THE REVOLT AGAINST PATRONISING POLITICS: REFLECTIONS ON DAVID GOODHART’S THE ROAD TO SOME

I love the uneducated!
Presidential Candidate Donald Trump

President Donald Trump’s electoral win showed how the US public is …
sick of having their views dictated to them.

Liberal Democrat Miranda Green writing in the Financial Times1

Talk about humility gives occasion for pride to the proud and humility to the humble. Similarly, sceptical arguments allow the positive to be positive. Few speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, dubiously of scepticism. We are nothing but lies, duplicity, contradiction, and we hide and disguise ourselves from ourselves.
Blaise Pascal: Pensées2

In an essay published in Horizon (1944) Arthur Koestler attempted to define The Intelligentsia, who it comprised and what its influence was at different times in history. Until the Enlightenment this was not such a difficult task – clerics in the Middle Ages, scholars in the Renaissance or the leaders of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation were indisputably the highly educated layer of their day. This did not mean that their opinions or discoveries were necessarily respected (there was, after all, such a thing as heresy), but it did usually mean that their status was. By the twentieth century, things were not so simple. Koestler quotes two definitions of the intelligentsia, firstly from the Concise Oxford Dictionary 3rd ed. of 1934: “Intelligentsia: The part of a nation (esp. the Russian) that aspires to independent thinking”; and secondly from the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, 2nd ed., 1936: “The class consisting of the educated portion of the population regarded as capable of forming public opinion.” Koestler opts for the first definition, regarding the second as having proved “too optimistic”.3

Leaving aside the glaringly different implications of these two definitions, we could begin by focusing on Koestler’s characteristically sardonic comment that it has proved “too optimistic” to assume that the “educated portion of the population” is “capable of forming public opinion”. Does he mean that public opinion is hopelessly resistant to the intelligentsia’s attempts to educate it? Or does he mean that the intelligentsia is frequently not competent to do so? Grammatically either or both interpretations are possible. When a British cabinet minister remarked that people had “had enough of experts” during the Brexit referendum, he sparked outrage among the intelligentsia, or those who considered themselves as such; he also struck a chord among thousands of people who were fed up with being lectured to by “experts”, particularly economists, whose word was taken as the gold standard by the liberal media, but whose prognostications proved in many cases to be spectacularly wrong.

This feeling is captured in a recent article in the centre-left journal Prospect, the authors of which have some harsh things to say about academic careerism, or at least the public’s perception of such. They imply that the anti-expert backlash sees too many academics as con-men, whose considered opinions are “a self-reinforcing apparatus for putting themselves beyond challenge – to advance [their] status, their careers, or, most damagingly of all, their political views over those of the less educated classes”.4 Economists themselves, they finger the social sciences as having a prominent role in undermining respect for academic authority, especially in their own discipline and psychology. Like all generalisations this is unfair, but the “five things they don’t tell you about economics” satirically listed at the beginning of an economics primer by dissident economist Ha-Joon Chang rings dismayingly true in the light of the dismal science’s pretensions – and indeed rather dismal recent record: “1. 95% of economics is common sense. 2. Economics is not a science. 3. Economics is politics. 4. Never trust an economist. 5. Economics is too important to be left to the experts.”5

But who actually are the intelligentsia nowadays? Obviously academics regard themselves as such, as do the more cerebral type of journalists collectively known as the chattering classes. Politicians have borderline intelligentsia status, being chiefly the transmitters of ideas that have their source in the intelligentsia, but Civil Service mandarins are undoubtedly intelligentsia. Creative artists are members of the intelligentsia, or at least regarded as such, since their views are solicited for forums such as radio and TV discussions. Perhaps successful businessmen consider themselves the intelligentsia, but the malfeasance of overpaid bankers, for which society has paid dearly, has been enough to give this part of the intelligentsia a bad name. Then of course there is a long tail of largely participatory rather than initiatory intelligentsia which includes the people who read the more serious analytical press, attend book circles, or are employed in the arts and cultural sphere. Finally there are plenty of pseudo-intellectuals, hard to define, but you know one when you meet one.

