Varför studerar så få woke-ideologin, Matt Goodwin?

Jag intervjuade bokaktuelle Matthew Goodwin om ställningarna i kulturkriget i Storbritannien. Vinner woke? Hur mår motståndsrörelsen? Och vad kan vi i Sverige lära av det som sker där?

Mar 16, 2023

I lördags pratade jag med Matthew Goodwin i podden om hans kommande bok Values, Voice and Virtue (Penguin 2023). Samtalade handlade mycket om kulturrevolutionen vi ofta kallar woke – och dess motreaktion. Boken fokuserar på Storbritannien men situationen är till stor del densamma här i Sverige.

Jag har börjat transkribera fler intervjuer (igen), och tyckte att den här passade bra för det, eftersom jag vet att inte alla uppskattar att lyssna på engelskspråkiga poddar. Det blir fler transkriberingar, men hör gärna av er om ni uppskattar det. Då vet jag att det är något jag ska fortsätta med.

En sista sak. Det har kommit till min kännedom att det finns en teknisk bugg i integreringen mellan Substack och Stripe (som sköter betalningarna), vilket försvårat för en del av er som velat bli prenumeranter. Jag har kontakt med dem om detta och hoppas att de löser det snart. Men om ni hellre vill använda Swish, Plus- eller Bankgiro, så går det också bra. Då lägger jag till er manuellt som prenumeranter.

Märk insättningen med “Substack” och din mejladress. I dagsläget är det årsprenumeration och mecenatnivå som är lättast för mig att administrera på det viset.

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Welcome back Matthew Goodwin to Rak höger!

– Thank you for having me!

And nice to see you in Stockholm when you were here. We had a chance to actually meet in person which is kind of rare. And you were here and a few other notable international intellectual stars. You visited Engelsbergsseminariet which had a conference on “woke”. How was it? Because I couldn't make it. I saw that you wrote a tweet, like “I'm in the middle of nowhere and we're having a great conference. Why isn't this kind of conferences or seminars being held at universities in England or the US?”

– Well firstly, the conference was fantastic. The Engelsberg forum is somewhere that I’ve gone to a number of times now, and the organizers and the foundation this time around really did a splendid job of bringing together people from very different backgrounds, very different political views, to discuss this movement “woke”. There were philosophers talking about the philosophy of woke, historians discussing the roots going all the way back to the 13th century. We had sociologists, political scientists, psychologists. As I was sat there thought, however great this conference is, and then it really was good, why is this not happening at Harvard or Princeton, or Oxford, or Cambridge? Why is this event being led by an organization out in Sweden? Why is this not happening at major institutions? I think in a way we all know the answer, which is institutions don't really have that much of an interest in exploring these questions. But it also struck me just how much research is now beginning to happen on the woke movement. If you look at just how much we're beginning to understand about psychology, the voters, the activists, philosophy. I think it's a really important correction because we've got a whole literature on the populist right. Every PhD student I'm approached by wants to study the populist right, but we've got almost no attention on the woke, radical, progressive left. This conference, in my eyes, was really a correction to that.

If I'm being very stupid in this podcast, it’s because I have slept very little because I just flew in from Åland, an island that lies in between Sweden and Finland. I was in invited by politicians in one of the right-wing parties, Obunden samling. They wouldn’t want to be described as the populist right of Åland, but they fill that function in the parliament they have. So the woke debate has made it to Åland. Otherwise all politics there is basically about how to make everything function as well as possible. Because there are 30 000 citizens so it’s very small and there are practical issues that they need to handle. And yet right now, when we were there yesterday, they were having a debate about introducing a gender-neutral pregnancy law, so that all genders can be pregnant. The reason we were there was because we were invited like a year ago but then the other part is said, no, we don't need right-wing extremism. We already have all the facts. But Obunden samling wouldn't have it and they invited us. Over 100 people came out and it was much bigger than I thought it would be. It struck me that this is really everywhere.

