What Happened To Me?

My debate with David Aaronovitch and the liberal left at Conway Hall

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David Aaronovitch, Jo Coburn, and Matt Goodwin, Conway Hall October 17

“What happened to you, Matt?” When did you change your views? When did you become right-wing? What happened?

These are questions I'm asked a lot, mostly by people who work in the universities, the think-tanks, the BBC, the creative industries, who identify on the liberal left.

They’re also questions which came up last week during my debate with former Times columnist David Aaronovitch, at Conway Hall, which was sponsored by the liberal left Prospect Magazine and attended by many of its liberal left readers.

And they’re questions which need answering —especially when you’re in the public square and feel a strong sense of responsibility to your readers, as I do.

There’s no doubt something has changed.

A decade or so ago, I was a fully paid-up member of the liberal left —reading and writing for The Guardian, working for left-wing think-tanks, advising Labour MPs, speaking almost exclusively at left-wing events and conferences, socialising with left-wing academics, even having lunch with one David Aaronovitch.

But today I find myself in a very different space. Most of my friends are now on the right, not the left. Most of the writers I find interesting are on the right, not the left. And most of the arguments I find intellectually stimulating and coherent are in the same place.

So, what happened? Well, as Andrew Sullivan once remarked when he was asked the same question by the liberal left in America, people are asking the wrong question.

The question is not ‘What happened to me?’ No. The real question we should all be asking the liberal left today is— What the hell happened to you?

Here’s what I told David Aaronovitch and the liberal left.

A decade or so ago I was basically where the average voter was. I leaned a little a bit to the left on the economy and a little bit to the right on culture.

I thought the economy, which had been battered by the global financial crisis, was in desperate need of reform.

The crisis had exposed how dependent we were on London's financial services and how corrupt the system was. I was furious that so few people were sent to prison for causing the global meltdown.

And while I thought Britain needed some high-skill immigration to help things like the National Health Service (which employed most of my family) I was sceptical of the rising levels of legal and illegal migration under New Labour and which would later reach even higher levels under the Tories.

Like much of the country, and as research shows, I thought mass immigration erodes social trust, social cohesion, public support for welfare, and fuels populism.

When it came to multiculturalism, I thought newcomers should be encouraged to integrate fully into British society, to not live ‘parallel lives’ but subscribe to a shared, unifying story about who we are as a country because without that I worried we'd implode into tribal grievances and communal disorder.

I’d simply spent too much time in northern towns like Bradford, Burnley, Oldham, and Rochdale to buy into naive liberal narratives about multiculturalism being an unalloyed success story. I knew it wasn’t true. I knew it needed work. And so did many voters.

And while I didn’t campaign for Brexit, I did understand why so many people were hacked off with the status-quo, so when they went on to vote to leave the European Union I was one of the few academics in the country who put my head above the parapet by saying we should implement Brexit. I thought this was essential to maintain public support for, and trust in, our democracy.

All those things, all those beliefs, basically put me in majority territory —where most voters were. And I still believe many of those things today. I don’t really think my views have changed all that much while people who say they have probably didn’t know me all that well to begin with. If anything, I’ve become more vocal about them, a little bit more supportive of Brexit as the EU has continued to fumble one crisis after another and, for reasons I’ll get into, a lot more concerned about the state of Britain.

But what has changed, what has left me and millions others like me feeling politically homeless, is what’s happened to the people running Britain—the new elite class. In short, they’ve radicalised —they’ve driven the car off the cliff and abandoned the rest of us.

In his now classic book The Revolt of the Elites, published in 1995, Christopher Lasch famously pointed out that the revolt that was only just beginning in the West was not the masses rising up against the elites but the elites rising up against the masses.

And he was right. This is exactly what we’ve been witnessing. Put simply, we are living through the greatest radicalisation of the elite class since the 1960s.

Increasingly, especially since Brexit, Trump, and the summer of 2020, the white, urban, liberal graduates from elite universities and comfortable backgrounds who have joined, and are now replacing, the old ruling class have been moving sharply leftwards on cultural issues.

On all the issues which have been surging up the agenda —immigration, multiculturalism, borders, race, sex, gender, diversity, anti-racism, and more— they've simply turned inwards and away from much of the rest of Britain.

And as they’ve moved leftwards, they’ve taken the institutions they dominate with them —the BBC, the civil service, the universities, the advertisement agencies, the museums, the galleries, the public bodies— using their social and cultural power to impose a narrow set of strongly socially liberal beliefs on the rest of society which, as the latest British Social Attitudes survey shows, are supported by no more than 20% of Britain.

In this way, the institutions, the entire national conversation, and the prevailing culture have all been reshaped around the values, the tastes, the priorities, and the lifestyles of a minority new elite class. We can all see it. We can all feel it.

As Andrew Sullivan writes, it’s this sudden, sharp shift in the worldview of the new elite class which is pushing our politics, culture, and society into a profound state of cultural dislocation, and which has left many institutions looking unrecognisable to people who do not belong to this class:

“We all know what’s happened. The elites, increasingly sequestered within one political party and one media monoculture, educated by colleges and private schools that have become hermetically sealed against any non-left dissent, have had a “social justice reckoning” these past few years. And they have been ideologically transformed, with countless cascading consequences”.

As I told David Aaronovitch, while he and other members of this new elite class are fond of dismissing this polarisation as a conspiracy theory it is now widely accepted among researchers.

Whether on the right, among scholars such as Charles Murray, or on the left, among analysts like David Shor, Barack Obama’s former data guru, few if any people who actually know the data would deny that this ‘education polarisation’, whereby elite graduates have moved sharply left and non-graduates have either stood still or moved right, is taking place and is one of the most important trends in Western societies today.

And few would deny that elite graduate white liberals in particular, as part of the ‘Great Awokening’— have drifted further away than most, turning in on themselves and losing touch with everybody else.

For the new ruling class, this is entirely rational. The drift left has always been as much about social status as projecting political beliefs. Unlike the old elite, their embrace of ‘luxury beliefs’ which bring them few costs but impose heavy costs on others —like their passionate support for mass immigration, their dismissal of calls for border security as “racist”, their obsession with gender identity and dismissal of sex-based rights, and their strong support for illegal migrants, or taking yet more refugees from Gaza— have today become key markers of their sense of social status, esteem, and moral righteousness over everybody else.

Whereas the old elite flagged their money, estates, titles, and membership of exclusive private clubs on Pall Mall, the new elite use their social and cultural power to showcase their luxury beliefs to others, to accrue more social status from other elites while disassociating themselves from supposedly ‘low-status’ conservatives and populists who hold the ‘wrong’ beliefs. Talking about your ‘white privilege’ or sharing your pronouns on your e-mail signature has become the new Canada Goose jacket —a status signifier. As has deriding half the country as ignorant gammons and racists.

As David Aaronovitch aptly demonstrated at the debate, at which he routinely resorted to ad hominem and guilt-by-association, the weakest arguments in the book (how dare I speak at a conference where somebody else once-upon-time happened to say something controversial!) the members of the new elite class are also deeply intolerant of those who cling to beliefs they disagree with.

As the research shows —the new elite are the most likely to unfriend people they disagree with on Facebook, block them on Twitter, feel unhappy if their children have a relationship with a Conservative or Brexiteer, and —as I discovered after the debate— refuse to even share dinner with somebody they disagree with.

This intolerance became most visible in the aftermath of the vote for Brexit when I watched many people on the ‘liberal’ left berate much of the rest of the country as an assortment of racists, bigots, gammons, and morons, all the while making it abundantly clear they had never actually met any of them.

And it’s also reflected in how, over the last decade, the new elite have steadily expanded concepts such as ‘racism’, ‘transphobia’, ‘hate’ and ‘misinformation’ to silence or stigmatise otherwise acceptable views, such as wanting to lower immigration, strengthen out national borders or protect sex-based rights, as being socially unacceptable. As Leighton Woodhouse writes:

“The children of the ruling class have colonized the left, and are using its moral language to malign the broader … public as a bigoted, ignorant, dangerous mob. To protect the “vulnerable” and “marginalized” from this threat, they demand the ideological allegiance of every elite political, cultural, and media institution; the social and professional ostracism of dissidents; and the enforcement of speech codes both online and off. “Social justice” has become both a status signifier for the … establishment and a tool to discipline the rabble”.

Much of this reflects something else I have found deeply worrying over the last decade —how many people who belong to the new elite class are now abandoning classical liberalism in favour of a far more radical and illiberal ‘woke’ progressivism, as the research shows.

This is what the likes of Aaronovitch and others on the liberal left routinely deny or ignore, proclaiming the ‘woke’ do not exist or only do so in the imagination of Tory ‘culture warriors’.

But this is just wrong and lazy. As the liberal centrist think-tank More in Common has shown, the radical progressives who disproportionately dominate the institutions now represent a hardly insignificant 15-20% of Britain.

And when it comes to their political views they are, like the new elite class more generally, completely detached from the rest of the country.

They’re far more likely than everybody else to believe Britain is a “very racist” society, to think minority rights ‘have not gone far enough’ and should ultimately be prioritised above the majority, to think mass immigration has been positive, to say we should curtail free speech in order to promote ‘social justice’, to say British identity is a source of shame and embarrassment, to support radical gender identity theory, like thinking men can become women and women can become men or, as we saw in Scotland, children should be able to simply switch their sex, and to believe we cannot move on as a society unless we stop to address historic ‘injustices’ which happened centuries ago while simultaneously ignoring many similar injustices that are taking place in the world today but which, to be blunt, don't happen to involve white people.

So, while David Aaronovitch and many others on the liberal left like to talk endlessly about the so-called ‘liberalisation’ of Western societies, a trend they massively exaggerate (most voters still back immigration reductions, the Rwanda plan, a tough approach on crime and morality, are proud of their nation, suspicious of Islam, and so on), they routinely downplay, or are simply not interested in, how the liberal left has given a free pass to many people who are not even liberal at all.

Hence the general shock among many liberal left columnists this week when, in the aftermath of watching an alliance of radical progressives and Islamists celebrate the murder of British Jews on Britain’s streets, they discovered that, actually, the toxic combination of woke politics and mass immigration which they encouraged has unleashed people who hold deeply illiberal views.

The key problem —a big reason why I fell out of love with my old friends— is that radical progressives are not just launching a revolt against the masses; they are launching a revolt against liberalism itself.

Increasingly, they’re trying to replace the liberal regime with authoritarian dogma —capturing the institutions and corporations, silencing dissenters and compelling compliance with their radical beliefs on social justice, anti-racism, identity politics, and so on. As Sullivan notes:

“Due process? If you’re a male on campus, gone. Privacy? Stripped away — by anonymous rape accusations, exposure of private emails, violence against people’s private homes, screaming at folks in restaurants, sordid exposés of sexual encounters, eagerly published by woke mags. Non-violence? Exceptions are available if you want to “punch a fascist.” Free speech? Only if you don’t mind being fired and ostracized as a righteous consequence. Free association? You’ve got to be kidding. Religious freedom? Illegitimate bigotry. Equality? Only group equity counts now, and individuals of the wrong identity can and must be discriminated against. Color-blindness? Another word for racism. Mercy? Not for oppressors. Intent? Irrelevant. Objectivity? A racist lie. Science? A manifestation of white supremacy. Biological sex? Replaced by socially constructed gender so that women have penises and men have periods. The rule of law? Not for migrants or looters. Borders? Racist. Viewpoint diversity? A form of violence against the oppressed.” 

While Sullivan is mainly talking about America we can all see and feel the same dogma now taking root in Britain, pushed on or at least enabled by a radicalised elite class.

You can see it in the growing moral panic about our supposedly ‘institutionally racist’ country, where everything from the British countryside to cricket is now routinely denounced as ‘racist’ —despite all the available evidence showing Britain to be among the most tolerant and least prejudiced nations on earth where children from minority backgrounds are prospering, not being held back by racism or discrimination.

You see it in the speed and scale at which the new elite class is now importing, or at least turning a blind eye to, the same divisive and illiberal identitarian ‘woke’ narratives in our politics, culture, institutions and even corporations, routinely portraying Britain and America as though they are indistinguishable nations shaped by identical histories when, in fact, as Tomiwa Owolade points out, Britain is not America.

I simply have no interest in supporting a politics which routinely prioritises our fixed racial, sexual or gender identities above our individual rights, and which can only talk about what is pushing us apart rather than what is pulling together. What happened to me? No. What happened to you

You see it in how the new elite routinely gaslight the rest of the country, claiming things like mass immigration and hyper-globalisation are only ever an unalloyed moral good, when much of the evidence, like what people saw on the streets of Britain this week, says the contrary.

You see it in how they continuously deny British schoolchildren are now being indoctrinated in the very same divisive, illiberal, radical, and highly contested beliefs which have ruined America, despite a growing pile of evidence (see here and here) which shows, clearly, this is now taking place at an alarming rate.

I simply have no interest in supporting a politics which would allow our children to believe that the only interesting or significant thing about them is not the content of their character but their self-constructed gender identity or the colour of their skin. What happened to me? What happened to you.

