The left is everywhere but prefers preaching to listening

I could start by adding "..and nowhere" to the headline because that pretty much summarises the issue here. The left's ideas are meant to be universal and absolute - no political postcode lottery is permitted - such that cultural variation is suspect. And conservatism is all about the nuance of that cultural variation. The comment, 'the left is everywhere' comes from this Russ Roberts commentary about Jordan Peterson:

I was recently at a panel discussion of the state of political and cultural life in America. All of the panelists were from what I would call the gentle left — good people to the left of center with a different world view from my own but full of compassion and good intentions. It was something of a smugfest — how sad it is that misguided people found Trump appealing. How sad it is that the right has no interest in the left while the left has been reaching out to understand how Trump voters could possibly exist. They chalked up the stupidity of Trump voters to global capitalism that had hollowed out the middle class and driven so many sheep into the arms of the Republican wolf who would only shear them and make a lovely blanket for himself.

Despite their best efforts at anthropology, the panelists were like fish in water unable to imagine what water is. The reason the right is less interested in the left than the left is in the right, is that the left is everywhere. You don’t have to take a trip to Kentucky or to a church to understand the left. The left dominates our culture — Hollywood, the music scene, the universities. And the left can’t seem to imagine that anything they are pushing for might be problematic. In particular, the radical egalitarian project is not everyone’s cup of tea. By radical egalitarian agenda, I mean equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunity. Or that gender is a social construct.

This is the gist of the left's incomprehension. Our trendy lefties cannot understand a conservatism that, while it's pro-market, is deeply suspicious of capitalism - or at least the grand capitalism of banks and big business. There's an incredulity at people who think the first duty of government isn't to promote equality but is rather to protect the community and culture of the people that government serves. As Roberts says, who find that "radical egalitarian agenda" not their cup of tea.

The cultural ubiquity of this position can be set out even more starkly:

And an almost equally obvious answer is that the areas in which we’ve made progress have been those which are in fundamental accord with the deepest values of neoliberalism, and the one where we haven’t isn’t. We can put the point more directly by observing that increasing tolerance of economic inequality and increasing intolerance of racism, sexism and homophobia – of discrimination as such – are fundamental characteristics of neoliberalism.

Of course, our neoliberal left will be adamant that they care deeply about economic inequality, they'll point to tweets, to conferences attended, to the presence of M. Piketty's book on their coffee table. But then we look at their priorities and see a different thing entirely - the excitement is over the gender pay gap for TV presenters, the 'trans agenda', and abusive language on social media.

It is a bizarre irony that someone as selfish, grandiloquent and preening as Donald Trump seems to grasp the real worries of the working class and, for want of a better word, lower middle class better than today's left. Concerns about the loss of social infrastructure like pubs, clubs, societies and local shops. Worries about jobs, businesses and the future opportunities for young people. And a sense that nobody is really interested in their local community, culture or lived experience - except, that is, for lecturing them about making the wrong lifestyle choices or sneering about what they like to eat, listen to, read or watch. This isn't to say that Trump's policies are the right ones but that he, at least, makes the effort to try and understand.

Neoliberalism is, in economic terms, brilliant - the billion people lifted out of absolute poverty over the past 30 years are a testament to this - but, while this has been happening, there's a set of people who don't see their lives getting better, watch their community hollowing out and wonder whether anyone is really interested in their lives and their neighbourhood. As Roberts observes, to see these people, hear them, understand them, our essentially metropolitan left has to go somewhere they wouldn't normally go - a tired English seaside town, a church in America's 'bible belt', a Yorkshire pit village, a French small town or an Italian village bar.

And when this metropolitan left arrive they have to do something else, they have to set aside the urge to lecture, to explain, to know better and start to listen. If they don't do this the result we get from the visit sounds like this:

Enough. Don’t buy the too-easy media picture of a rancid or untended town, or of bitter people; but understand that Clacton-on-Sea is going nowhere. Its voters are going nowhere, it’s rather sad, and there’s nothing more to say. This is Britain on crutches. This is tracksuit-and-trainers Britain, tattoo-parlour Britain, all-our-yesterdays Britain.

