know the country rather well) overwhelmingly reject the idea that just because a Scottish couple has a baby in Japan and raises it there the baby is Japanese. And that is true of everywhere a nation state, or anything like it, is thought to exist. If my wife and I were to go to live in, say, Norway and raise our children there, I don’t think it would be possible to say that my children are Norwegian – and I don’t think that the majority of Norwegians would say otherwise.
The reason why Kisin is right to emphasise this is that – hold on to your hats – the social constructionist vision of the world, i.e., that human social reality is created through shared, debated and negotiated understandings rather than emerging from empirical fact, is indisputably correct. That is to say, it does not matter whether ‘rationally’ it should be the case that if a child is born to Scottish parents in Japan and raised there then the child is Japanese. The point is that the Japanese understanding of Japaneseness says that the child in question is not Japanese. And for the purposes of determining who is, or isn’t, Japanese, we don’t care about empirical fact, precise measurements of DNA, the application of objective reason: we care about the only people whose opinions matter – that is, the Japanese themselves.
Ethnicity in other words is socially constructed. Nelson is obviously correct to point out that to speak of Englishness as an ethnicity has no real basis in genetics. (As a mongrel Scots-Irishman born in England I should know.) But we live in a world in which what is socially constructed (hard social constructivists would say this means every aspect of what we experience) is reality – we behave as thought there is a thing called ‘Englishness’, and it simply is not defined by just having been born and raised in England. It is something which is admittedly nebulous and fuzzy. But just because we can’t precisely define ‘Englishness’ does not mean that it does not exist – in the same way that, just because we can’t identify the precise millimetre at which we can say that somebody becomes ‘tall’, this doesn’t mean that we don’t know what being ‘tall’ is. Being ‘tall’ is socially constructed in that it is not a quality with an existence independent of social context – ‘tallness’ is not a law of nature – but that does not mean that it is not real.
Nelson, in other words, is living in a delusion in which an insistence on national identity beyond subscription to some vague set of values is a myth. It may be a myth, but since we live in myth and cannot escape from it, that is tantamount to saying that it is reality. And his delusion – this is the really important point – is itself rooted in a vision of the world which is socially constructed and fundamentally mythological: a world in which it is possible for people, through the power of objective reason, to simply subscribe to a set of values and thereby become ‘British’ – or in which said objective reason gets to determine who possesses, or does not possess, a particular nationality (for example, by determining that Englishness should just mean having been born and raised in England).
The problem with Nelson, and the other Nice Right Liberals across the piece, is in other words that they imagine that it is the deracinated individual who gets to determine social facts – when in fact it is the opposite way round: social facts determine the context within which an individual is situated. One can insist until one is blue in the face that English identity is all a lot of stuff and nonsense and that it has no objective reality. But that insistence is simply wrong, because English identity is a fact in the only sense in which it matters – it is a fact in the heads of the English. (And in the heads of the rest of the world too, for that matter.) And given that this is true, it is flatly false that one could simply add a million people from all over the world to the population of England each year and thereby produce more English people – it is just much, much more complicated than that.
The real tragedy of the Nice Right Liberals is that they are their own undoing – and that they are blind to the profoundly impotent, self-defeating nature of their own worldview. The fact of the matter is that liberalism itself in the pop-culture sense – what I earlier described as tolerance, respect for autonomy, rejection of hierarchy – emerges from a social and cultural context and milieu within which those values are rooted and can function.
It is not the case that any level of immigration whatsoever will threaten that; clearly, immigrants of any ethnicity can be integrated into a society, and are. But in the same way that if one were to add a million non-Japanese people to the population of Japan each year it would gradually change the values of that society, if we plan to continue adding hundreds of thousands of non-English people to the English population each year its values, the values from which liberalism itself sprang, will likewise change. In Fraser Nelson’s head this is a non-problem because there exists in the realm of ideas such as thing as ‘British values’ which transcend national boundaries and which anybody anywhere in the world can subscribe to. What I think is much more likely to be true is that ‘British values’ emerge from the cultural context of the sub-national entities beneath them, Englishness most of all, and that as Englishness deteriorates British values will deteriorate with it.
The New Right Liberals will in any case disappear long before this happens. In Milan Kundera’s Immortality there is a scene in which two men, who have hitherto imagined themselves to be friends, suddenly have a cataclysmic argument that reveals to each of them that their worldviews are completely incompatible. The first, Paul, presents a radio show at a radio station where the second, the Bear, is a programme director. Paul, a classic European liberal intellectual, is one day pontificating in the radio station’s cafeteria in a sophisticated way about the worthlessness of high culture, advocating instead an attitude of frivolity and an embracing of pop trash. And he has a carefully constructed argument supporting his position: European high culture, he exclaims, springs from the same origin as that which gave birth to all of the ills of the 20th century, and without it – with an embrace of mindless frivolity – tragedy can also itself be consigned to the dustbin of history. “High culture,” he ultimately declares,
is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor, only to be surpassed by his successor. Without this relay race called history there would be no European art and what characterises it: a longing for originality, a longing for change. Robespierre, Napoleon, Beethoven, Stalin, Picasso, they’re all runners in the relay race, they all belong in the same stadium.
And with the abandonment of high culture and the end of European intellectualism there will also be an end to all that is violent and conflictual: “Frivolity is a radical diet for weight reduction. Things will lose ninety percent of their meaning and will become light. In such a weightless environment fanaticism will disappear. War will become impossible.”
But the Bear has Paul’s number. He knows that his radio show will soon be cancelled. And he also knows that Paul’s own ability to indulge in intellectual flights of fancy rests precisely on the high culture which he so breezily and sarcastically dismisses. Having listened to this diatribe for long enough, he cuts Paul short. If high culture is coming to an end, the Bear says, it is only because of the failings of intellectuals themselves to defend their own heritage. He continues:
You remind me of the young men who supported the Nazis or communists not out of cowardice or out of opportunism but out of an excess of intelligence. For nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of nonthought. I experienced it with my own eyes and ears after the war, when intellectuals and artists rushed like a herd of cattle into the Communist Party, which soon proceeded to liquidate them systematically and with great pleasure. You are doing the same.
He ends with a flourish, telling Paul, “You are the brilliant ally of your own gravediggers.” An argument against high culture that is rooted in high culture does nothing but destroy itself and the position of the person making the argument – it ends nowhere but ruin.
Exactly the same thing is true of the New Right Liberals. An argument against the importance of national identity that itself emerges from a worldview, liberalism, that is embedded deeply within a national context and history does nothing but destroy itself, and ends nowhere but ruin.
But we can all I think recognise that, implicitly or explicitly, which is why the New Right Liberals are collapsing into complete irrelevance. We can all recognise that, as Kundera puts it in reference to Paul and the Bear, it is a “fairy tale” to imagine that “two men who deeply disagree with each other can still like each other”. As he goes on:
Perhaps they would like each other if they kept their opinions to themselves or if they only discussed them in a joking way and thus played down their significance… But once a quarrel breaks out, it’s too late.
That is the position in which the Right of politics in Britain now finds itself. The Nice Right Liberals and the actual conservatives were once able to like each other because they were able precisely to play down their differences. Now things have gotten serious and those differences are being revealed to be stark. We have entered, to come back to an earlier post, an era of regime politics – and regime politics is characterised by seriousness and struggle. In our current moment we seem to be learning that it is the actual conservatives who have the initiative and the impetus to win the emerging quarrel on the Right of politics. And the New Right Liberals therefore seem fated to vanish from the scene.
Dr David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. You can subscribe to his Substack – News From Uncibal – here.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.