Until recently, elections were widely seen as being won or lost on economic grounds. Yet events such as the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s election as US president have challenged this conventional outlook. These results had more to do with conservative cultural values than with material interests. Likewise, the backlash against Brexit and Trump has been mainly focused on defending liberal cultural values, not the state of the economy. How did culture become more politically salient than economics?
Some say elite interests have prompted this shift. In this view, the right has politicised culture to manoeuvre poorer citizens into backing policies that favour the rich, such as tax cuts and market deregulation. This argument has some substance. Trump’s election and Leave’s success both depended on blue collar voters, and in each instance culture was used as a tool of mobilisation and concealment.
In the US, this sort of politicking has been going on for some time. The Republican party started provoking the cultural sensitivities of working class Americans following its victory in the 1994 midterms. During this period, high-profile Republicans like Patrick Buchanan began preaching about the “war for the soul of America” and the left’s threat to “the values of faith, family, and country”. But while the party talked up the kulturkampf, its policies continued to benefit economic elites.
Since Trump assumed office, the federal government has enacted a travel-ban on Muslim-majority countries, has implemented a zero-tolerance immigration policy, has embarked on a trade war with China, and has sought to build a wall on the US-Mexico border. These policies certainly align with the cultural sentiments of Trump’s working class base. Yet measures such as the 2017 Tax Cut and Reform Act give the rich billions of dollars while constraining welfare spending. Trump has also overseen laws diluting workers’ protections in the areas of health and safety and pay. Alongside the culture wars, then, an orthodox rightwing agenda has been advanced.
Brexit can be viewed in a similar light. The Leave campaign’s central message was that the EU threatens the UK’s survival as a politically independent and culturally distinct entity. This nationalist message resonated strongly with working class citizens identifying as English. And it is a trope that hard Brexiters in the ruling Conservative party continue to use. For example, they have opposed the government’s Withdrawal Agreement with the EU on the grounds that it would turn Britain into “a vassal state”.
Scratch beneath the surface, however, and a different picture emerges. It’s not nationalism that animates Tory hard Brexiters but a form of globalism that prioritises tax cuts, welfare retrenchment, and market liberalisation. As the political scientist Timothy Bale points out, these Tories dislike the EU because they see its “red tape” as a barrier to the small-state Britain they want to establish. Like its equivalent in the US, therefore, the right in Britain is using culture to try and implement policies benefiting the rich.
So those who say that elite interests have driven the political saliency of culture have a point. But their explanation also suffers from a major flaw. It treats voters as putty in the hands of calculating elites. This is not only patronising, it also stops an important question from being asked: why has culture been susceptible to politicisation while other social divisions, such as class, haven’t been?
Class politics in decline
The decline of class politics among ordinary citizens is another key reason for the political ascent of culture. Trends falling under the rubric of globalisation – such as deindustrialisation, automation, stagnant wages, and the 2008 financial crash – have sapped public confidence in the ability of government to improve economic conditions. As a result, disputes over the distribution of material resources have become far less prominent, paving the way for greater conflict over values.
It is true that American and British publics have little faith in their governments. Polls show that 18% of Americans trust the federal government to do a good job, while the comparable figure for Britain is 17%. Moreover, such high levels of distrust aren’t dependent on the party in power. Even during the heady – “yes we can” – days of Barack Obama’s presidency only one quarter of US citizens thought government was capable of bringing about real change.
This lack of faith in politics is also linked to how people have experienced the global economy. The political scientist Andrew Wroe shows that many Americans not only feel economically insecure due to globalisation, but they also blame their increased sense of vulnerability on the federal government. This situation undermines trust in politics because it makes people think that their government has reneged on its basic promise to protect them. As Wroe says, “economic precariousness violates citizens’ expectations about the role of the state”. A similar connection between economic insecurity, globalisation, and political distrust can be seen in Britain.
The economic basis of this political distrust has led to a decline of class politics. Theoretically, politicians may have regained citizens’ trust by enacting policies that assuaged their sense of vulnerability. For instance, they may have passed reforms that heightened public insurance against economic volatility. Yet in reality, ordinary voters do not trust governments to deliver such reforms and so there hasn’t been widespread demand for them. This has led to a situation where rising economic precariousness and inequality have been allowed to continue, showing that the class interests of the masses aren’t as politically salient as they once were.
