Making the left behind as a subject of crisis

Abstract

Working through the narrative construction of the left behind, the article explores how groups become visible as subjects of crisis, with reference to material conditions, attitudinal disposition and moral outlook. It suggests that crisis provides a panoramic vision that is crucial for understanding how authors delineate left behind subjectivity, suggest relational dispositions and put audiences and spectators into the frame. Considering book-length titles and policy proposals, the article examines contributions to a body of work that speaks on behalf of populations and makes them subject of social-diagnostic, moral and political evaluation. It argues that this type of image-making renders left behind constituencies visible as subjects of resentment but without history, self-authorship and depth. With this focus, the article adds a critical perspective to the study of crises at a point when their permanence and multiplication challenge existing frameworks.

Introduction

As a matter of public consciousness, crisis seems hard to avoid. With respect to economic harms, ecological shocks, security threats and political instability, multiple circumstances present themselves as critical at any point in time. This multiplicity contrasts with the knowledge that many of the most protracted conditions of global suffering do not cross the threshold of public attention that would lead them to qualify as crises. Who gets to claim crisis is a question which points towards material power that grants visibility and authorship. What matters, Fassin (2021, p. 270) notes, are ‘not only the conditions of possibility of crises but also their conditions of impossibility’. In this context of multiplicity, it becomes difficult to pinpoint the projects that set out to seize crisis and make use of its political potentials.

This article seeks to understand how (and why) the left behind become visible as a subject of crisis, with reference to material conditions, attitudinal disposition and moral outlook. It suggests that crisis provides a panoramic vision; its representational functions are crucial for understanding how the groups made visible as left behind, in different material contexts and with different points of emphasis, enter the stage. Drawing on conditions in France’s deindustrialized Northeast, Germany’s Eastern Länder, the United States’ rust belt and various areas of deprivation in Britain, there is now a transnational commentary that speaks on behalf of economically marginal populations, usually conceived of as ‘native’ or ‘white’, making them the subject of social-diagnostic, moral and political evaluation. With attention to a body of work that emerges in the context of British culture war politics, this article considers the ideas and images that go into the narrative construction of the left behind. It suggests that crisis affords a panoramic vision on this constituency, which it makes visible as a subject of resentment but without history, self-authorship and depth.

In the UK, a growing number of authors account for the experience of groups that are identified as having been forgotten and portrayed as resentful towards social others and out of synch with cultural modernity. Authors that invoke the left behind prioritize cultural attitudes, ‘traditional’ values and differential experiences of mobility (Goodhart, 2017a); they posit the ‘racial self-interest’ of beleaguered whiteness (Kaufmann, 2019); they articulate the betrayal of ordinary people as result of distortions to liberalism (Timothy, 2020); or they invoke the destruction of working class traditions (Embery, 2021) alongside conditions that enable ‘national populism’ (Eatwell & Goodwin, 2018). As macropolitical backdrop, authors highlight Brexit, Trump and resurgent far-right politics that are facilitated or pushed forward by the left behind’s alleged ‘revolt’. Their claims feature prominently in academic scholarship, in the output of right-wing think tanks, such as Policy Exchange, and in the literary production of non-fiction writers who set out to give first-hand accounts of left behind experiences. Contributions to this corpus have been successful in garnering public attention, achieving book sales and shaping the frames of British public policy (e.g. Commisson on Race and Ethnic Disparities, 2021; House of Commons Education Committee, 2021).

Considering this body of work, the article attempts a type of literary criticism to explore the staging of the left behind with an interest in the forms of visibility and spectatorship that crisis produces. It does not engage with the empirical accuracy of attempts to delineate this constituency, for example misrepresentations of relatively affluent Brexit-voting constituencies as economically marginal (e.g. Bhambra, 2017). It also does not probe the degree of resemblance between accounts of the left behind and the self-consciousness and sense of anger and loss among working class populations in the UK and elsewhere. Instead, it explores how the left behind come into existence, and are made visible to spectators, based on claims about grievance and resentment, conflictual relations and tragic subjectivity. It offers a perspective on this type of image-making and of the subject positions, relationships and visibilities that emerge through the appeal to crisis.

The article initially considers theoretical positions that prioritize moments of rupture and openness in light of the permanence of crisis. Regarding such conjuncturalist perspectives, I draw attention to the panoramic vision of the spectacle and its representational functions, placing ‘bodies in action before an assembled audience’ (Rancière, 2009, p. 11). The article then introduces the body of texts that, in a next step, it explores with an interest in three dimensions of crisis work: how authors delineate left behind subjectivity, suggest relationships and relational dispositions and put audiences and spectators in place. It considers the role that themes from these texts play in UK public policy, and comments on adjustments that existing critical theorizations of crisis require.