The alert reader will already have spotted that, barring a small cohort of dissidents, the vast majority in the above categories share strikingly similar views on most of the big issues of the day, what they call “liberal” views. Group thinkers, rather than the independent thinkers of the first dictionary definition quoted above, they usually exhibit enthusiasm for the EU and indifference or hostility to national sovereignty, a dogmatic but naive belief in so-called multiculturalism and “diversity”, as well as globalism (or “globaloney” as one of its critics calls it), enthusiasm for large sums to be doled out in foreign aid, at home a desire for state funding that goes well beyond the core functions of welfare, infrastructure, education and security to embrace large areas of culture, an apparently endless extension of “human rights”, and so on. Their opprobrium, sometimes taking the form of real hatred (“Tory scum”, “Brexit voters are xenophobes, pond life, ignorant”, “European voters opposed to mass immigration are all racists”) is accordingly directed at those who are sceptical about some or all of the above enthusiasms. However, until Brexit and the election of Trump they had mostly got their own way, at least since the demise of Thatcherism. The anger they have displayed since these two democratic bombshells is at least in part due to their sense of injured merit, their sheer astonishment and indignation that they no longer set the agenda as heretofore.

A good example of such liberal hauteur was the post-Referendum comment of a key organiser of the Remain campaign, who was indignant that the BBC, as its charter requires it to do, had given equal billing to protagonists of Leave and Remain during the Brexit referendum campaign. “You’d have the IMF, then you’d have a crackpot economist, or you’d have a FTSE 100 CEO and then someone who makes a couple of prams in Sheffield. It was balanced in terms of the amount of coverage, but not balanced in terms of the quality of the people.”6 The assumption that any economist who challenges the view of the IMF (which recently had to apologise publicly to the British Chancellor for sternly predicting that his policies would have the opposite [and damaging] effect from the one they did have) is automatically a crackpot, is a classic example of elitist hubris; likewise the idea that a massively over-remunerated CEO, safely insulated from the struggling small businessman, knows what is good for the latter better than he knows it himself. Leaving aside the dubious record of economists, such attitudes blandly subordinate democracy to economic power relations.

Hubris was pushed to its logical conclusion by a Financial Times commentator who opined that Brexit had proved that “popular democracy” was unsuitable for deciding matters of “national interest” because the voters were “uninterested and uninformed”. “Uninterested”? The Brexit turnout was near a record high at seventy-two per cent and more people voted Leave than had ever voted for an individual government. If voters were “uninformed” (for which read “unimpressed by the establishment line”) the people to blame are those who thought that scare tactics and threats were a suitable substitute for arguing the case. As for “national interest”, if voters are not allowed to vote on that, what are they supposed to vote on?7 Since general elections also involve complex matters of economic, social and foreign policy, someone using this argument would have to explain why he or she does not also favour banning general elections. Such a person appears to think that the bigger or more fundamental the question to be determined, the less right the voters should have to determine it. This is a point that might conceivably have some validity when urgent decisions in wartime are required. However, when the long-term direction of the nation is being decided at a time of peace, it is a view that is both patronising and anti-democratic.

In any case the data adduced by the Remain camp was not objective analysis but chosen for polemical effect, just as was the case for the Leave campaign. Merely stating that “our data is better than yours and our people are smarter than yours” does not remove bias in the selection of such data, what liberal intellectuals themselves call “cherry-picking”. The authors of the article previously quoted in Prospect seem to be making this point when they write that “the result of putting empirical analysis on a pedestal, can be less tolerance towards others who start with different views [italics added]. That was in evidence in some of last year’s [2016] sneering at ‘Leave’ voters as dupes who couldn’t understand the arguments.”8 In fact the supposedly muddled Leave voters had quite specific and often passionately held aims – reduce immigration, take back control of both governance and legal oversight – which the Remain campaign struggled to discredit convincingly. Indeed Remain protagonists could be heard arguing in one forum that sovereignty had in no way been diminished by membership of the EU (demonstrably untrue), and in another that sovereignty was anyway a myth that no longer existed because of globalisation and existing treaties. According to this argument, just entering into reciprocal agreements on specific issues cedes sovereignty in the same way as being obliged to implement a continual flow of diverse directives from Brussels. Such a disingenuous claim reflects the underlying dishonesty of the “EU project” itself which its spiritual founders (Schuman and Monnet) were candid about in private: undermine the sovereign status of participant countries by stealth until it was too late to reverse the process when (and if) the peoples of the European nations began to realise what had happened to them.

