During my lifetime two class wars have been fought to resolution across Europe: one economic the other cultural. The outcomes of the economic class wars are uncontroversial. In Britain the middle class won the economic war: social protection is relatively poor (most notably for pre-school and the elderly), labour markets are only lightly regulated, and top-end income taxes are relatively low. In contrast, in continental Europe, the working class won: high social protection, regulated labour markets, and higher taxation.
But what is less openly discussed is the outcome of the cultural class wars. In Britain the working class won: mainstream culture – the daily exposure of ordinary working class people – decisively broke free from middle-class dominance. The clearest manifestation of this is the divergence in the media where mass market newspapers designed for the barely literate, such as The Sun, coexist with middle-class newspapers such as The Telegraph. In continental Europe the mainstream culture remained essentially middle-class. For example, the biggest circulation French newspaper, Ouest France, is far closer to The Telegraph than The Sun. The conjunction of victory and defeat may be explicable: in Britain middle-class victory in the economic war may have generated sufficient guilt and backlash to undermine the confidence needed to maintain control of mainstream culture. Analogously, in continental Europe inclusive social protection may have made a common culture easier to maintain.
Culture matters because it helps to shape identity. Economists are realizing that the identities which people choose to adopt matter for their performance – see Nobel Laureate George Akerlof’s new book Identity Economics. Meanwhile, social psychologists have discovered the power of imitation: people imitate role models. The standard economic framework in which behaviour is shaped by incentives needs qualification: incentives work only within the parameters set by adopted identities. Popular culture can be thought of as a menu of downloadable role models that shape the identities that ordinary young people adopt. In some mundane but important respects the menu conveyed by middle-class culture is more functional than working class culture: a more stable marital environment; aspiration rather than fatalism; deferred gratification rather than bingeing.
As revealed both by the riots of 2011 and school results, Britain has a new indigenous underclass characterized by educational underperformance, unemployment and marital breakdown to an extent without parallel in continental Europe. Its parallel can, however, be found in America, as revealed in Coming Apart, the new book by the American conservative libertarian Charles Murray. His book divides into the first nine-tenths, which describes social change, and a final tenth of cranky libertarian diagnosis. Those first nine-tenths build up portraits of social change in two stylized communities: Belmont and Fishtown (for Britain the equivalents would be North Oxford and Rotherham). For Belmont recent decades have been good: it has become the home of the new elite. The elite have inherited not wealth but brains, and a stable family upbringing; their brains gave them access to the newly meritocratic universities, and their parents gave them functional habits. The new brain-based economy rewarded these characteristics with prosperity. In contrast, Fishtown has fallen apart, starting with the family: divorce, fluid co-habitation, and single parenthood have all risen massively. Alongside family disintegration work habits deteriorated: whereas in Belmont prime-age men worked harder, in Fishtown increasing numbers chose not to work at all. Alongside personal deterioration came a loss of sociability in Fishtown not matched in Belmont: less civil association, less trust, and more crime.
So why have America and Britain developed an indigenous underclass whereas continental Europe has not? What have they experienced in common over recent decades that other European societies have missed? I suggest that the explanation is that both Britain and America have adopted the same cocktail of weak social protection and a virulently crass popular culture. The epicentre of that culture was the Murdoch empire from which the rest of Europe has been protected by language. Murdoch culture – Fox TV in America, Sky TV, The Sun and The News of the World in Britain – has reset the norms of behaviour. Educated families – Murray’s new social elite – have largely sheltered ourselves: it is culture that has ‘come apart’, polarized between a mass market of Murdoch and middle class islands. Absurdly, Murray blames America’s social crisis on generous welfare: if it were, it would be Scandinavia in crisis not the Anglo-Saxons. Nor is it due to cultural elitism: the Anglo-American elite is no more sophisticated than that in continental Europe. Its educated families are entirely justified in huddling together to protect their offspring from being engulfed by Murdoch’s degradation.
The culprits are neither the underclass themselves, nor the new elite, but those who have perpetrated this combination of weak social protection and cultural collapse.
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Excellent – but maybe just a wee bit too optimistic about ‘the continent’. Many of the Anglo-American trends highlighted in the article are noticeable here (i.e. in Austria, where I’m writing from) too, although it is true they are not as marked.