– Absolutely. I mean we're having a debate in the House of Commons currently about what we're teaching children about race, sex and gender and the discovery that children as young as eight or nine are being taught about sexual positions and multiple genders and a lot of things that you might expect would make a conservative government instinctively nervous and anxious, but actually many of these things have been happening under the succession of conservative government. There are now a few conservative MP:s who are beginning to say well maybe actually what they need to do is reshape the nature of British conservatism, maybe they need to realign the conservative party so that it's much more vocal in its opposition of these things and that debate is currently happening in Westminster. I was contributing to it last week, I'm just beginning to ask some questions as to whether the conservative party really understands how prevalent these challenges around gender ideology really are.

It's the same in Sweden. I invited you on in part because you have written a new book so we'll get to that in a second, but I just published a guest writer, or she's going to be a recurring writer on my Substack, Anna-Karin Wyndhamn. She writes about how the governmental agency that handles the education sector in Sweden, Skolverket, they have paid consultant firms to introduce what in English equals DEI, ideas throughout the pages and that is instructions for teachers about how they can work with diversity, equity, and inclusion. The ideas are very radical and the people they use as references are the same people that a few years ago said that the whole idea of honor killings or honor culture is just racist fantasies by white people. Now they’re rebranded themselves as the foremost champions of justice and diversity. It’s very much an ongoing conflict and it sort of surprises me and at the same time it doesn't, that the Tory party isn't more strident in these issues. So why aren't they?

– Well, essentially this is leading into some of the arguments I make in my new book, which is that we now have a political class which leans much further to the cultural left than most voters. And in the case of the conservative party, lean much further to the economic right of most voters. If you just step back and look at British politics from the outside, and I do think there are lots of interesting overlaps with Sweden now, which is why we're having this conversation, I really see Britain as being completely reshaped over the last decade by three big revolts.

– The first was the rise of Nigel Farage in the UK, the Independence party, very similar to the Sweden Democrats. The second was the shock vote for Brexit, which, of course, nobody really saw coming. And the third was the rise of Boris Johnson in 2019, who symbolized the post-Brexit realignment of our politics, who did very well among working-class voters, voters who had not gone to University, and in lots of historic industrial area. So, the conservatives had this unique opportunity to connect with the country which essentially is what my book is about, how that even came about. But deep down, the conservative party, like any political organization is also severely constrained by its own history, and its own legacy. The conservative party in Britain is still ultimately a very economically liberal, socially liberal party shaped by the legacy of Thatcherism, and then by Tony Blair and New Labour, and David Cameron and liberal conservatives. So the party has consistently failed and struggled to adapt to this new political moment that we're in. It's only today that Rishi Sunak, the new conservative prime minister is beginning to explore ways in which he can try and repair all of that damage and all of that chaos that came with Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, who you might remember was also a prime minister in Britain, by saying he's going to take a much tougher approach on issues like illegal migration. But this is fundamentally a party that had this unique opportunity to reshape the country and it has failed.

You bring up that Boris Johnson was tremendously successful in the north of England, which is called the red wall. And basically, it's the same in certain areas in Sweden where you always have a Social Democratic majority. There’s a joke in Sweden and I think it's the same in Britain, that they would vote for the Social Democrats or Labour, even if it was a horse running as a representative. But Boris Johnson managed to win over many of these voters. I remember that many conservatives felt hope and it was sort of a new moment in British politics. You quote it in your book, that Boris Johnson was the third prime minister that was taken down by Boris Johnson, because he was involved in so many scandals, and was let go. Do you think these voters can come back to the Torys or are we still talking about the red wall? Are they still more volatile than they used to be?

– I would answer that question by just reminding ourselves briefly about Boris Johnson's achievement and it was an enormous achievement. He essentially swooped in to a large number of Labour-held seats where a majority of voters had voted for Brexit and he won over seats the conservatives had not won for nearly a century. In some cases he won seats the conservatives had never won before. It really was a remarkable revolution. I met Johnson a couple of times and I also presented to him and talked about these issues with them. And I think basically the issue with Johnson is, if you look at what he actually did as prime minister, he didn't really do all that much that reflected the interest of those people who voted for him. Yes, he got Brexit done. He made sure that UK left the European Union, but if you look at what he did on issues like immigration, the culture wars, the gender issues that we've been talking about, the 2020 protests after the death of George Floyd. If you look at all of these big moments Johnson really wasn't conservative in any meaningful sense. Ultimately, he really just wanted to be liked by the sort of liberal London class. He was obsessed with being liked. He really didn't want to be seem as similar to Donald Trump.