Unsurprisingly the intelligentsia persist, Post-Brexit, in attempting to preserve their claim to superior insight, which indeed was demonstrated and confirmed in their eyes by the Leave vote itself. A university Vice-Chancellor (a job category currently under attack, even from an Oxford college bursar, for the almost obscene recent inflation in vice-chancellorship salaries) told the present writer that Brexiters were “just a bunch of angry people” (what the Germans splendidly call Wutbürger). The lack of interest in why they might be angry, or whether they might have any right to be, was palpable. A senior Liberal Democrat campaigner for Remain crystallised this attitude when he said that Brexit was simply the product of paranoia sweeping the West: “It involves growing fear of the other, whether the person is foreign or black or whatever it might be. It involves a turning away from reason, evidence, logic – those ideas that have built what is called the West over the past five hundred years.”9 All this because a majority democratic vote decided that Britain would rather have a trading relationship with Europe than be ruled from Brussels!

HUBRIS OF THE GREAT AND THE GOOD

David Goodhart, the founder-editor of Prospect and regarded on the left as a renegade liberal, has analysed in a remarkable book10 how and why the echo-chamber and groupthink of the contemporary liberal intelligentsia imploded.11 At one point in his book he describes a dinner conversation with the then Cabinet Secretary (Britain’s most senior civil servant). The latter, arguing for an open door immigration policy, revealingly observed: “I think it’s my job to maximise global welfare not national welfare.”12 The former mandarin is obviously contemptuous of the “will of the people” (which Remainers tend to regard as a fascist idea, except when it echoes their wishes); indeed apparently he does not even deem his personal allegiance should be primarily to the voters and taxpayers who pay his generous salary and pension.

A symbolic triumph of liberal arrogance over the interests of taxpayers is the rise of the UK’s Department for International Development, which in some areas of the world eclipses the Foreign Office both in budgetary support and political influence. “Most people who work in the DfID”, writes Goodhart, “believe their first duty is to the far-away needy rather than the close at hand. They believe that the survey evidence showing more than half of the public disapproving of the large recent increases in foreign aid is just proof of their bigotry.”

Representatives of other countries look on in bewilderment when they see that the aid is usually (unlike USAID) not even tied to the use of British-produced products (tents, mosquito nets etc.). Equally astounding to others, in African countries the DfID representative often has a larger team, a greater budget and greater resources than the High Commissioner, to whom he or she is not responsible, although the latter’s job is to represent British interests.13 This usurpation of power would be regarded by many as symptomatic of the way liberal ideologues regard taxpayers’ funds as a pool of money to be used to advance their personal ideology, disregarding the interests of the taxpayers who pay their salaries and provide the money. This would be so even before one begins to scrutinise the extent to which such aid may be siphoned off by corrupt local interests.

Of course the bureaucrats and NGOs do argue that the aid ladled out to corrupt African regimes supports British (or other national) interests besides its humanitarian benefit. There is much talk of soft power, building bridges and so forth. But soft power would be better exercised through welcoming African students to European and American universities and perhaps by spending more on the BBC World Service as an alternative source of information and news. Fulbright and Rhodes scholarships are worth much more than thousands of dollars of much embezzled bilateral aid. It is considered politically incorrect to say so, but the truth is, as Lord Bauer, a Hungarian-born advisor to Mrs Thatcher once observed, that “Direct bilateral foreign aid is a process whereby poor people in rich countries give money to rich people in poor countries”. In fact he was even more explicit, stating that bilateral aid to Third World governments (as opposed to emergency disaster aid, which everyone can support) “increases the power of the rulers [at the expense of the people], encourages corruption, misallocates resources and erodes civil society”. In her book Dead Aid the Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo pointed out that aid to Africa doubled in the 1980s as a percentage of the continent’s GDP; growth simultaneously collapsed from two per cent to zero.14

Likewise immigration is an issue that throws mandarin attitudes into stark relief. Goodhart describes a conference he attended devoted to the migration crisis, then at its height on the EU’s southern borders. Academics and NGOs, he writes, talked of migration flows “as if they were generals moving troops around the battlefield”. If there was a big youth bulge in the Balkans or Africa and Western European populations were aging, the products of the bulge could and should be shovelled into Western Europe “if only European politicians would show political leadership (code for ignoring public opinion)”.15 Ironically these are the same sort of people who were up in arms when Mrs Thatcher incautiously began a sentence with the words “There is no such thing as society …”. Clearly migration “experts” believe that settled societies and cultures can be manipulated or diluted at will to suit an ideological or utilitarian programme. The views of those on the receiving end of this are not required. Lurking behind such left-liberal attitudes is the view that today’s Europeans should be made to atone for the excesses of imperialism and colonialism in the past. But it is hard to see why a working class family in Sunderland should atone for the British Empire any more than a German born during, or after, the Second World War should be made to atone for the Nazis (though possibly Angela Merkel is subconsciously influenced by this idea). Hungarians are unimpressed by this and talk of Germany’s attempt to bully them on the issue as “human rights imperialism”.