The retreat of class from politics has supposedly cleared the way for culture’s entry. As one commentator puts it, the depoliticisation of class has made politics about “signalling values rather than worrying about economic outcomes”. But while there is substance to the view that class has become less important politically in the US and Britain, it doesn’t follow that this would make culture more important. That is to say, the decline of class politics explains the shift from economics but not to culture.
Higher education, social status, and political influence
It is primarily due to the expansion of higher education that culture has occupied the political space vacated by class conflict. This has had the effect of increasing the number, prestige, and political influence of cultural liberals in the US and Britain. In turn, these developments have prompted cultural conservatives to fight back.
In the late 1970s around one in five British and American citizens had graduated from university. Today the figure for both countries is close to one in three. Social scientists such as Herbert Kitschelt long ago demonstrated that university attendance in the west is closely associated with liberal cultural values.[i] People with degrees are more likely than non-graduates to support multiculturalism, sexual freedom, racial and gender equality, and reproductive choice. Non-graduates, by contrast, are more likely to be conservative in their outlook, valuing cultural homogeneity, traditional gender roles, and exclusive national identities. Surveys of British and American societies show that as university attendance has grown, cultural liberalism has become more widespread.
Cultural liberals have also seen their social status rise as a result of the expansion of higher education. Increased university attendance has been encouraged in the US and Britain to help workers cope with globalisation and the transition from manufacturing to a knowledge-based economy. Those with degrees have typically found themselves in a position to benefit from this structural change, while those without such qualifications have tended to lose out. According to the historian James Davidson Hunter, this has led to a situation where different cultural perspectives “have been consolidated in class locations”. Cultural liberals have coalesced in prestigious middle class professions and cultural conservatives in less esteemed blue collar jobs.
The rising quantity and status of cultural liberals increased their political influence. Nothing shows this more than the changing policy focus of the Democrats in America and Labour in Britain. Historically, these parties have had a working class social base and have pursued leftwing agendas. However, in the 1990s they dropped their emphasis on redistributive taxation and instead spoke of taking a “light touch” approach to markets and giving people a chance to get ahead. Their move partly reflected and shaped the depoliticisation of class discussed above, but it also showed that they saw the middle class as their future. “We’re all middle class now” was how one senior Labour politician explained this policy reorientation at the time.
To win over white collar voters, the Democrats and Labour couldn’t rely on economic arguments alone. Their embrace of the free market meant that there was little to distinguish them on this front from their rightwing rivals. Therefore, their main electoral pitch became the promotion of cultural liberalism. As the political scientist Francis Fukuyama states, the Democrats “embraced identity politics as [their] core value” and started emphasising “women, African Americans, young urbanites, gays, and environmentalists”. Labour similarly talked of representing people “whatever their background, age, race, or sex”.
Electorally, this approach paid off. Bill Clinton was the first Democrat president since Franklin Roosevelt to be re-elected for a second term, and under Tony Blair Labour won three general elections in a row. In Britain at least, the right mimicked this approach. When David Cameron became Tory leader in 2005, he distanced the party from its traditional supporters in Middle England and set about wooing white collar liberals. And as prime minister he oversaw legislation such as the 2013 Same Sex Marriage Act. By this time, therefore, cultural liberals not only had a high social status in Britain and America, they also had the loudest political voice.
For many on the other side of the value divide, cultural liberalism’s forward march has been experienced as a profound loss – a loss of status, political influence and a way of life. It’s not just for reasons of nostalgia that those attached to traditional values in the UK and US often say their country was better in the past. Cultural conservatives have generally felt maligned and marginalised by the status quo of the last two decades. And that’s why they have been ready to break with the existing state of affairs. The Brexit vote and Trump’s presidential candidacy gave them their chance to do this.