– Some of the policy decisions he took were absolutely staggering given the people who are voting for him. I'll give you one example: under the Johnson immigration policy, he actually removed the requirement for British businesses to advertise jobs in Britain first. He’s more of a cosmopolitan in a way than a conservative and his new immigration policy resulted in the highest rates of migration the country's ever seen. The fundamental problem is that Johnson never really understood the people who voted for him, never really showed much of an interest in keeping them. When he was forced from power, by that point he'd really alienated a lot of his electorate. The question facing Rishi Sunak, his arch-nemesis, they really are political enemies. The challenge facing Rishi Sunak, who has picked up this party that’s battered and bruised, is whether he can reconnect with those red wall-voters. My gut instinct is it's going to be very, very difficult, not impossible. But very, very difficult. He's started to show that he gets what they’re looking for in some areas of public life, if you look at what he's doing with the so-called small boats crisis.

When we record this on Friday you just published a new piece on your Substack which I really recommend all my listeners to check out and I will link to it when I publish. He had “stop the boats” as a slogan for a campaign now. The political proposal is that people who enter Britain illegally will be removed from the country, blocked from returning and prevented from seeking British citizenship in the future, and this ties into what we're talking about. Among other things.

The Brexit that many of the voters actually wanted, which was taking control over the borders, not in a xenophobic null migration way perhaps, but being masters of their own house versus the Brexit that they've been given so far. And you say that Rishi Sunak understands this gulf between those two kinds of practices better than Boris Johnson did.

– He's been showing some willingness to get into that territory. What we're seeing and this I think carries over Sweden actually, I think one of the challenges that faces parties that win over a new kind of electorate is how you keep that, keep them onboard and loyal and the conservative party has not really been doing much to keep these voters by their side. But what Rishi Sunak is trying to say is look, there is basically a Labour party and media establishment, a political establishment that has absolutely no interest in tightening up the laws so Britain could defend its borders. He's essentially pushing current law as far as he can to try and dramatically reduce the number of boats of coming. Just to give you one figure, the forecast is that we will have somewhere between 60 and 80 thousand people crossing from France to Britain in 2023. Those numbers will be very high during the summer.

– So as we go into the general election next year, Sunak has basically put all of his chips on this gamble that he can show the numbers coming down, or at least he can show that the people who are coming over, like from Albania for example, which is now the largest single group of foreign nationals on the boats, a country that is in talks to join the European Union. Unless he can show the numbers are coming down, he's going to have a problem. He’s saying to these voters in the red wall and elsewhere, look, I get it. You want a tougher approach on this, you want control of our borders. And I would just say, for swedes who aren't familiar with this case, there's another dimension to this that you will relate to. Your ongoing discussion over crime, gang violence and what you've been seeing in some of your suburbs. There's a very similar debate emerging in the UK, where we had several cases of children, teenagers being assaulted by asylum seekers and illegal migrants. Where I’m teaching, in Kent, we've had a very prominent case, a school girl was raped by a gang of migrants.

A gang, not a singular attacker?

– A gang, multiple people. My point in saying this is, this issue is emotional, it's highly potent. It's a very pressing issue for voters. In some areas of the country we've already had protests near Liverpool, we've had parents protesting outside hotels because there are rumors of school children being insulted. So Rishi Sunak has got to get on this quickly, because it’s creating a very toxic atmosphere in some parts of the country. I think Swedes will relate to that, I think you would probably understand some of the political dynamics and tensions that will run around that. But this will ultimately define whether Sunak holds power next year because if he can win those voters back and he can put Boris Johnson's electorate back together again, then there is a chance he holds power.

