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What Farage sees in Donald Trump Both men are masters of identity politics

A shrewd political friendship. Jonathan Bachman/Getty Images

A shrewd political friendship. Jonathan Bachman/Getty Images


July 18, 2024   6 mins

Nigel Farage is America-bound in a show of solidarity with his battle-scared “friend”, Donald Trump. If the public attack and Trump’s defiant rise made him appear even more fit for office, the heroic death of the local fireman, Corey Comperatore, only added to the claim he was down with the people. The subsequent appointment of J. D. Vance was further confirmation; the campaign for the heart, soul and future of America will be determined by its blue-collar workers.

It’s a crusade Farage knows only too well. Despite Conservative Party infighting, the political battle ahead won’t be between competing factions on the Right. As Reform has stated and Trump has clearly understood, the real fight will be between those who feel disillusioned and alienated, and those spared such suffering. Farage’s choice to launch Reform’s manifesto in Merthyr Tydfil in the South Wales Valleys was symbolic: not only is the town synonymous with the birth of revolutionary socialism, but it was also the constituency held by the founder of the Labour Party, Keir Hardie in the early 20th century.

If the Labour Party is to counter the threat of Reform in Britain’s abandoned and despondent communities, it will need humility. And it must begin by once again respecting working-class Britain. This means taking its concerns seriously, not dismissing its anger or conjuring up fancy theories to explain voter choices away. We can’t present working-class people as uneducated and highly susceptible dupes. They know more than any social scientist about the meaning of impoverishment.

As the recent election made clear, we live in an age of deep political mistrust, where old loyalties and political allegiances based on the class system are breaking apart, where a large percentage of the electorate veers between anger and apathy, and where new forms of media have transformed the political terrain. But there has been another dramatic shift: the Americanisation of our political system, which has brought about a new political and cultural milieu in which identity has replaced class. As we can see from Reform’s success, the performative politics of emotion now reigns supreme.

Before this visit, watching Farage weighing up whether to run in Britain’s most recent election or help Trump secure a second term was not incidental. It takes us to the heart of the politics in which he thrives. Of course, characters such as Farage are not entirely new to our political scene: just as a wealthy Oswald Mosley presented himself as a man of the people, Enoch Powell, whose family had roots in the mining communities of South Wales, made a career by demonising immigrants and prophesying “rivers of blood”. Farage, however, is a different breed of politician, who speaks of British values and sovereignty, yet who takes his political and strategic ideas from beyond these shores.

Despite his “anti-woke” rhetoric, Farage speaks more about identity politics than anyone else in British politics. In this, he takes after his bloodied friend, whose 2016 election victory inspired many of Reform’s campaigning methods. Identity politics thrives on mobilising negative emotions, from general anxieties of an insecure world to amplifying each and every sense of injustice or verbal wounding to keep politics operating at skin level. That is the appeal, and it is also the reason why our elections have become so volatile. And as the past days have shown, it has bred a new species of violence that can’t be ignored.

We have a new category of floating voters today who, unmoored from traditional ideology and allegiances, no longer neatly sit in what we once thought of as the centre ground. Again, the United States is instructive here. Take the case of McDowell County in West Virginia: a former mining region and one of the poorest areas of post-industrial America, topping many of the league tables for social deprivation. In 2008, 53% of the community voted for Barack Obama and his message of hope and change. Yet in 2020, 79% voted Trump. The warning for Labour should be clear: when disappointment prevails, any change is welcomed, and it is those who feel that their lives are stuck in a deep-seated statis whose choices are the most volatile.

“Despite his “anti-woke” rhetoric, Farage speaks more about identity politics than anyone else in British politics.”

All this would suggest that immigration is only really a problem when an economy is doing badly. And let’s be honest, for many who live in traditional working-class areas in Britain, things have been grim for quite some time. But immigration is also a highly emotive smokescreen: Trump was the first to realise that, by provoking the culture war on social media, he could distract from his actual policies.

The Left should ignore Reform’s distracting rhetoric and instead focus on the substance of their policy agenda. I am at a loss as to why a single journalist didn’t asked Farage during the campaign what he thought of the banking crisis of 2008, which due to fraud, negligence and greed was the catalyst for the following age of austerity that decimated the living standards of the poor. A former city-trader who worked on the commodities exchanges, we can surely guess his loyalties?