Migration ideologues and others on the liberal Left have a curiously ambivalent attitude to the rule of law, which they constantly invoke. NGOs investing a lot of time and money to help illegal trans-Mediterranean migrants are encouraging law-breaking, as well as supporting the disgusting trade of people traffickers. Italy, formerly indulgent in this matter, has finally decided that enough is enough and is trying to curb such activities. Then again, liberals in America seem more concerned to uphold the human rights of eleven million illegal Mexican migrants than uphold the law: for them, the former must take precedence over the latter. In both the Mediterranean and the Mexican case the illegals have successfully blackmailed the states they target by exploiting the fact that human rights laws can be used to circumnavigate all other ones. But as migration expert Paul Collier16 has pointed out, a “human right” conferred on one category of person engenders an obligation on another category. A point is reached where the first set of rights begins to encroach on the second set.

Here the liberal media is complicit: CNN features on illegal immigration to the USA tend to focus on anomalies resulting from lack of law enforcement in the past, whereby a child born in America to illegally immigrant parents has the right to stay, but the parents may technically be due for deportation. The viewer is usually left with the impression that all illegals are fine upstanding persons who are anyway indispensable for the US economy and any mention of the fact that they are also felons is an affront to their human dignity. Trump voters making such mention are vilified. But it is worth noting that Trump attracted a large number of Hispanic voters (more than Mitt Romney) who were legally settled immigrants and evidently expect the rule of law to be upheld. Indeed this may have been one of the reasons they came to the USA in the first place. To a human rights activist however, illegality seems to be irrelevant, combating crime amongst immigrants is “racial profiling”, and any attempt to stop further illegal migration is (a) “impossible”, (b) “racist” and (c) offends against human rights.17

SOMEWHERES” AND “ANYWHERES”

Goodhart has an ingenious metaphor for those who feel adversely impacted by mass immigration and globalisation and those who are the perceived beneficiaries of the same, the latter enjoying what he calls a mobile “achieved” identity. The former are the “Somewheres”, some 50 per cent of the population, who may be economically constrained and unable, or just unwilling, to move from a settled community environment, often a relatively deprived one; the latter are the “Anywheres”, 20 to 25% of the population, with flexible skills, higher education, little sense of rootedness, often affluent (at least compared to Somewheres) and usually liberal, albeit in a fuzzy groupthink sort of way. This can be seen in their embrace of slogans like “multiculturalism” (Goodhart makes the point that they accept the cultural solidarity of minorities, the more vivid the better, but seem “uneasy about it for majorities”). It is not true that the Somewheres have no voice, as their cause has often been espoused by the right-wing press, but there does seem to be truth in the perception that the Anywheres, at any rate their attitudes, have consistently prevailed in many areas and the most pressing concerns of the majority Somewheres have been routinely both derided and ignored.

Polarisation is compounded in a substantively meritocratic society by the latent assumption that is psychologically legitimated by the culture of meritocracy, namely that, if you are poor or unsuccessful, you deserve to be. Views like this used to be ascribed to heartless conservatives, but the “modernisation” of social democratic parties has resulted in their leaders adopting somewhat similar attitudes, one of the reasons why Social Democracy has been the prime loser almost everywhere in recent political turbulence. Workers left behind by globalisation have found that the parties traditionally devoted to their interests seem to have more concern for the rights of migrants and other obsessions of the urban liberal Left than in the misfortunes of redundant workers. The cognitive dissonance is summed up in the widespread assumption that lower skilled jobs are the province of “failures or foreigners”, although Germany and Austria have maintained a more sensible attitude to apprenticeship and pride in vocational skills.

