Celebrations on Brexit night Photo: Getty/Daniel Leal-Olivas
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The global debate about populism has gone terribly wrong. It has become utterly obsessed with impoverished “left-behind workers” while ignoring the group that really matters: middle-class elites.
This is the thesis laid out in the Financial Times this week by Simon Kuper. What Trump, Brexit and Salvini have in common is not that they represent a backlash among the economically left behind but that they signal the “revenge of the middle-class anti-elitist”.
And who is this middle-class anti-elitist? Well, according to Kuper, he (most populist voters are men) is part of the “comfortably well off”. He owns his home. He lives on an “above-average income”. He lives not in a left-behind town in northern England where the factories shut but in the more prosperous southeast, which enjoys countless economic advantages. He is, in short, comfortably middle-class. All of this leads Kuper to ask what he thinks is the key question: why do well-off people vote against the system?
This is an interesting question but if you are trying to understand the current populist moment then it is the one wrong one to ask. It is also a question that reveals a lot about where people go wrong in the wider debate. Let me explain why.
To back up his thesis about middle-class populist elites, Kuper, like many others, points to the findings that two-thirds of Trump voters in 2016 lived in households that enjoyed above average incomes while “[m]ost British Leave voters lived in the south of England, and 59 per cent were middle class”.
Kuper is by no means the first person to try and make this point. In his description of middle-class elites, he approvingly cites the work of Danny Dorling, a geographer at Oxford University. Like Kuper, Dorling argued that Brexit is “unfairly blamed on the working class in the north of England” while “most people who voted Leave lived in the south of England”. These are interesting points but they are also very misleading points.
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SubscribeAn interesting article that is as clear as its writer tends to be when speaking in public.
This article nicely shows the misuse of stats, these don’t appear to complex statistical paradoxes – instead they seem to be straight forward lying.
it is frightening how many facts that we all ‘know’ in good faith (left or right) are based on lies like these.