Behind all the bluster, there is a clear set of policies Reform stands for. It is clear it wants less taxes for the wealthy, greater powers for multi-national corporations, less worker rights for those in gainful employment, lower social security benefits, and a doing away with all those unfair inherence taxes on two-million-pound properties. No wonder they would rather seek to evoke the negative emotions of the electorate, for these are hardly policies that will liberate the forgotten on Tyneside.

To his credit, Keir Starmer has just appointed what is arguably the most working-class cabinet in history. But the party will need to go much farther to regain the trust of those communities that birthed the Labour Party more than a century ago. That means delivering upon policy promises to help the underprivileged, and most importantly shifting away from the identity politics sewer in which Farage continues to swim. This can be swiftly done by showing an absolute commitment to freedom of speech, thereby leaving concerns about cancel culture to the hyper moralists.

This would require a willingness to defend the right of others to stand for what they believe in. I engaged in a conversation earlier this week with David Bull on Talk television not because I agree with anything Reform stands for, but because perhaps the most radical thing we can do in today’s climate is to listen to those we fundamentally disagree with and show we can move beyond a divisive and dismissive stance.

Challenging Reform therefore means changing the terms of the debate so that poor, white communities feel they can exercise political agency. One unfortunate recent development has been the imposition of the term “privilege” upon broken communities that clearly have none in any meaningful sense. I was first properly sensitised to the common usage of the word in a university setting during the pandemic. By coincidence, I also happened to be reading a biography of the American singer, actor and black activist Paul Robeson. I couldn’t imagine for a second that he would have used that term as he marched in solidarity with hungry miners from South Wales on London’s wintery streets in 1928, in a spontaneous scene that would become the start of a beautiful friendship.

Of course, campaigns for racial and gender equality have been hugely important and the ongoing fight for justice in the face of racial violence remains necessary. But if the introduction of race and gender were important correctives in recognising the plight of marginalised groups, something has been lost along the way. What concerns me is how conceptual saviours have used race to castigate poor white Brits — often heterosexual men — who vote for Reform. Rather than labelling all Reform voters as intolerant racists, the Labour Party must speak to voters about why the Reform narrative is so appealing.

Beyond this, the Labour Party must have a more honest conversation on the question of racial politics that is open to its complexities. The realisation that among the most vocal supporters of the Rwanda Bill were second- and third-generation immigrant politicians such as Rishi Sunak, Suella Braverman and Priti Patel should be enough to temper enthusiasm for the uncritical deployment of intersectional analysis. Racial politics has never been straight-forward. And the relegation of class background in the intersectional schematic only supports the idea that identity politics is just a bourgeoise version of victim Top Trumps, where on every occasion the white heterosexual male comes bottom regardless of social status. One strategy to disarm the allure of Reform could therefore be to positively rethink what diversity means so the working classes feel their presence is recognised and their voices are heard.

In his first speech as Prime Minister, Starmer called for “a bigger reset”. Part of that reset should be to take a step back from believing social media in any way represents the views of what we might dare to call “the people”. Social media has become so toxic that it is leading us all into a dangerous abyss. Besides, if recent events in France have taught us anything, it’s that the countryside is bigger than Twitter.


Professor Brad Evans holds a Chair in Political Violence & Aesthetics at the University of Bath. His book, How Black Was My Valley: Poverty and Abandonment in a Post-Industrial Heartland, is published with Repeater Books.


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T Bone
T Bone
4 months ago

Socialism should be redefined to Projection as Praxis.

When you say:
“Identity politics thrives on mobilising negative emotions, from general anxieties of an insecure world to amplifying each and every sense of injustice or verbal wounding to keep politics operating at skin level.”

This is pure projection. It is literally what every form Marxism (whether Class-based or Intersectional Marxism) always does and always will do until it has imposed a police state.

It is true that some Socialists are decent and may genuinely believe in the vision of a deconstructed artificial hierarchy but in reality, it’s a pipe dream. You can’t artificially create functioning social hierarchies and the belief that you can is a religious faith principle based on a distorted perception of human nature.

The fact that Trump and Farage support working people without a simultaneous desire to force the “democratization of the workplace” is a good thing. It’s a practical, realistic and moderate outlook on how a society can function at the highest possible level for the maximum amount of people.