My aim is not to diminish the severity of the injustices that the multi-ethnic working class experiences in the UK and other post-industrial societies, which is exacerbated by decades of neoliberal restructuring. Rather, the article’s objective is to draw attention to how such experiences are processed and dramatized. For a constituency that usually coincides with the left behind, Shilliam (2018, p. 154) notes that ‘the “white working class” has never been a self-authored constituency but [is], at least in good part, an artefact of political domination’. It is a subject that is ‘summoned’ (Virdee, 2023, p. 472) by claims about anger and victimhood. In a similar way, the left behind emerges based on claims about resentment and loss, but without authorship, history or depth. As it appears in the texts that the article considers, it is a flat subject of grievance. Considering the making of the left behind, the article aligns with important work that draws attention to its emergence as a racialized subject (Begum et al., 2021; Isakjee & Lorne, 2019; Mondon & Winter, 2020; Shilliam, 2018; St Louis, 2021). The aim is to add substance to the political operations that bring this subject into existence and to address shortcomings among existing perspectives on the politics of crisis.

The multiplication of crisis

A substantial body of theoretical work considers crisis as a matter of political thought, historical experience or socio-structural analysis (see Bergman-Rosamond et al., 2022, for a detailed overview). Rather than reviewing this scholarship, the article proceeds from an observation that is offered widely: whereas theories of crisis used to bring singular circumstances of extreme severity into view, their object of interest has changed. The multiplication of critical circumstances and their endurance, and the perception that multiple crises overlap, coalesce or cascade are seen to raise new conceptual challenges. It is frequently noted that singular experiences of upheaval and exceptional disruptions, conventionally the domain of crisis, have been replaced by conditions of near permanence (e.g. Fassin, 2021; Fassin & Honneth, 2022; Roitman, 2022). The perpetuation of crisis, Vigh (2008, p. 9) suggested at an earlier point, stretches ‘the notion of “rupture” [that is distinctive for earlier understandings of crisis] into a relative constant’. Various risks to public health, financial stability, living standards and global peace arise, persist and overlap. As some commentators note, the proliferation of crises that are all happening at once points towards escalatory interactions, such as between economic domains, public health and global security. Tooze (2021, p. 21) suggests ‘polycrisis’ as a perspective to capture such interactions. Commenting on Tooze, Callinicos (2023, p. 179) explores the multiplicity of crises with an interest in the simultaneity of ‘[permanent] catastrophe and the possibility of revolt’.

For the discussion here, it is not the ‘abnormal coincidence of disparate shocks’ (Tooze, 2022) but the mediation of this multiplicity in the form of images and storylines that raises questions. For theorists of hegemony, the competition between different ‘narratives of crisis’ is a moment of significance, for example in the wake of an economic crash. In his account of the UK ‘winter of discontent’, Hay (1999, pp. 332–333) notes that ‘the discursive construction of crisis is doubly constrained by the “symptoms” it must narrate and by its ability to find resonance with the experiences to which such symptoms give rise’. Yet the struggle for political openings, understood as narrative competition on a terrain marked by material contradictions, is difficult to envision when multiple images of crisis circulate that, on the face of it, do not seem to align with political blocks vying for hegemony. This is the case where symptoms of crisis seem too vast and inchoate to be channelled in a call for remedial management (Tooze, 2022) or revolutionary action (Callinicos, 2023) and instead generate inundation and bewilderment in the face of overwhelming experiences.

The multiplication of crisis challenges in particular a tradition of conjuncturalist thought that, drawing on Gramsci’s (1971) ideas, aims for a clear-eyed view on crisis by sounding out its political opportunities (e.g. Anderson, 1964; Hall, 1988/2021). It is not immediately clear how such conjuncturalist perspectives can engage with crises and their political functions in a context that is marked by multiplicity and permanence and by the proliferation of personalized crisis images, which the following develops.

Subjects of crisis

In theoretical work on the permanence or pervasiveness of crisis (e.g. Fassin & Honneth, 2022; Roitman, 2022), the circumstances for this multiplication of crisis often remain unexplored. In particular, there is limited recognition that crisis often circulates in the form of narratives about troubled populations. In Western Europe, several transnational subjects of crisis are widely visible, including Muslims, immigrants and refugees, alongside some national minorities (such as the Roma) and the left behind. In different contextual shades, these groups become visible for the difficult social circumstances they face and as carriers of a troubled, tragic or dangerous subjectivity. In each case, there is a body of work that gives accounts of group experiences, trajectories and moral subjectivity.

