On Being the Brilliant Ally of One's Own Gravediggers

Nice Right Liberalism reaches its end state

‘His heart, once capable of inspiring others so completely, could no longer inspire so much as itself. It beat now only out of habit. It beat now only because it could.’

-From Wonder Boys

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 naive 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 by clicking the video at the top of this post 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.