The book, Values, Voice and Virtue, is a follow-up to National Populism but this is focused on Britain. In the book you see a divide between the ruling class and the ruled majority, and this distance between how the elites and their values and how much they respect the people they ruled and how that has changed a lot. Many blames social media for this polarization of politics, especially in the US but also in the UK and in Sweden. They blame social media for Brexit, Trump etc. Many also think that how I frame this now when I’m asking this question, is part of the problem because they say there is no elite, no establishment in that sense and talking like that is in itself populist. If you don't find the argument that social media and the new technology is driving this resentment, or this polarization, both the woke revolution and the counter revolution, how much of it is social media? Or is that not a convincing argument?

– Well, I think if you look at all the evidence that's emerging in social science on the impact of social media, there's absolutely no doubt that it has exacerbated polarization between different groups of voters who hold very different sets of values. There's no doubt about that. Recently there was an interesting debate recently between Facebook and Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist. Basically, the team of Facebook pulled together a lot of research that's been done on the impact of social media and made the point that look actually on the one hand, yes, it is exacerbating tensions, but a lot of the evidence on political polarization shows clearly that it began before any of us were on Twitter and Facebook, it began during the 1980s and the 1990s as some of us will remember. And it began before we all started spending much of our day online.

– One of the arguments I make in the book is essentially if you look at all of the things that have completely rocked British and also to some extent European politics, the rise of populism, Brexit, actually what we've been given since then particularly since 2016, are a series of very misleading narratives. One is about social media but we've also had this utterly ridiculous debate about the legacy of Britain's Empire and how the fact we have an Empire somehow brought about the vote for Brexit, ignoring the fact that many other countries have had Empires and yet they have not voted to leave the European Union.

– And then we've had narratives that said, actually, no, it's just about individual campaigners. It's about Dominic Cummings, it's about individual leaders and how unpopular they are, people like Jeremy Corbyn, the radical left leader of the Labour party. What I'm trying to say in this book is that all of these short-term here-and-how explanations are actually really not convincing at all. What you need really need to do if you're going to make sense of political change is to take a step back and look at the longer running divides in society and how those have been pulled into politics. That's essentially what's happened in Britain and I will talk about it. But I say, look, there are these three big new divides that are driving a lot of voters into the arms of rebels, of populists, of outsiders, because millions of votes want to reshape the system and reform it in a number of ways.

In the book, you wrote that Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair presided over a new revolution because which was defined by its strong commitment to a radical economic and cultural liberalism. I think some people would object to you lumping these two together because of course, Margaret Thatcher was from the Tory party and Tony Blair from the Labour party. Can you go into a little more detail here as to why both Thatcher and Blair represent the elite?

– Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair were many ways, remarkably similar politicians. They were conviction politicians, they were in power for an incredibly long time, they reshaped their parties around an entirely new political blueprint. They were missionary leaders, they believed in their own sense of fate and destiny. And they saw a lot in each other. I talked about this in the book, when Henry Kissinger wrote a letter to Margaret Thatcher after Tony Blairs election victory. He said “well as far as I can see, the Labour party has become the conservative party on economics. You must be happy” and Margaret Thatcher replied “Yes, but giving Labour a big majority was not what I had in mind”. When somebody asked Margaret Thatcher in an interview “what's your greatest achievement of all time?” She replied “Tony Blair”. There was a view among conservatives, and John Major said this too, that they forces the Labour party party to give up socialism, they forced the Labour party to embrace the new right economic orthodoxy. Thatcher was a radical economic liberal who fundamentally reshaped the country around hyperglobalisation, passionate defense of individual rights, a suspicion of the state.

– New Labour then really reshaped the country around a radical cultural liberalism, mass immigration, rising diversity, the hollowing out of the traditional guardrails in society. What I'm saying is by the time these two historic projects were finished, between 1979 and 2010, there was a new liberal consensus at the heart of British politics. It was economically liberal, it accepted the globalization, accepted free trade, it accepted the liberalization of finance. London was put on steroids, financial services were unleashed, the big bang and this basically reshaped Britain’s economy around a narrow political economy that only really works for some groups in society. But secondly at the same time, it was culturally liberal, it was completely committed to mass migration, to EU membership, to liberal cosmopolitanism.