It is telling that the slogans for Brexit and the Trump presidency are ‘take back control’ and ‘make America great again’. Both evoke the loss of something important and the promise of redemption. Whether cultural conservatives are redeemed remains to be seen. Commentators such as David Goodhart have called for a new political settlement in which conservatives and liberals are represented more evenly.[ii] Yet such an arrangement seems a long way off, not least because Brexit and Trump have induced a cultural liberal backlash.
The backlash against Brexit and Trump
In Britain this backlash is exemplified by the People’s Vote campaign and Labour’s better than expected performance in the 2017 general election. In America it is evident in Democrat activism and the outcome of the 2018 midterms.
The immediate goal of the People’s Vote campaign is to have a second referendum on EU membership. Its supporters contend that this would be democratic as the Leave campaign’s claims about the benefits of Brexit have proven “fantasy” and so most Britons now favour staying in the EU. This argument is spurious. Far from representing the public at large, those behind People’s Vote reflect the political establishment of the last two decades. Their real aim is to overturn Brexit, restore middle class hegemony, and bring about a “culture-shift that values and promotes … an open and inclusive society”. By pushing back against the conservative revolt embodied in Brexit they have politicised culture still further.
This development has been compounded by Labour’s strong electoral performance. The party’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is a lifelong Eurosceptic and Labour’s manifesto promises to deliver Brexit. Yet Corbyn’s social base is overwhelmingly middle class and sees him as a cultural liberal champion. The gains Labour made in the 2017 general election have strengthened this group’s determination to reverse Brexit. In the words of the Corbyn-supporting journalist Ellie Mae O’Hagan, this election showed that Britain isn’t “an island of curtain-twitching bigots” and the “narrow-minded effluent” behind Brexit can be overcome. More recently, pressure from his middle class base has resulted in Corbyn offering qualified support for a second referendum. This too has encouraged cultural liberals to continue the fight.
In America a similar dynamic has unfolded. The journalist Thomas Edsall shows that “well-educated, relatively upscale, white Democrats” have become even more politically active since Trump entered the White House. Such people were instrumental in taking the Democrats in a cultural liberal direction in the first place. The doubling down of their efforts has simply augmented this trend, as illustrated by the strong-standing of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren among the party’s candidates for next year’s presidential election.
The Democrats’ more vocal support for cultural liberalism has benefited them electorally, which suggests that value conflicts are going to remain front and centre of political competition. In last year’s midterms, the party won the House of Representatives largely because they picked up the votes of university-educated suburbanites. This constituency usually expresses economic preferences that align with Republican policies. Yet they voted Democrat as they considered resisting Trumpian conservatism and defending liberal cultural values to be more important than their economic interests. The primacy of culture over economics therefore looks set to continue.
How the shift came about
Culture has become more politically salient than economics due to elite interests, the decline of class conflict, and the expansion of higher education. Wrapped up in all this have been two political failures. The first is the failure of government to protect people – particularly working class people – from the vicissitudes of globalisation; this has undermined ordinary citizens’ trust in political elites and has led to the view that government is incapable of making radical changes to the economy. The second failure is one of political representation; the heightened prestige and political influence of cultural liberals has weakened the voice of cultural conservatives and made them think their values are under threat.
These failures are interlinked. Those at the sharp end of globalisation tend to be cultural conservatives. That is, those who believe government can’t help them economically are at the same time those who believe the political status quo threatens their values. So, a dual process has occurred within this sector of society: politically speaking, economics has become less important just as culture has become more salient, erupting on to the political scene in the form of Brexit and Trump.
In politics, however, there is no final victory. The conservative revolt has been met with a cultural liberal backlash. This value divide isn’t going away any time soon as the issues at stake are ultimately about identity. ‘Who we are’ may be diluted by compromise, which is why the culture wars are so dangerous. They engender a zero-sum mentality that pushes the search for common ground ever further into the background.
Had the political elite in Britain and the US shown more interest in the working class, this situation may have been avoided. But now it’s too late and culture is firmly set as the main political faultline.
[i] Herbert Kitschelt, ‘Left-Libertarian Parties: Explaining Innovation in Competitive Party Systems’, World Politics, 40, 1988, 194-234
[ii] David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The New Tribes in British Politics, Penguin, 2017