I love it when the Guardian’s mask slips. When its veil of pained concern for the poor falls away to reveal the classist sneer beneath. There was a delicious instance last week in a rave review of Ash Sarkar’s new book, Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War. With ‘punch and panache’, the reviewer gushed, Ms Sarkar shows how the ‘agents provocateurs’ of ‘the right-wing press’ have manipulated ‘the lower orders’ and made them ‘[abandon] class war for the culture wars’. Thanks to their ‘tabloid’ controllers, ‘the lower orders’ now ‘spend their weekends not on the barricades but behind computer screens, fuming over small boats and gender ideology’.
The lower orders. Ouch. I thought the only journalists to say ‘the lower orders’ these days were us at spiked, always sarcastically of course, to caricature the snobbery of the liberal elite. And yet here was the Guardian, entirely unironically, using this term that the dictionary describes as an ‘old-fashioned’ and ‘offensive’ expression for ‘working-class people’. I wonder if there was any gnashing of teeth at Guardian HQ over this linguistic slippage. One envisions an Oxbridge intern in the readers’ editor department firing off a stern reminder to all scribes: ‘Please note, we say “the poor” or “the left behind” when writing about oiks. Save all other terms for post-work drinks.’
Here’s the thing, though: it was an apt description of Sarkar’s book. It really is a study of the alleged manipulation of the masses by a right-wing media that prefers the plebs dumb and distracted rather than angry and active. Of course, Sarkar doesn’t say ‘the lower orders’. Or ‘the plebs’, for that matter. Regardless, a palpable and haughty disappointment with ordinary people permeates her tome. Boiled down, her argument is that we in the West labour under a tyrannical ‘minority rule’. But it’s not the minority we’ve been hoodwinked into believing it is. It’s not identitarians, ‘progressives’ and cancel-happy authoritarians who’ve got their boot on our necks. No, the ‘real ruling minority’ are ‘hedge-fund managers, press barons, landlords, corporations and oligarchs’.
And how do these despots distract us from the truth of their power and get us frothing over drag-queen story hours and blue-haired students instead? They use ‘scaremongering’, Sarkar says. They ‘obscure, prop up and extend’ their power by ‘direct[ing] working-class anger away from wealth and political inequalities and towards identity minorities who’ve been made into scapegoats’. They’re dab hands, apparently, at ‘whipping up a frenzy of racist and indiscriminate loathing’ among ordinary people, who subsequently come to hold beliefs that are ‘completely out of whack’ with reality, says our sainted guide. The lesson of our times, apparently, is that ‘people’s sense of what’s going on around them isn’t always accurate’ – indeed, it can be ‘warped’ by ‘the press and politicians’ to produce ‘wholly deceptive perceptions’.
That Guardian hack really was spot on: this is a book about how the ruling class distracts the lower orders with culture-war faff. On almost every issue, Sarkar’s dread of these manipulative tactics leaks out. We’re forever being ‘prodded into a state of reflexive reaction’, she says. Take the trans question. She says there’s been a ‘regression in public opinion’ on trans issues. Polls show that more and more Brits are against letting ‘transwomen’ (men) take part in women’s sports. Many of us no longer accept that ‘transwomen’ are women. Erm, that’s not ‘regression’. It strikes me as movingly progressive that everyday citizens are taking a stand for scientific truth and women’s rights against the truly minority religion of gender bollocks.
How does Sarkar explain what she describes as Brits going ‘backwards’ on ‘progressive beliefs’ but which to the rest of us looks like a blossoming of reason? The media. Naturally. Their ‘alarmist tone’ on trans matters ‘seeps through’ and has a ‘profound’ impact on public thinking. The very words they use – ‘risk’, ‘threat’, ‘destruction [of women’s rights]’ – help to drum up ‘hostility to transgender women’, she says. This is obvious nonsense, isn’t it? First of all, people aren’t ‘hostile’ to individual trans people, but to gender ideology’s liquidation of women’s rights. Plus, the idea that people who think women don’t have knobs must have been brainwashed by the media is mental. Surely, it’s those who think you can have a pair of bollocks and be a lesbian who’ve been manipulated by cranks, not those of us who only say what humans have been saying since we first came down from the trees: ie, men are not women?