As Janan Ganesh has pointed out, it is only in the megabucks arenas of football and finance that “post-national” meritocratic assumptions have held their own, although there are complaints that football teams which were the focus of local pride are now simply collections of foreigners whose engagement is determined by the chequebook and performance elsewhere. Even more resentment may be generated by the pay of footloose star bankers and their ability to push the cost of their failures onto others. The bottom line is that both professions are “colour-blind, passport-blind and near nihilist in pursuit of competitive excellence above all claims of blood and soil”. Ganesh, in conformance with his paper’s ideology, seems to applaud their imperviousness to the “nativist moment”, but concludes somewhat ambivalently that “perhaps that liberal ideal, post-national consciousness, flows from brutal meritocracy rather than high principle”.18

The irony is that the hubris of the national and international ruling caste of meritocrats stems from the insulation they enjoy from the everyday concerns of those less privileged. Madame Lagarde looks down from the majestic heights of the International Monetary Fund and castigates the Greeks for not paying their taxes, but herself enjoys a tax-free salary of over $400,000. A famous pop star lambasts the government for not spending more of our taxes on foreign aid, but is later found to keep much of his own wealth in a tax haven. Jean- Claude Juncker, in an incautious aside, says that “if things get serious you have to lie”. This from a man who is constantly lecturing backsliding EU countries about “European values”, and who himself presided Luxembourg turning into a dubious tax haven. Meanwhile the EU wastes millions of taxpayers’ euros by insisting on sharing Brussels with Strasbourg as the parliamentary seat purely to appease the amour-propre of the French political class, a procedure that has become so farcical that Juncker himself exploded in rage recently when he found himself making an important address to a Strasbourg parliament that was almost empty. As Daniel Hannan has written, “the EU is run by a politburo, supported by a caste of lobbyists, rent-seekers and quangocrats. Public opinion is seen as an obstacle to remove, not a reason to change course” – hence its customary response to referendums it does not like. In Denmark, France, Ireland and the Netherlands referendums have either been ignored or have been ordered to be held again to get the “right” answer.19 As Sir Ralf Dahrendorf, himself a former EU commissioner, once observed, “if the European Community [as it then was] were to apply for membership of itself, it would not be admitted on the grounds of being insufficiently democratic”.

The same toxic mix of hubris and hypocrisy affects national liberal elites in the media. Austria’s left-liberal ORF revelled in anti-Hungarian propaganda during the migrant crisis of 2015, before crashing its gears into reverse when the Austrian government did a U-turn and began pursuing an immigrant policy with marked similarity to that of Viktor Orbán. The BBC is constantly sermonising on liberal themes such as gender equality, but was recently revealed to be paying its leading women presenters less, a great deal less, than men doing an equivalent job. Paedophilia has become a media obsession, yet the BBC harboured arguably Britain’s most sinister offender for years and appears to have turned a blind eye despite many warning signs. Equally emetic is the rhetoric about liberal values from powerful businesses like Facebook, whose founder is evidently preparing to yield to the Chinese censors in order to exploit the lucrative Chinese market;20 or the unprincipled stance of Cambridge University Press, that excised critical articles from its hitherto respected review China Monthly when the Chinese authorities threatened to ban some of its immensely lucrative English language publications that sell well in China. (In this case there was such an outcry from academe that the publisher sheepishly reversed the decision, but the hypocritical mindset had been revealed.)

Or should Germany be criticising the Hungarian Prime Minister in respect of his relationship with Vladimir Putin when an ex-Chancellor of Germany (and a Socialist to boot) earns a comfortable whack by sitting on the board of Rosneft? Or America likewise be complaining about Hungary’s democratic failings when, until recently, it was applying torture to suspects (I am sure we would have heard from vigilant American liberals if a single instance of torture was discovered in “Hungary”)? Or should a country that argues about whether the Democrats or Republicans should get to fill a Supreme Court vacancy be complaining that the Hungarian government is politicising the judiciary? Should a former presidential candidate be calling the democratically elected Prime Minister of an allied state a “Neo-Fascist” while his country is cosying up to a sinister totalitarian theocracy, which covertly finances Islamic terrorism round the world?

The point about citing such hypocrisy (many more examples could be given) is not just to point the finger, but to demonstrate that the widespread revolt against it cannot be dismissed as a rebellion of ignorant trolls; it is a justified reaction to the hectoring of a liberal elite that is used to getting its own way, but does not live by its own rules. “Experts” are pressed into service to roll out the ideology, their many mistakes soon forgotten or played down in the liberal press. The impression one has is that the elite believe they are entitled to be wrong but the rest of us are not entitled to be right.