OK, this is written by a Conservative (I really object to those CINO, RINO sneers from the, mostly reactionary rather than conservative, alt-right - Matthew Parris is a conservative) but it rather sums up the dismissal that these distant, slightly tatty places get from the great and good when they call in. The same goes for France where arrivistes get a prickly response from locals for wanting some sort of (largely imagined) lost past to return:

Hours had passed on a sunny Friday in the center of town, yet on some streets we saw almost no one. “You see clearly that we are on a street that is dying,” Mr. Jourdain said on Rue Emile Grand as we concluded our tour. “There are whole buildings where there isn’t a soul.”

I called City Hall for a meeting with the mayor, a member of France’s center-right party, but was met with a distinct lack of enthusiasm from her spokeswoman. I was put off with the promise of a phone call the following week, and when I finally reached the mayor, Stéphanie Guiraud-Chaumeil, she argued that urban “devitalization” has had a “relatively moderate impact.” She also angrily condemned Mr. Jourdain.

“He is an extraterrestrial,” she said, “who came here to get talked about.”

There is no comprehension here, simply a refusal to sit and listen. It is the pattern again and again, in place after place. Journalist or researcher arrives in town, talks to a couple of people, takes some pictures and then rushes back to somewhere with better coffee bars and trendier restaurants to write a piece explaining how the community they visited is tired, left-behind, struggling, dowdy, depressed (select the descriptors of your choice). Sometimes these writers or researchers are good enough to speak to a few actual locals but mostly this gets boiled down to a few grumpy quotes - even better if the locals say something a bit racist, sexist or homophobic.

The places we're talking about here aren't rich places but they're also not really poor places. The people who live in these places are conservative and it hurts them to be told they're "going nowhere" and we should look instead at the shiny city with its overpriced apartments, fancy restaurants, crowded roads and unfriendly neighbours. Nothing is offered to people in Clacton or Albi except the strong suggestion that somehow the people in the big city are better than them - be more like East London, more like Paris. Presumably without the racism and knife crime.

The biggest challenge facing western democracies isn't populism, it isn't robots, it's not flying cars or food security or climate change or the rise of China. No, the challenge is stopping the city from strangling our societies and cultures. Part of this is to start trying to work out how we make Clacton and places like Clacton something other than "all our yesterdays". And sitting at the centre are the people, the ones who think that "radical egalitarian agenda" has gone too far, the ones who want politicians to worry as much about neighbourhood, community and place as they do about transphobia, the gender pay gap and high speed railways.

We started with the trendy left being everywhere and nowhere, like butterflies flitting across a cultural herbaceous border. Set against this isn't just "somewhere" but the idea that society starts with family, friends, neighbour and community. And that this society needs looking after. This isn't about everything being the same, nor is it about community developers - assorted left-inclined missionaries of social action - arriving in a place getting everything sorted. No, it's about rebuilding the structures of place - community, neighbourhood, families - and the institutions they need to succeed.

Many conservatives (and Conservatives) have forgotten this essential part of what we believe, preferring instead a sort of technocratic fix based on regulation and grand institutions. Not that such things are unimportant but without strong local institutions - family, neighbourhood, community - strong national institutions will not succeed. Hospitals in "Our NHS" work (most of the time) despite the stupifying bureaucracy of the NHS because they are local institutions - our hospitals, our clinics, our health centres. And the same goes for schools, policing and much else that makes society work - when the ties to local community are strongest, the institution is most effective. The national, even supranational, urge for homogeneity that neoliberalism and social democracy force on communities excludes people from any sense of owning those institutions, prevents initiative and slowly stifles the local ties, the idea that we should love where we live, that make community work.

Although there's a grumpiness (and bemusement) at that 'radical egalitarian agenda' it perhaps covers over a deeper malaise in society, the seeming alliance between the uncaring utilitarianism of neoliberalism and the controlling 'gentleman in Whitehall knows best' approach of social democracy. Everything is so far away, out of our control, and more bothered with things that aren't important to us and ours. It's not that people far from the places of power - Westminster, Brussels, Washington, Paris - are ignorant but rather that they've stopped listening as so little is about them or their lived experiences. The left is everywhere, except in the lives and communities of people just over the hill from the shiny city, quiet places with good people who would like a little care and attention for a change.

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