– By the time you get to the fateful decade of the 2010s, you have these three big revolts among voters. What they're saying through populism, Brexit and then Boris Johnson, however imperfect those vehicles are, voters are saying “Actually, I don't share the values of this and I'm tired of not having a voice in this conversation and I'm tired of this new elite that’s imposing its narrow orthodoxy on the country. This is a book about Britain, but in a sense it isn't only about Britain. It's basically about what happens when voters rebel against this new socially and economically liberal consensus. And now, dominates politics and institutions in many other countries as it does now in Britain.

Yeah, in that sense you could maybe say that the Social Democratic party in the 1990s were inspired by Thatcher as well. At least they were looking at Tony Blair and so the trajectory of the Swedish Social Democratic party was very similar to Tony Blair. They basically accepted the new economic policies. If you had asked a Social Democrat from the 1970s, if he could have gone forward in time 20 years and see what hade happened, he would have said that this is a right-wing party. This is not the Social Democratic party, the Socialist Party that I'm a member of. That's not my criticism, by the way, it’s a criticism from the left at least since then.

One thing that you do bring up in the book is something that happened to a large degree under Blair, and that was the huge expansion of higher education and that is one of the divides. People who are highly educated often are the ones in the elite, of course, but also have these more woke values or these liberal values much more than their constituents or the people they are representing. Do you agree with that? Did I summarize it well? And also, what are the other divides in British society?

– Well, yeah, I mean essentially what happened from the eighties onwards is the expansion of higher education, the expansion of the University's basically gave rise to this new Elite, a new middle class graduate elite who tended to live in the cities, the university towns, who are defined foremost by their university education, by the social liberal values, if not their radical progressive values and who basically between the 1980s and today have been consolidating their power and their position in society. Not always in some conspiratorial way, but simply by using and exploiting the system to benefit their own group. The expansion of universities was critical to that, the expansion of a university-based meritocracy that came to see having a university degree as the only marker of success and status in society and it was the children of the new graduate elite who have benefited far more from this system than anybody else in society. They also hoover up all the benefits of being based in the most prosperous, the most dynamic, the most affluent parts of the country. And they then benefited from dominating all of the key institutions in society, not only the universities, but also the creative industries, the cultural institutions, the political parties, the think tanks the NGOs, the school's, the civil service.

– All of those institutions, again, it's not a conspiracy, it’s just the university class, the elite university class by which I mean people who went to Oxford, Cambridge or what we call the Russell group universities, a dozen or so universities. They made their way into the institutions and as they drifted left over the last 20 years on cultural questions, on issues like migration, multiculturalism, gender, anti-racism, they take many of those institutions with them. What we often see is not some conspiratorial long march to the institution that goes back to the 1950s. What we see, I would argue, is just education-based polarization by which I mean graduates and non-graduates moving apart on these cultural issues and the institutions of the pendulum graduates are then going with them, drifting further to the left.

People who are a part of that class argue that when you're more educated, when you read more and you take stock of the situation and all the analysis and data, then you realize that these more liberal ideas are correct. And the ideas that you perhaps had with you from where you grew up or from your parents, they are prejudices, they are biases that can’t stand up to rational scrutiny. So when you educate yourself, you become more liberal. Do you think that is a convincing argument?

– We have a number of studies here in the UK, which have used very reliable, long-term data, like the British cohort study and that shows clearly that as people pass through the higher education system, they become more socially liberal and more economically to the right. So they basically take on this liberal consensus. Now, of course, there's a lot of self selection there. I mean, what you tend to find is that people who come from more affluent families with graduate parents tend to self-select into the universities anyway. So that's sort of compounds the outlook.