Socialism and Free Speech are not compatible. Once again, just because some Socialists believe in the free exchange of ideas doesn’t mean that a critical mass will. Socialism is Utilitarian. The ends justify the means.

Why would revolutionary Socialists ever feel it necessary to call themselves “Democratic Socialists.” It’s because they know deep down that Socialism can’t be sustainably Democratic. How does it respond when a plurality of people don’t want Socialism. Does it abandon Socialism? No, it just narrows the window of acceptable thought down to Socialists positions and allows Democracy within that narrow window.

Martin M
Martin M
4 months ago
Reply to  T Bone

I read a story somewhere in the last week, about Cuba’s “Old Revolutionaries”, who were struggling to make ends meet on their pensions from the State. While they were undoubtedly “doing it tough”, it was hard to feel too sorry for them, because, in embracing Communism, they “backed the wrong horse”.

El Uro
El Uro
4 months ago
Reply to  Martin M

You are a humanist. People like me feel nothing but wild gloating

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
4 months ago
Reply to  T Bone

And if you don’t show up in the window, well the gulag is always available.

Jim Veenbaas
Jim Veenbaas
4 months ago

The author spends the first 80% of the essay crapping on Farage and Trump for playing identity politics – say what? – and then ends by saying Labour should drop identity politics to attract Reform voters. Some pretty schizophrenic logic here.

“One strategy to disarm the allure of Reform could therefore be to positively rethink what diversity means so the working classes feel their presence is recognised and their voices are heard.”

Isn’t this the whole point of Farage and Trump?

Ian Barton
Ian Barton
4 months ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

The article quickly became another tedious TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) and FDS rant. The author’s students should not be getting into debt on the back of poor writing like this.

Martin M
Martin M
4 months ago

The main difference between Trump and Farage is that you’d have a beer with Farage.

Prashant Kotak
Prashant Kotak
4 months ago

Why is this essay, written by an academic, so shockingly unsophisticated?

Jon Barrow
Jon Barrow
4 months ago
Reply to  Prashant Kotak

True enough, but hardly surprising. There are more than a fair share of daft academics.

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
4 months ago
Reply to  Prashant Kotak

I think you’ve answered your own question through the term “academic”.

I almost laughed when he sought to characterise resentment against uncontrolled immigration as only occurring due to adverse economic circumstances, as if hordes of culturally dissonant peoples descending (or being placed) in a previously mainly heterogeneous community would otherwise be viewed with equanimity.

Sure, economics plays a part, but integration (lack of), criminal gangs and values inimical to the UK are so easily dismissed? Of course, it’s largely in working class communities where these things become manifest (grooming gangs, for instance) and precisely why such communities have a renewed sense of grievance, even when economic deprivation has existed for decades. The author is, in short, an idiot.

El Uro
El Uro
4 months ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

The author is, in short, an idiot.
.
I have one more reason to hate you. You stole my opinion!
.
PS. By the way, where do they find such authors? Perhaps this is a seasonal phenomenon. More or less smart people on vacation

Richard Spira
Richard Spira
4 months ago
Reply to  Prashant Kotak

Apart from the obvious lack of leftist self awareness, the semi-literate confusion between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’ is wince-making.

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
4 months ago
Reply to  Richard Spira

Or several, probably.

David L
David L
4 months ago
Reply to  Prashant Kotak

Because many academics are quite dim.

mac mahmood
mac mahmood
4 months ago
Reply to  Prashant Kotak

How so?

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
4 months ago

Working people are deserting the Labour Party. ‘No problemo’, says Brad Evans, ‘No need to change the neo-liberal, globalist policies, just change the propaganda’.

Susan Grabston
Susan Grabston
4 months ago

So presumanlbly the muslim chairman of Reform is a racist? This article started with a conclusion and then went on to justify it. An hypothesis and an enquiring mind might have produced better results.

Anthony Roe
Anthony Roe
4 months ago

Made me quite misty-eyed. The sooner Professor Evans can be sent off to pick stones out of fields the better for us and him.

Ben Jones
Ben Jones
4 months ago

‘Professor Brad Evans holds a Chair in Political Violence & Aesthetics’
What on earth does this mean?