Prof Collier is, as always, a stimulating read, and prompts a response. First, social structures in Europe are diverse: there’s a big difference between Germany and Spain. Second, these structures in the key European economies (Germany and France) arose from far more complex circumstances than the ‘victory’ of the working class: it’s not controversial to say that they developed in response to post-war Allied concerns over communism; a purpose-designed mechanism to spike the guns of left-wingers (France’s social compact was longer in the gestation, too, with deep roots in the Enlightenment and the revolution). Third, I’d suggest that Murdochian cultural influence is overemphasized, as, while contributory, its role was merely ancillary to the determined Thatcherite assault on the post-war social consensus. Fourth, cultural debasement is hardly unique to Britain (continental television is a ‘populist’ wasteland). Fifth, the UK and US political establishments roundly rejected redistributive fiscal policies where European polities, constrained by coalition politics, often could not. Sixth, European reconstruction was heavily bankrolled by the US as a bulwark against the Left, while Britain (by design) was left with a post-war legacy of indebtedness that originated in Hullian plans for economic hegemony. Thus, ironically, European social cohesion was more centripetal in tendency; Britain’s more centrifugal.
Behavioural norms, too, are vastly too complex to be decisively influenced by singular cultural factors such as the print media (which in Britain’s case has a long and unique tradition of populism and sensationalism). Meanwhile, the institution of the BBC alone can be instanced as an countervailing influence. And family structure? Always more cohesive in the less mobile European context. Catholicism in Southern Europe, too, has played a mitigating role. Britain’s middle class , too, has long been fiercely protective of its educational inheritance.
On the question of social protection and welfare, Beveridge’s (cross-bench) structures were widely envied for their comprehensiveness. ‘Weak’ social protection was imposed rather than ‘adopted’, and consciously so, with working class cohesion purposely attacked in conflicts eagerly sought by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative administration. The extreme radicalism of her politics left US Republicans awestruck even as they scrambled to emulate her, and Reagan’s policy team judged their own efforts to be pusillanimous in comparison.
I am a genuine admirer of Prof Collier’s work, which is dedicated to grappling with intractable systemic issues others shy away from. However, I felt bound to respond to this piece, which, uncharacteristically, ignores the complexities of political and social forces to which, elsewhere, he is highly sensitive.
Dear Mr. Collier,
a very interesting article indeed.
I took the liberty of translating it into Spanish to make it sound among our community.
I hope that does not disturb you, if it does, please let us know and I will delete it from my blog entirely.
Thank you.
One small comment, in Spain we have only had a miryad of TV chanels since the 1990′s. Before there were only 2. On that year, Telecinco, Antena 3 and others begun a process of a similar type as that you are framing Murdoch in. Mediaset owned by Berlusconi made it develop further to what we call “TV rubbish” still alive and kicking!
Our national newspapers are a little more serious than those from Murdoch’s empire although they are biased by political ideologies and obviously, they manipulate as much as Murdoch’s fatal culture.
Thanks again..
Dear Canko,
please remove the translation from your blog. We do have selected partnerships and sometimes give permission for approved translations. However, as is clearly indicated in our disclaimer & copyright section, we retain the copyright on our articles and potential translations have to be agreed.
Message received, we’ll do as requested.
Eventhough, I would like to mention it has been read by more than 230 people since published.
I am not a registered translator but I feel confident my translation work respects 100% his full meanings and structure.
Just thought it would be helpful for you to have it translated for free, the begining of freedom, a necessity for such information to be made as much public as possible.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
We will delete the article next week.
“In Britain the middle class won the economic war: social protection is relatively poor (most notably for pre-school and the elderly), labour markets are only lightly regulated, and top-end income taxes are relatively low.”
And you think this favors the MIDDLE class? That’s nuts! How much do the rich pay you to write such nonsense?
Very interesting article, but I disagree with about the ‘victory’ of working class culture. I think that what was a very rich culture of collective institutions -including pubs, working men’s clubs, women’s institutes, miners’ libraries, trade unions and many more – was indivisible from the patterns of labour that brought about the very existence of a working class. The move towards fluid and spatially diverse working practices in the post-industrial age has precipitated the downfall of these institutions. That was working class culture, not The Sun, not reality TV. All of the cultural product you mention can be traced in origin to middle class profiteering. The working class has always been vastly numerically superior to the middle class, and in a democratic, consumption-driven age their preference was always going to have cache. Murdoch, Piers Morgan and countless others from middle class backgrounds have spotted this and set out to capitalize on the alienation experienced by working class people following deindustrialization, filling the gap left by the death of community living. The culture that is popular among people from working class backgrounds is by no means devised by them.
The results are far-reaching; collective solidarity has been overtaken by atomism. The danger is that people begin to associate the working class as ‘crass’ and the middle class as aesthetically superior. Actually I have always found that a great deal of middle class culture is actually counter-cultural in that it fiercely critiques the bourgeois tenets of the pursuit of wealth, moral conservatism, bureaucracy and the denial of emotion, and instead champions the values we might associate with the working class – humility, solidarity and honesty. We should not assume high-brow culture is necessarily better, but neither should we assume that it is necessarily middle class.