– But there's also I think, and I know this is my personal view, there’s an ideological influence within the institutions themselves, so even young, more liberal-minded children who self-select into university, then also become exposed to a subculture that is ideologically homogeneous, where there is no real diversity of thought or opinion, and which in many cases is overtly political, driven by political objectives. In that way you tend to have this perfect climate of liberal-minded individuals coming into institutions that are basically then compounding their socially liberal values and then sending them off into society. And I would certainly argue the evidence backs me up. And then the question is, well what do we do when the institutions are dominated by people who just simply see the world in a very different way, who embrace the liberal consensus, if not wanting to take a much further. What do we do when a much larger number of voters, who may have gone to university but certainly didn't go to the elite universities or didn't go to university at all, maybe they went to a technical college or they went to do an apprenticeship. But a much larger number of people are looking at these institutions and I'll give you one specific example in the moment. And they're saying, well, these institutions don't really represent the country and they don't represent me. Let me give one more example of this, which I found striking. You cannot watch an advert on British television at the loom without that a giving you a very political view of the world, right?

– The representation of British society in television is highly, highly diverse. Every advert is featuring somebody for a minority group, usually a mixed-race couple, usually somebody from a sexual minority, so LGBT, diversity is the angle. We just had some polling last week which found that 45% of British voters say that what they now see on television is no longer an accurate reflection of their society. So, think about this, nearly, half the country are watching television and watching adverts, watching, soaps, watching programs and there's this knowing feeling that this is no longer an accurate representation of their society.

They are deplorables, clearly. Just kidding, but it's sort of a natural that the television commercials are like this in Britain. Because if you look at BBC for example, they have quotas for all groups that can be discriminated against according to the law in Britain. So you have to have 8% of those being shown in television, or being heard in radio, has to have some sort of handicap is not the right word, I will get cancelled, but they need to have a disability and the same with race, gender and sexuality. If you look at the Lord of the Rings movies for example, it's a fantasy world I know that, but the first three movies with Peter Jackson, they were pretty true to the books, and then woke happened. So The Hobbit movies when they came out all the people in the towns were diverse. And recently Rings of Power for Amazon and the woke movement had intensified, ruling the day, and now, it's everyone. People are black, people have different sexualities in this world that was written by an Oxford Professor who was born in the 1800s. And it's just silly, it becomes silly because you know that they are pandering to the to these political viewpoints that it must be diverse even if it’s preposterous.

– I think what people probably sense is that they are basically being exposed to political projects and we can see in the surveys as well that a significant number now say they feel that they can't really share their views, share their beliefs at work, in universities and schools, because they are now fearful of what will happen if they challenge this particular view of the world, this orthodoxy. One of the things I talk about in the book quite extensively, is this notion of voice, this notion of having a voice in the national conversation. And we now have large majorities of people from the working class, from the non-graduate majority people without university degree who say, people like me have no say in government or have no say in the national conversation and the reality is because they don't, they are not represented in the media.

– The media has become more elitist today than it was in the 1980s. Local media has gone; regional media has gone. Most journalists now go from Oxbridge, straight into the newsroom with nothing in between, they take these very radically progressive values with them. Voters are looking at how people like them are treated in the national conversation. Ever since Brexit, a large chunk of the country are being dismissed, as gammons, this phrase that we have because it refers to a middle-aged white man, whose face goes red when he talks about issues like immigration or Europe. So they call these voters gammons, which is a British version of the deplorables and they are dismissed as racists and bigots. To be blunt, they are some racist people in society but the reality of the evidence in Britain, which I also talked about in the book, shows that over the last 40 years, every major reliable measure. We have of prejudice, in all of the surveys, shows a dramatic decline in racial prejudice over the last 40 years and a remarkable increase in tolerance and support for things like minority rights, same-sex marriage, etc. The world view that is being imposed by this elite on everybody else, “the country is institutionally racist, we need to spend all of our time discussing the problems of Empire, the voters are dangerous, they're suspicious, they should not be trusted” – all of this is really still creating this very fertile ground for a rebellion against the elite and so I don't personally think we’ve solved anything since Brexit, I don't think we managed to bring these voters back into the national conversation at all, if anything we've just pushed some further out and we've maligned them and mocked them on the way. I don’t think that's a very good place for any democracy to be. So this notion of voice I think is a very important one in it's something that people feel very strongly.