Sarkar really gets into her snobby stride on the immigration issue. Public angst over asylum seekers didn’t ‘grow on trees’, she says. Rather, like other ‘moral panics’, it’s a ‘product of rhetorical barrage from media, think-tanks and politicians’. The filthy tabloids are especially at fault. No paper has been as ‘frenzied’ in its ‘anti-asylum’ coverage as the Sun, she says. It is always ‘pouring xenophobic untruths and outright racism into the public’s ear’. ‘The public’ – who does Sarkar think she’s kidding here? When the bourgeois left frets over who the Sun is ‘pouring’ shit into, we know who they mean. We know they’re not referring to their own social circles in which buying a copy of the Sun is the deadliest of the secular sins.
The ‘asylum moral panic’ pushed by the Sun and others helped to ‘[whip] up a frenzy of racist… loathing’ and ‘inevitable nastiness’, says Sarkar. It made people dumb, too: the public’s perceptions on numbers of asylum-seekers is ‘often completely out of whack’ with truth, she claims. Given the Sun’s ‘hysterical’ coverage, ‘it doesn’t take a sociologist to work out why [its] readers might have a negative view of asylum seekers’, Sarkar writes. In short, monkey read, monkey believe. The middle-class left can dress up its anti-Sun posturing in as much Marxian finery as it likes, but to me it has the pungent whiff of elitism, with tabloid readers essentially treated as the witless receptacles of demagogic prejudice.
Sarkar’s obsession with media manipulation has the effect of belittling the concerns of working-class people. To her, everything’s a moral panic. She uses that phrase 11 times. Cancel culture is a moral panic. Concerns about gender ideology spring from a ‘transphobic moral panic’. The idea of ‘too much immigration’ is a moral panic. The conceit of this book is that the masses are worrying about all the wrong stuff. You ‘lower orders’, as the Guardian at least had the balls to say, are obsessing over bullshit. Your concerns are false. They were planted in you by a right-wing media machine that plays ‘a powerful role in shaping public perceptions’. And you don’t even know it. Seriously, how thick are you?
It seems to me that Sarkar’s project is one of moral delegitimisation. And it is out of order. The truth is that people are perfectly within their rights to be worried about men using women’s changing rooms. Indeed, we used to call it indecent exposure when men got their cocks out in front of women. Now you want us to call it ‘trans rights’? Nah, you’re alright. People are right to be concerned about cancel culture, too. Ours is a country in which the police are literally knocking on the doors of wrong-thinkers. And it’s not racist to want the state to keep a better eye on our borders so that we might know who’s coming here. What was it that James Connolly said? ‘A free nation must have complete control over its own harbours… short of that power no nation possesses the first essentials of freedom.’
The beautiful irony is that what Sarkar sees as the manipulation of public opinion is really a brilliant moral uprising by the masses against the eccentric ideologies of our supposed betters. For the truth is that both wings of ‘minority rule’ – both the identitarian nutters of the academy and the corporate oligarchs Sarkar hates – have bought into ‘woke’ or whatever the hell we’re meant to call it. You could go to the launch of a hip novel at Daunt Books or to a social gathering of Coutts bankers and you’d hear the same cranky shite: transwomen are women, open the borders, Israel is bad. Tell me, who’s really fallen under the spell of ‘minority rule’: us oiks who deviate from the elite’s religious lunacy that says women can have dicks, or Ms Ash Sarkar who laments in this book that ‘Keir Starmer was excoriated for even hinting at the idea that there might be exceptions to the rule that women don’t have penises’?
I find it amusing that someone who thinks there are exceptions to the rule that women don’t have cocks has written a book berating the rest of us for our false consciousness. The public discussion of Sarkar’s book has focussed on her criticisms of the left’s drift into identitarian idiocy. And it’s true that she makes some of the points spiked was making 20 years ago about the left’s abandonment of the universalism of class in favour of the particularism of victimology. But, for me, the far more striking thing is the book’s elitism. Time and again, she seems to mistake working-class revolts – whether against the neoliberal EU or the divisive religion of transgenderism – for false moral pursuits by misled people. Another alleged leftist who’s terrible at reading the masses.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy
