The picture that Matthew Goodwin paints of modern Britain’s ‘ruling class’ shows a weak understanding of how and where influence works
In 1956, the radical American sociologist C Wright Mills wrote about what he called, in the title of a book, The Power Elite. America’s elite, he observed, forms a “compact social and psychological entity” that “towers over the underlying population of clerks and wage earners” and whose “values” are “differentiated” from those of the “lower classes”. “All their sons and daughters,” he added, “go to college, often after private schools; then they marry one another… After they are well married, they come to possess, to occupy, to decide.”
Seven decades later, the British political scientist Matthew Goodwin similarly paints, in his new book Values, Voice and Virtue, a picture of “the new elite” in Britain. The brushstrokes are familiar, drawing on the work of communitarian and “post-liberal” thinkers of recent years. Britain has “a new dominant class” that has captured its institutions and imposes its “radically progressive cultural values” on the rest of the nation, adrift as it is from the conservative instincts of the majority.
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