You see it in the institutions where I work, the universities, where my former friends have spent much of the last decade denying we have any problem with free speech and expression whilst simultaneously ignoring the growing pile of evidence, remaining completely silent as universities become increasingly politicised, prioritising ‘social justice’ above free speech and the search for truth, and then saying nothing as the likes of Kathleen Stock, Jo Phoenix, Helen Joyce, Eric Kaufmann, and many other nonconformists who merely happen to hold different views were harassed, bullied, or chased off campus altogether. What happened to me? What happened to you

You saw it in the ridiculous reaction to Tony Sewell’s excellent report on race-based disparities where one member of the new elite lined up another another to repeat the religious-like mantra over and over and over again that the only reason for these disparities was ‘racism’ or ‘white supremacy’ while contending anybody who pointed to factors such as family breakdown or cultural values was also a racist. Support a politics which can no longer even have a remotely sensible discussion about social mobility and equality of opportunity? No thanks.

You see it also in the general, routine reaction to anybody who dares question or challenge the liberal consensus on mass immigration, hyper-globalization, and the hollowing out of our national democracy —the online mobbings, the shrieking, the cancellations, the lobbying of employers, the online archaeology, the coordinated way in which ‘liberal’ progressives work together to essentially try and destroy the reputations and livelihoods of anybody who disagrees with them, and the downplaying or complete avoidance of national scandals which do not support their worldview, such as the widespread sexual exploitation of young, white, working-class girls. What happened to me? You must be joking. What happened to you.

You see it in the big political and policy decisions which have shaped the last decade in British politics, which continue to shape the country today, and which reflect the simple fact that the new elite have no real interest at all in striking a compromise with the rest of the country. The obsession with diversity, equality and inclusion in every area of our national life. A model of multiculturalism which is far more interested in what distinguishes minority racial, religious, and cultural groups, and maintaining their difference, at the expense of integrating them into wider society. The indifference or hostility to any piece of evidence or story which undermines or challenges the claim immigration and multiculturalism have only ever been positive. The ongoing sexualisation, racialisation and politicisation of our children and culture. The continual push, as we saw in Scotland, Wales and now see in institutions like the NHS and civil service, to embed radical gender identity theory, despite it having no serious basis in science. The acceleration rather than reduction of mass immigration, despite tens of millions of people wanting the very opposite . The strident and shrill opposition to any plan or proposal to strengthen Britain’s borders, which the vast majority of voters also want. The politicisation of key institutions like the NHS and the police, which like many people in the new elite class now appear more comfortable demonstrating their allegiance to radical progressivism than actually doing their job.

And, as we saw this week, the complete and utter silence among the new elite class and the institutions when it comes to the ‘right’ minority groups glorifying Hamas and Islamist terror on the streets of Britain, so long as this is directed at the ‘wrong’ minority groups, like British Jews. If anything has reminded me of exactly why I fell out of love with the radicalised new elite class then it has been watching the sickening events of the last fortnight and the total silence of many of my former friends and institutions which routinely shout from the rooftops when any other minority group is perceived to have suffered hardship but could not even bring themselves to condemn in no uncertain terms the mass murder, rape, and harassment of Jews. Perhaps the only good thing to emerge from these events is they’ve pulled back the curtain for us all to see what many members of this new elite class and the institutions they dominate really think and feel.

As my friend and colleague Konstantin Kisin points out, these events have shattered the illusion, held by many people on the liberal left, that the advance of radical woke progressivism was just about protecting victims, standing up for persecuted minorities and ‘being nice’. This was only ever a fantasy, among often well-intentioned but misguided people who simply did not understand what they were dealing with.

At its core, radical progressivism, woke ideology, is and has only ever been about the pursuit of power. And after the events of the last two weeks there is no longer any doubt about how the growing number of illiberal liberals, the radical progressives, will use any power they achieve—they will seek to destroy, in any way they can, anybody who disagrees with them, and unleash an ugly, violent conflict on Western societies.

So to the liberal left, to the people who once talked about defending and upholding liberal democracy, to the people who routinely turn a blind eye to much of this, to the people who have failed to control and push back the radicals in their midst, to the people who ignore how their elite consensus has come unstuck and left millions of people behind, feeling scared and anxious about the direction of the country, I simply say this. What happened to me? No. What happened to you.

Matt Goodwin’s Substack goes to more than 57,100 subscribers from 167 countries around the world and thousands of paying supporters who support our work. Like our stuff? Then help us expand by becoming a paid supporter and access everything —the full archive, Live with Matt every Friday, exclusive posts, polling, leave comments, join the debate, get discounts, notice about events, and the knowledge you’re supporting independent writers who are pushing back against the grain. Join us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter/X and Facebook.