The visualization of group experience through crisis is hardly new. Perhaps it could be argued that more groups today are construed as subjects of crisis, also pointing to the ongoing, perennial nature of many personalized crisis images in operation today. ¹ Long-standing tropes about the ‘crisis of masculinity’ and the moral evaluation of ‘male vulnerability’ operate analogously (see Jordan & Chandler, 2019). Further back, the production of 19th-century knowledge about ‘pauperism’, based on scrutiny of poor populations’ lived experiences, the reliance on material relief and need for moral intervention, illustrates some of the visibilities that crisis produces (see Ginn, 2017). It sets up populations for inspection, admonition or praise and for political intervention, often by moving seamlessly between empirical accounts of social conditions and their moral evaluation. Some groups become the focus of a burgeoning output of written and visual material that accounts for different facets of the crisis experience. The contemporary visibility of such groups whose deservingness and character is continually questioned, just as much as the experience of what it ‘feel[s] to be a problem’ (Du Bois, 1903/1999), are crucial issues that arise in this space.

The more limited argument in the following is that, where crisis functions as a powerful representational device for group experience, it should be considered for the visibility it produces. In such cases, there usually is an ongoing commentary on shocks and disruptions that distinguish such experiences, following established scripts and appealing to predictable expectations as to who and what is in crisis. This commentary invokes images of crisis that set up groups for inspection by spectators. Such images enlist audiences and, as Mahony and Clarke (2013, p. 933) suggest, they ‘summon publics’. In doing so, they connect different populations, often based on a comparative account of deservingness, and through moral frameworks that assign culpability and victimhood. A later section in this article, ‘Subjects, relations and audiences’, tracks these operations as three aspects of ‘crisis work’. It examines how, for the left behind, authors draw an image of tragic and resentful subjectivity, suggest antagonistic relations and put spectators in place.

The panoramic spectacle

As mentioned, an important framework for considering the politics of crisis has been suggested by conjuncturalist thinkers, who engage with crisis as a political moment. Addressing ‘the present crisis’ (e.g. Anderson, 1964; Virdee, 2023), conjuncturalists scope out potentials that emerge at points of rupture. They draw attention to the breakdown of hegemonic blocks, the constellation of competing forces, and the political openings such forces struggle to seize. Conjunctures are moments when ruling classes fail to maintain popular consent (Gramsci, 1971, p. 210). They intimate potentials for the realignment around new political ideas yet equally require analysis for the ‘morbid symptoms’ accompanying them. In British leftist thought, such as in Perry Anderson’s (1992) and Stuart Hall’s (1988/2021) work, crisis and conjuncture are key categories for thinking about 20th-century politics and the prospect of transformative change.

The conjuncturalist view of crisis is distinctive for its interest in critical moments that become the terrain of political struggle. The outcome of such struggles is not dictated by historical necessity or stable class interests but requires consideration for how, in moments of crisis, political preferences and popular subjectivities take shape and can be mobilized. In this vein, recent conjunctural analyses offer a critical reading of the ‘common sense’ underpinning Brexit. Virdee and McGeever (2018) draw attention to the ‘construction of the white working class’, the politics of Englishness and the force of imperial nostalgia. They consider the racialization of working class subjecthood in a context where people ‘make sense of the real economic pain they suffer through such a racialized frame of white working class victimhood’ (Virdee & McGeever, 2018, p. 1814). Though their analysis does not seem to identify moments of conjunctural openness, it draws attention to emergent solidarities in the multicultural ‘everyday’ (Virdee & McGeever, 2018, p. 1815; see also see also Virdee, 2023, p. 473). This corresponds with other conjuncturalist work, including Hall’s (2000) own contribution, that points towards cultural openings in the microcosm of lived experience as source of social optimism.

The panoramic vision on subjects of crisis, considered in this article, does not seem to present itself as a matter for conjunctural analysis. The crisis of the left behind does not strive towards resolution but sustains itself through the repetition of familiar themes in front of an ‘assembled audience’ that, as Rancière (2009, p. 11) suggests regarding the viewership of spectacle, is invested in the movement of ‘bodies in action’. The images of crisis that bring the left behind into view, prioritize disrespect and substantiate white deservingness. They point towards the need for alternative perspectives on the politics of crisis.

Where conjuncturalists look at crisis with an interest in its resolution, it seems equally important to consider its persistence and permanence. Despite the Gramscian concern for ‘morbid symptoms’ and the cultural power of dominant social groups, conjuncture implies an orientation towards the future, forward-looking intentionality and the emergence of ‘the new’. The panoramic spectacle puts crisis on the temporal frame of the present; it ‘proves its arguments simply by going round in circles: by coming back to the start, by repetition, by constant reaffirmation’ (Debord, 1988/1990, p. 19). Where conjuncture sees potentials for political openness and emancipatory change, spectacle is concerned with the repetition of images that are widely familiar and that confirm what audiences already know to be true.