David Goodhart makes the point that the specific troubles of the EU are almost entirely self-created, from the faulty design of the euro to the imposition of liberal dogma in regard to freedom of movement. As he puts it, “most people remain attached to the common sense notion that national citizens should be ahead of non-citizens in the queue for public goods,” but the EU is stuck with the idea of non-discrimination; to this is added the dangerous perception that asylum seekers and some other immigrants may even be getting more help from the state than those in the host country who are on basic state benefits. “The EU’s Monnet– Delors-inspired post-national hubris”, writes Goodhart, “has led directly to the euro crisis, and, similarly, the inability to reform freedom of movement has led directly to Brexit. The EU sees itself as a bulwark against nationalism but, by making itself the enemy of moderate nationalism it has ended up fostering more extreme versions in the EU-wide populist uprisings.”21 The obloquy directed at those who feel themselves disadvantaged and finally had their say with Brexit and Trump – that they are ignorant, that they are bigots – unveils the least charming side of modern liberalism, a self-righteous contempt for the less privileged and the less successful (the “basket of deplorables”), that substitutes patronising abuse for constructive political empathy.

Goodhart also remarks that “the liberalism–democracy conflict is a very real issue in some parts of Europe, especially with so many issues now removed from national democratic choice thanks to independent central banks, judicial creep in areas like human rights, and the growth of EU law. In Central Europe, as the Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev has pointed out, it was hostility to the post-Communist elites that partly drove popular enthusiasm for EU membership, but less than ten years later Brussels was seen as the enemy, usually in cahoots with local elites. ‘The outcome is a sort of politics in which populists are becoming openly anti-liberal and elites are becoming secretly anti-democratic.’”22 That last comment is particularly on the nail in respect of Hungary, not least since a leading leftist intellectual was recently reported as having suggested the liberal Left should work with the extreme right-wing Jobbik party in order to dislodge the majority centre Right Fidesz. Since Hungarian Liberals originally fell from grace by throwing in their lot with the corrupt ex-Communist elite in order to get their hands on the levers of power, it would appear that they have not learned very much from past experience.

Notes:

1 Miranda Green: “The business world lacks dissent and debate”, Financial Times, 4 September 2017.

2 Pascal: Pensées, translated by A. J. Krailsheimer (London, Folio Society MMXI, based on the revised text published by Penguin Books in 1995). This is from Pensée 655 (Human Nature, Style, Jesuits etc.).

3 Arthur Koestler: The Intelligentsia, first published in Horizon in 1944, reprinted in The Yogi and the Commissar and Other Essays, Uniform Danube Edition of Arthur Koestler’s works, Hutchinson, 1965, pp. 71–85.

4 Prospect, August 2017.

5 Ha-Jon Chang: Economics: The User’s Guide (Pelican, an Imprint of Penguin Books, 2014).

6 Quoted in Tim Shipman All Out War: The Full Story of Brexit (Revised and updated edition, William Collins, 2017), p. 312.

7 Jamil Anderlini: “A shaky trade pact that signals American decline”, Financial Times, 6 October 2016.

8 Prospect, August 2017.

9 Ryan Coetzee reflecting on the campaign he helped to organise. Quoted in Shipman, op. cit., p. 585.

10 David Goodhart: The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics (C. Hurst & Co., 2017).

11 For a very fair and percipient critique of the strengths and weaknesses of Goodhart’s thesis, see Jonathan Freedland: “The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart – a liberal’s right-wing turn on immigration” (The Guardian, 27 March 2017).

12 Goodhart: op. cit., p. 15.

13 Goodhart: op. cit., p. 224.

14 Dambisa Moyo: Dead Aid (Allen Lane, 2009).

15 Goodhart: op. cit., p. 21.

16 For example in his book Exodus: Immigration and Multiculturalism in the 21st Century (Allen Lane, 2013), which I have reviewed in these pages.

17 Barack Obama was labelled “Deporter in Chief” by Janet Murguia, President of the National Council of La Raza, an immigrant advocacy group, after it emerged that more illegal Mexican immigrants were deported under his administration than any President hitherto. However this seems mainly to have been the result of a bureaucratic redefinition of what constitutes deportation. Nevertheless it earned him much criticism from his liberal supporters.

18 Janan Ganesh: “Citizen of nowhere”, Weekend FT, 2–3 September 2017.

19 Daniel Hannan: “Democracy is the loser in EU’s doublethink” – Sunday Telegraph, 13 August 2017.

20 Facebook has been working on special software that could accommodate censorship demands in China, according to reports in the New York Times and elsewhere. See BBC News report by Dave Lee, 23 November 2016 online.

21 Goodhart: op. cit., p. 103.

22 Goodhart: op. cit., quoting Ivan Krastev: “Between Elite and People: Europe’s Black Hole”, Open Democracy, 3 August 2016, https://www.opendemocracy.net/globalizationinstitutions_ government/europe_blackhole_3796.jsp.

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