Peter B
Peter B
4 months ago
Reply to  Ben Jones

It means he’s wasting your taxes.
Perhaps state funding for universities is less of their total income than it used to be, but there’s certainly some taxpayer input.

Susan Grabston
Susan Grabston
4 months ago
Reply to  Ben Jones

It means you’re paying for him

Peter B
Peter B
4 months ago

A pitiful cartoon level misdiagnosis.
Isn’t is curious how those on the left always accuse their opponents of their own worst faults ?
So identity politics and culture wars were now started on the right by people like Farage and Trump. Characters who are clearly not the result of a popular revolt against such policies being forced on them.
EP did not “demonise immigrants”. Only an ignoramus who hasn’t bothered to do even the most basic research could repeat such tired fake history.
The one constant in all this is the determination of people like this author – in spire of his claims to the contrary – never to listen to or respect people they disagree with:
“Part of that reset should be to take a step back from believing social media in any way represents the views of what we might dare to call “the people”.”
So if social media is the only outlet people have left to show their views, we’ll just carry on ignoring them. They are the deplorables, after all.

R E P
R E P
4 months ago
Reply to  Peter B

Spot on – imagine how useless at analysis his students will be.

mac mahmood
mac mahmood
4 months ago
Reply to  Peter B

Social media are not the only outlet left to the people. There is UnHerd, or the Express, or the Mail, or The Telegraph, to name but a few.

Richard Calhoun
Richard Calhoun
4 months ago

This is such a dishonest piece … populism has occurred because both the Labour and Conservative Parties have turned into the ‘Uni Party’.
Ignoring the electorate on so much for so long, immigration being only one example, they have destroyed our economy and our values through ‘Welfarism’
The end result is going to be the overturning of the present order that has been in place for the last 25 years.

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
4 months ago

Starmer himself said the quiet part out loud in his interview with Emily Maitlis:

‘Westminster or Davos?’

‘Davos’

Every time.

Politics is a career the highest rungs of which are no longer in the gift of the voters.

Ian Barton
Ian Barton
4 months ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

Excellent last line.

Richard 0
Richard 0
4 months ago

Unherd?? I don’t think so. This is the kind of unthought-out ‘same-old’ one can read all the time as the left/liberal blob try to make sense of a world that is leaving them behind.

Stephen Philip
Stephen Philip
4 months ago

“which due to fraud, negligence and greed was the catalyst for the following age of austerity”
No. It was primarily due to Gordon Brown’s runaway spending which left the UK with the worst deficit in the G20 and required drastic action to put right.

Terry M
Terry M
4 months ago

Trump and Farage do not practice identity politics. Identity means an unchanging inherent personal condition like race, sex, ‘gender’, color, national origin, etc., not economic or social situation.
Only leftists embrace identity politics. Leftists are collectivists, who see people as mere numbers of some collection, whereas conservatives and libertarians value individuals who judge a person by their character (and accomplishments) not the color of their skin. A Republican said that.

Daniel Lee
Daniel Lee
4 months ago

The author profoundly misunderstands what “identity politics” means. For the Left it means sorting and helping groups with government power. For Trump and the Right it means unifying people and requiring the government to leave them alone so they can help themselves.

R E P
R E P
4 months ago

For an academic (modern academia is degraded) Evan’s appeal to identity politics is a mirror image of the truth. The left overtly champions melanin content. Trump doesn’t and Farage doesn’t. They just want to control the influx of new citizens!
Sociology Professors don’t do numbers. The 46% of non-ethnic British voted for Brexit. I have met civil servants who believe these were all white working class which is why they misunderstand modern Britain. They never seem to think that people who are not European were unlikely to have the attachment to the EU!

Steven Targett
Steven Targett
4 months ago

As a long time resident of the so called Red Wall and a white heterosexual male I can tell you why socialists will never get my vote. I don’t like my community being colonised by incomers whose culture is fundamentally inimical to mine. I don’t like being told that aman in a frock is a woman and being criminalised for saying it isn’t so. I don’t like the idea that my hard earned prosperity can be snatched away at the stroke of some apparatchik’s pen. I could go on bit that’s enough to be going on with.

Also the smug arrogant complacency that wafts of leftist intellectuals like the author is pretty repellent.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
4 months ago

It is so sad to see how UK academics has fallen.