If you are a person who reacts to these commercials, for example, or assess the thing that I said about the Lord of the Rings movies, or you think that too many migrants are coming to Great Britain isn't that then sort of a measure of, if not racism then some sort of xenophobia?

– Well, it depends on how you see anti-immigration and how you see public attitudes on that issue. I've been influenced, some work that's been done in Sweden, some work that's been done by academics who have said, look, there are very distinctive strains of opposition to immigration. There is racism that is held by, I would say probably somewhere around eight to ten percents of the British population would be openly racist. Maybe a little bit less than that but around that figure. You then got people who are xenophobic, who for no logical coherent reason that they can explain, they just don't like immigrants and feel that they are under threat from immigrants with no logical explanation. And then there is immigration skepticism, and immigration skepticism is, I think very different from those two things. And immigration skepticism is a belief often grounded in empirical reality, and things that we observe in our communities and the things that we see.

You mentioned also in the beginning that Boris Johnson, when he repealed a law, so employers don't have to advertise a job opportunity to the native population before they bring in immigrants to do the job. And that would be one way you could be against immigration without it having to do anything with the color of someone's skin or where they come from.

– Yeah, absolutely. There are many others, we're having a very vigorous debate about the housing crisis in this country, we have a National Health Service crisis. You know, we have lots of good reasons to question population growth and also the pace of migration, the level of migration. And I think those things are distinctive in my mind from racial resentment. This is something that unfortunately, most a lot of my academic colleagues tend to downplay because what happens is the concepts gets stretched so that we end up basically stigmatizing, a much larger number of people as being racist or xenophobes rather than being immigration skeptics, saying actually I've got a reason to question, should we have a net migration rate in this country of 500,000 every year, is that sustainable? What about the impact on schooling? What about the impact on housing and those sorts of issues? I think that there are differences. There are racist voters in Britain as there are in every other society and I'm not for a second downplaying that. But I am saying that thankfully, they are now a fringe minority. Whereas immigration skeptics… even today, I polled this yesterday actually; more than half of Britain says immigration is too high. If you're going to say more than half of the country are xenophobic and racist, I would personally struggle to find evidence to show that.

If half of the population are against the current levels of migration or want to lower the migration then, and if you combine that with defining that opposition as being some sort of racist or right-wing extremists, then you have half the population that you have to sort of exclude from having a voice because these people apparently can't be trusted, they are racist and they are extremists. So that's also a very dangerous viewpoint when we are talking about so many people in a democracy that you then try to exclude.

– Aside from saying that we have millions of people who don't feel that their values are represented in the conversation, and they don't feel, they have a voice, the third key fault line for me is this notion of virtue, who is seen as being virtuous and who isn’t. The new elite have embraced a belief system that encourages them to view some groups and societies having virtue, more moral worth than other groups. We can see this very clearly, if you are a member of the elite graduate minority, if you are a minority group, racial, sexual, gender minority, you are awarded a higher degree of status, of self-esteem or social honor, prestige than if you are from the less well-educated, non-urban, white working class, or the Brexit voters, or even populist voters. There is a view that they are problematic, they are difficult, they are stigmatized as essentially being an underclass of morally, inferior races. One of the things that I think has changed…I've been quite influenced by some of the work by people like John Goldthorpe at Oxford, Rob Henderson at Cambridge among others who have said, look actually the way the elite derives status today is quite different from how the old elite derived, status.

