Quite predictably, the Gary Lineker debacle spawned a number of regrettable and rather silly takes. However, there was one, just so egregiously wrong that I have resorted to Substack to respond to it.
A week ago Matt Goodwin penned an article accusing Britain’s “New Elite”, including Lineker, of being out of touch with the rest of the Britain. So far, so standard. After all, the narrative of an out of touch “Liberal Elite” has been an effective part of the British Right’s playbook for decades now.
Then Goodwin posted this tweet:
Goodwin’s tweet is not just totally incorrect, but it reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of Britain’s class system and its history. It is not just that the elite have always had a different culture, but that (at least since 1066) the class system has been constructed around these cultural differences.
From the Norman Conquest, we inherited the key fault line of our national class system: a divide between a culturally and linguistically French elite and a sidelined, Anglo-Saxon commonfolk. We can still see this rift quite clearly in our language. Words of French origin almost always have a higher register than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts.
This linguistic divide is what makes the British class system unique. As opposed to the genealogical basis of contemporary Indian, Chinese and Japanese caste systems, a linguacultural barrier was more easily surmountable for those who aspired to be part of the elite. Indeed, after the Norman conquest, much of the existing English elite assimilated and learnt French language and culture themselves. And though today’s elite may no longer have to learn an entirely different language, they are still expected to speak and act “properly”. So, they pack their children off to boarding school where they learn a higher-register, Anglo-Norman dialectic otherwise known as “Received Pronunciation”.
Language is not the only part of elite culture which the Normans indelibly shaped. Noblesse oblige and the polite customs which it entailed formed yet another way of distinguishing the elite. While beer and ale may still be the drinks of choice for most of England, our elite have preserved the wine-guzzling habits of their cultural ancestors. Equally, French food is still regarded as higher status and more refined than Anglo-Saxon staples.
So while Henry V may have brought an end to French-speaking English kings in 1413, their influence has persisted to this very day.
Yet the narrative behind the British class system has stagnated. Many still view the primary antagonists of Britain’s class war as an effete and Frenchified Victorian aristocracy. Those who don’t instead tend to buy Goodwin and Co.’s narrative of a politically liberal “New Elite”, ironically a narrative which is most prominently spouted by those who would otherwise be considered part of the Victorian “Old Elite”.
Though the decaying British class system may still exist, both views make the fundamental mistake in assuming that the elite is British. As I have previously written, during the twentieth century, these national elites were supplanted by a global elite. This is of course not to say, as some cranks do, that some shadowy “globalist” conspiracy runs the place. Instead it’s a simple consequence of both capital and man becoming far more mobile across the twentieth century. Technology has enabled wealth and status to become deracinated.
There is no coherent culture or politics to this new elite either. America, as the centre of cultural gravity, may have the greatest influence, yet this only creates further contradictions. For example, most Indian Americans tend to vote Democrat, yet also (especially in the case of elite Indian Americans) support the far-right, nationalist BJP in India.
Goodwin has it completely wrong, then. The great shift in class has not been a cultural divergence but the dismantling of cultural barriers altogether. Capitalism, in the totality of its triumph over the old orders, has created an elite so diverse and culturally incoherent that such barriers cannot possibly exist.
Nice work Sam! And I learned a new word “deracinated” .. BOOM! 🙌🙌