Ian Barton
Ian Barton
4 months ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

Losing half of them would be no loss. The GDP lost on student income would be more than repaid by reduced idiocy – and reduced immigration.

Chipoko
Chipoko
4 months ago

Low quality. Grasp of English not 100%. Unimpressed.
Sir Keir Starmer arguably takes the cake for identity politics with his shameful ‘bending the knee’ antics.
Farage says more about identity politics than any other UK politician because he is one of very few who has the courage to speak out about it. We need voices like his to call out the likes of Starmer, Lammy & Co and the Conservative lot who were just as bad.

Christopher Chantrill
Christopher Chantrill
4 months ago

Wow. You commenters really got the Perfessor sorted.
But let’s look at it another way. No wonder the UK is in a mess with chaps like Brad Evans clogging up the Pump Room. But I expect that Sir Walter Elliot, Bart. would approve of his good looks.

David Harris
David Harris
4 months ago

“Both men are masters of identity politics”
That’s why the Left hate them so much. They’ve co-opted the Left’s own preferred weapon and made it their own. And good luck to them.

Robert Fauver
Robert Fauver
4 months ago

What happened to the generally thoughtful, factual, and insightful commentary I had come to expect from UnHerd. This article is rubbish!

Susan Grabston
Susan Grabston
4 months ago

I’ve spent the past 2 days reading and listening to what the Vance pick means. Clearly through a succession of primaries Trump has taken over the Republicn party. Maga needs to be codified to survive Trump as a political movement and Vance is an important part of that. The republicans are moving to the sweet spot – right of centre on culture, left of centre on economics. The free market grandees of the Repubican party are being pushed to the sides. Reform is already in the right position on culture and my bet is that as they professionalise their economic policies will move left. Contact with reality in Boston and Clacton will shift perspective as well as plurality of voices.
As for the comment about diversity finding a home for the white working class (bless) – why don’t we just go for unity and judge each other on the content of our character? Brahman woke can’t be intellectually squared -inter-sectionaliy falls on its own sword. I still laugh at the idea of white Irish privilege. Indeed, there are an increasing number of US historians who believe the Irish were the first slaves to those shores. So, top of the reparations list or a place on your itsy bitsy diversity chart?

J B
J B
4 months ago

“…If the Labour Party is to counter the threat of Reform… it will need humility… ”

Labour are f***ed then. I see no signs of understanding or empathy, let alone humility, from a Labour party captured by a regressive metroplitan elite. Labour, as I knew it, was captured and withered away long ago. (Ditto the Tories).

The Uniparty blob will hopefully receive their dues at the next election…

Damon Hager
Damon Hager
4 months ago

The white working class (particularly its men) see that identity politics is available to everybody else, but not them. They also resent being talked down to by an effete metropolitan bourgeoisie.
Most working-class people have nothing against immigrants per se, but they’re alarmed at the speed and scale of immigration. It’s easy to be relaxed about these changes if, like most so many self -appointed tribunes of the proletariat, you can safely retreat to your seventeenth-century Oxfordshire farmhouse.

David M
David M
4 months ago

The author needs to support his claim of “the most working class cabinet in history.” Rayner apart my impression is that they are completely middle class as a cabinet.

mac mahmood
mac mahmood
4 months ago

The idea that the state should treat all citizens equally, is not a call for diversity. It is a call for the rule of law.

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
4 months ago

“Enoch Powell, whose family had roots in the mining communities of South Wales, made a career by demonising immigrants”.

Power didn’t demonise immigrants he warned of the potential consequences are mass immigration. It was perhaps a little melodramatic overstated but we have had the import of other people’s disputes and arguments leading to violence in the streets, and masses of low level tension between ethic communities.

And “all this would suggest that immigration is only really a problem when an economy is doing badly”.

This simply isn’t true! Talk about saying you will listen to working class communities and then patronisingly ignoring what they actually say!

Mass immigration is visibly and rapidly transforming our country. No, the working class are not stupid and can see perfectly well that migration is leading to a huge increase in the population, vast requirements for new development, and an increase in cultural tensions. They are also acutely aware that the demands of the new migrant communities (and remember these are not just workers but their families) are going in competition with their own!

This really isn’t that difficult to understand but much the left seems to just put it fingers in its ears and shout la la forever.