– The old elite were really focused on money, on luxury time and on the family connections. The new elite are fundamentally focused on ideology and beliefs as a marker of status. If you embrace radical progressivism, you are seen as a high status individual who can showcase the new vocabulary, who can talk about heteronormative, cisgender, who can use all of the buzz words to say that you went to the right university, you move in the right circles and crucially to distinguish yourself from the morally inferior underclass because you are morally righteous. You are part of this new guardian class that is leading society into this woke Utopia. And I really do think this is a powerful motive. There are fascinating papers that are now coming out showing that the people who left the Labour party over the last ten years, were people who perceived that the Labour party was now more interested in helping minorities than respecting the British majority, and there are papers that show people who have been drawn into populism across Europe have a palpable sense that people like them are now seen as second-class citizens. There's a lot of truth, I think to that. This third divide over virtue, over who is virtuous and who is not, I think is becoming central to our politics as identity politics, and radical progressivism continues to sweep through institutions.

As I said, I was invited to Åland yesterday. The politicians who had invited us began by saying that we are not against equality between the sexes. I had to say then, to begin with it, that is a very strange way to start a conversation. Why would I think that? Of course, I know why you say that. But think of what you're saying. When you have to start the conversation by saying the things that you are not, like “I'm not racist”, then you're already giving up ground and you're already giving the opponent some sort of upper hand. And that's what I think ties into this, the part in your book that's about virtue. When you have the elite consensus, how a virtuous person is and what value they have and how they vote can be hard for people, even though they are part of the majority to go against that and many people are silent. Even though they are perhaps the silent majority, they still lose out in many of these debates. The migration debate is of course one of the most obvious cases of is where there has been a plurality or majority throughout the years that wanted to curb migration in Sweden and also in Britain, but still the elite perspective won out in both parties.

– I think there's a lot of truth to that and you can certainly see in Britain over the last 20 years, how many of the same sentiments and feelings have pushed a lot of people out of the system. There is a view now that the next big winner in British politics will not be an outsider, will not be a rebel, it will be apathy. It will just be a lot of people from these groups, from the working class, from the non-graduate majority people who hold what I call traditionalist values, who want to lower migration, have a harder approach on crime, who want to oppose woke ideology, that they will basically leave the political system all together. They will just turn away from politics, and you did begin to see that in the 2000's and it was ironically Brexit and populism that pulled a lot of those voters back into the system. You can see now how because of these things, this sense that “I'm not even in this national conversation, nobody's actually representing my outlook, nobody’s actually representing my views.

– The Conservative party and the Labour party now look indistinguishable, there's no real substantive policy difference between them and even worse, they now look down on me or they say that, now my ten-year-old should be able to legally change gender without me having any say over that. These are issues and tensions the law that are going to find an outlet. Without being too much of a pessimist when people say, well, what would you do differently? I just briefly give you three things: number one, we need our institutions to give more of a voice to these groups that feel they've been left behind. We need more people from these groups represented in the institutions. This obsession with diversity has actually given us the opposite of diversity, it's given us people who all think the same. We need a greater range of voice, people from different backgrounds and politics culture and media. Number two, I think we need to work much harder both on the left and the right, whatever your politics at opposing, radical progressivism, because it is only held by about 15 percent of the country, it's a minority belief system but it is rapidly taking over the institutions and it is dividing not unifying society. I think that opposition, the emergence of all of these new ecosystems that we talked about before, the YouTube's, Substacks, the new generation of thinkers and writers and so on, they need to be united and presenting a clear case for why this belief system is so problematic. And thirdly, we need to do a much better job as a society of respecting values that don't always correspond with the liberal consensus.

– We need to create much more space to recognize and accept that some views are not illegitimate, simply because they're different, but they are views that are as legitimate as saying we want more immigration, or we want a more aggressive approach for anti-racism or whatever – we need to create more space to respect different values. And I think that comes down to schools and universities. They are currently failing, at least in Britain, to give students exposure to all of those different views and beliefs.

I know that you're a very busy man so I'm very thankful that you were part of Rak höger. Matthew Goodwin, thank you.

Thank you.

Varför studerar så få woke-ideologin, Matt Goodwin?

Jag intervjuade bokaktuelle Matthew Goodwin om ställningarna i kulturkriget i Storbritannien. Vinner woke? Hur mår motståndsrörelsen? Och vad kan vi i Sverige lära av det som sker där?

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