Netflix is degrading our politics Adolescence isn't a documentary

In the 1850s, Gustave Flaubert began an experiment that would impact culture to this very day. What would happen, he wondered, if someone lived their life in the manner of the books they read? The resulting novel, Madame Bovary, was a sensation and a scandal. It follows Emma Bovary, the wife of a country doctor, in the fictional Yonville-l’Abbaye. She is an avid reader of popular romances, which inspire her to attempt to transcend her tepid bourgeois existence. The resulting affairs prove ruinous. In contrast to Romanticism, Emma is not virtuous but likewise she’s not unsympathetic. Her trajectory and its imperatives do not easily fit into a cautionary morality tale. After all, she merely believed what she read, and it burned her life, and her husband’s, to the ground.

The outrage was immediate. Flaubert was hauled before the courts on grounds of obscenity. His crime was rejecting idealism, showing life in its inglorious and alluring undress. But he was acquitted because the society he captured so perceptively was more guilty than he.

Post-Flaubert, many novels were written with righteous social purpose. Some, such as Zola’s Germinal and much of Dickens, brought about political change. Yet this movement, realism, was still an “ism” with the distortions and biases those prisms are susceptible to. It is still fiction. At its best, fiction is indeed the telling of lies to reveal deeper truths. What happens though if the intention to reveal a deeper truth is not present at all? What happens when we are swamped by fictions? In excess, any medicine becomes a poison.

The realm of politics is one beset by fictions — sycophancy, propaganda, spin, solipsism, the colossal distance between rarified worlds and street life. It has been ever thus. Yet the recent swerve of politicians into an infantilised Lalaland has felt particularly jarring. It now feels as if they actually believe the fictions they evoke and certainly expect us to. Earlier this year, the Labour MP Stella Creasy opposed changes to Home Office guidance on refugees, claiming, “Frankly, this process would deny Paddington Bear — he did the same thing, he came by an irregular route, but we gave him sanctuary.”

In the US, this lapse into sentimental fabulism has been taking place for some time. For years, Democrats have clung hubristically to The West Wing, particularly Martin Sheen’s fictional President Jed Bartlet, like some alternative universe where Trump didn’t happen. There was more than a hint of the Kennedys to Bartlet, bolstering the “what could have been” Camelot myth that haunts American liberals. Once, there may have been a nobility to such legends, but The West Wing obsession merely revealed the smugness, complacency, denial, and callous aloofness of the Democrats that helped spawn President Trump. For when fiction becomes delusion, the comfort blanket becomes a straitjacket.

What’s needed then is a hefty dose of gritty uncompromising realism. A cultural reset by telling it like it is. The Netflix knife-crime drama Adolescence appears to be such a moment. It is well-shot, acted, the subject — in which a child is radicalised on the internet — is devastating, and it is generally superior by, admittedly low, mainstream standards.

Yet there is something off from the beginning, with the 13-year-old protagonist appearing more like the cherubic Pears Soap bubble boy than a murderous incel. Of course, physiognomy is deceptive, but the intention was clear from the beginning — our sympathies were being purchased on questionable terms. The implication is clearly, how could such an innocent doe-eyed boy do such a thing? This appeals to white liberal middle-class viewers, cracking open a bottle of white and penitentially subjecting themselves to an “important” series. It does so by chastising them, one of the bourgeois’ prevailing kinks, but also by terrifying them into a moral panic, and by providing a pat answer to a quagmire of a problem.

The response to the show has revealed how far we — and our leaders — have fallen down the fictional rabbit hole. It has been treated as if it were a documentary. In a more innocent time, this could be forgiven, but not now.

From behind the curve, Keir Starmer led the way, placing this work of fiction at the heart of the Government’s attention and proposed future policy. He has encouraged the series to be shown in schools and parliament, and voiced concerns of “a problem with boys and young men”. There has been no shortage of actual violence in society, its unpalatable realities demanding urgent attention. The figures for knife crime in the UK make for grim reading. Knife Crime Statistics | The Ben Kinsella Trust – over 15,000 in London alone in 2023/24. Yet Starmer and his administration have only been shocked into action by a fictional miniseries. As a result, they are now campaigning not against gang culture, Islamist radicalisation, the collapse of the extended and nuclear family, the blight of fatherlessness, the economic deprivation that fuels crime, drugs and violence, the ghettoisation of communities — but against the spectre of the online Manosphere. They have found a conveniently hateful hate figure in the guise of Andrew Tate, and a convenient stooge in the alienated white working-class boy, one of the few demographics it is now acceptable to deride and exclude.

There’s a cyclopean simplicity to Adolescence and its ilk: one explanation, one solution, one villain. This chimes with the wave of articles that fuel this moral panic. This is, accordingly, an apocalypse of young boys and smartphones, as if girls aren’t susceptible to social contagion. Regardless of the undoubted impact of being terminally online on young boys (or any of us), this stands as a monumental example of concern trolling. We know from previous moral panics (comic books, Mortal Kombat, gangsta rap, video nasties, satanic panic), it leads nowhere. Indeed, some (stranger danger, paedogeddon) have led us to our current dire situation: kids stuck indoors, stuck on parent simulator tablets and devices, with the added development gap of lockdown warping their pliant minds. Self-declared progressives now find themselves the inheritors of censorious “won’t somebody please think of the children” pearl-clutching. All of which is predicated on them hearing what they want to hear, rather than what they need.

The subtitle of Madame Bovary — “Provincial Manners” — is rarely mentioned but it is apt. For all their metropolitanism, elite liberals often live in villages within cities, celebrating multi-ethnic culture the way a visiting diplomat or an aloof travel writer might — the food, the music, the colour. G.K. Chesterton shrewdly pointed out that this was a clique far more parochial than anyone from the “provinces”, where you are forced to be with people who are different. In wealthy parts of a city, you can choose circles of friends who think the same way, with the threat of exile for anyone who deviates from in-group conformity, which, unsurprisingly, is a collection of compelling fictions.

The other reason for the primacy of fiction is more insidious — control. The damage to free speech under specious weaponised hate-speech legislation is overtaken only by that done to equality under the law by the new sentencing guidelines in favour of ethnic, cultural or faith minorities. Those of us concerned about the Overton window crawling endlessly Right should recognise it is not some rebirth of fascism but rather the collapse of the liberal-Left into illiberalism.

Few among us would lament Andrew Tate being ushered from the stage and therein lies the danger. Who is next after that fails to solve anything? The truth is such campaigns don’t solve anything but simply obfuscate and misdirect. Their quick-fix solutions will do nothing about the underlying factors, the soil of despair, alienation, rage. So, others will step in — Islamist mullahs, gang leaders, misogynists, groomers and grifters of various types. Andrew Tate is not the creator of the alienation and debasement, he, and his kind, are the exploiters of political and social failures. The red pill only works when boys are already feeling disenfranchised. Where the damage began, and who profited from it, will remain obscured and unchallenged.

For them, nothing will change because the political class will not change. It does not care that generations of working-class boys will emerge into a world that has no place for them, even as it relies on them materially. They face economic precarity, the dismantling of industries and trades, and are effectively locked out of creative industries monopolised by the rich. If non-white, their marginalisation will be co-opted or treated as the sum of their existence. If white, there is the bonus of being discriminated against for their “privilege”. It is arguably even worse for girls, if grooming gangs and their cover-up is anything to go by. The aloofness of the powerful, snug in their own fictional world, sows a whirlwind for others, with the victims, and their stories, vanishing like the murdered girl Katie in Adolescence.

It’s scarcely a surprise, then, that those in whom society has no investment tend to reciprocate. And there is little to suggest that Labour will address any of the underlying economic causes of alienation, crime and violence. Taking phones away just isn’t going to cut it. Meanwhile, we are like Bovary, believing untruths. Until we face the true stories we do not want to hear and set aside our comforting fictions, others will remain locked in tragedies of our making.