This would seem to be an important insight for the political analysis of crisis. Crisis produces a sense of investment, excitement, self and otherness, while appealing to predictable expectations as to who and what is in crisis. It captures spectators, provides reassurance and familiarity, suggests moral lessons, and creates – at least it has this potential – a sense of collective identity through participation and spectatorship. Understood in this way, the crisis of the left behind resonates with Debord’s (1967/2014, p. 2) definition of the spectacle as ‘a social relation between people that is mediated by images’. This perspective on crisis draws attention to the political operations that create subjects, suggest relationships and put audiences in place. In the following, the article traces this ‘crisis work’ in the making of the left behind.

The left behind corpus

The following analysis works through a selection of books (and some policy documents) by Paul Embery, David Goodhart, Matthew Goodwin, Eric Kaufmann and Nick Timothy. This includes a journalist and professional think tanker (Goodhart), two academics with substantial policy and think tank footprints (Kaufmann and Goodwin), a Twitter personality (Embery) and a previous special adviser in Theresa May’s government (Timothy). The authors’ political orientations span libertarian and right-wing causes, though their commentary against ‘identity politics’ or ‘political correctness’, and claims regarding their own suppression by powerful cultural forces, constitute an equally important rallying point. All tend to quote one another, sometimes extensively. The involvement in Policy Exchange, where Goodhart plays a leading role, or in publications and events run by the Centre for Policy Studies provides a shared platform. All authors have a public profile in ongoing ‘culture wars’, and Goodwin, Goodhart and Kaufmann are members of the advisory council of Toby Young’s ‘Free Speech Union’. Most authors have lent their expertise to parliamentary inquiries and government commissions or operate in a policy-adjacent space. Some are engaged in events and mobilizations towards a new ‘national conservatism’. ²

It is important to emphasize that other accounts, including portrayals of popular experiences in ‘Red Wall’ constituencies, also prioritize the feeling of loss as the distinctive feature of left behind groupness (e.g. Mattinson, 2020, p. 64). Yet contributions by Goodhart, Kaufmann, Timothy, Embery and Goodwin go further: they foreground resentment, sketch out a relational web of grievance that connects the left behind with supposed antagonists, and put audiences in place as spectators of crisis. These political operations, which the section ‘Subjects, relations and audiences’ traces in some detail, are distinctive for invocations of the left behind by participants in British culture war politics (see Begum et al., 2021, p. 225, for a similar breakdown of these authors and texts).

Rather than considering personal networks and biographical circumstances, the following explores images of crisis in these authors’ work. It tracks points of emphasis and the production of left behind subjectivity, though there are equally conspicuous absences and omissions in this body of work that require some initial attention.

Generally, contributors to the left behind corpus pay some tribute to socio-structural change, highlighting industrial decline and the transformation of regional economies, though they usually situate this change either on an atemporal, context-free canvas or dismiss its significance in view of a preferred account of disrespect and resentment. ³ Despite claiming to account for working class experience, the world of work is largely absent in their texts and the structural and ideological shifts that have precipitated inequality in recent decades are outside their purview. The lack of well-paid, stable employment is a given. Any notion that employment could be a source of dignity, or that precarity may be a cause of moral injury, is missing. The circumstances of flexible capitalism and the political decisions that diminish regional economies and local autonomy form part of an unalterable background. What remains is the experience of moral injury that centres on pure disrespect, attributable to metropolitan elites, cultural modernity and the presence of various social others. This is the structure of feeling that authors foreground in their respective contributions, and which they insulate from material contexts and historical experience, as they bring the left behind into view.

It is not the point of the following to highlight such omissions, although they are important for situating the left behind corpus in a political frame. Left behind authors consistently attack ‘wokeness’, ‘liberal modernism’ or ‘identity politics’, but their politics equally seeks to displace the concern for histories of inequality and downplay the importance of socio-economic structures. The following does not examine positions in the corpus for how ‘realistic’ they are or seek to fill out its many gaps. Instead, it explores the images, themes and arguments that the authors use when they construe left behind groupness. In a first step, it considers slippery delineations of left behind subjecthood.

Who, where and what is ‘left behind’?

Most attempts to delineate left behind groups provide some demographic reference points. Yet there are frequent slippages among such empirical delineations, as authors give a shifting account of the left behind’s space and location, its economic circumstances and ‘racial’ composition.

In line with usage in economic and political geography (see Pike et al., 2023), some authors initially invoke ‘left behind’ as a spatial concept, referring to various sites of deprivation and poverty, but then affix the term to left behind subjects. Embery (2021, p. 29) introduces the ‘hypothetical example [of] a person from a working-class background living in a post-industrial town’, only to then make this figure come alive by attributing a set of views: the subject he has in mind is ‘patriotic without being nationalistic or xenophobic’ (p. 30), ‘might consider . . . that those who commit heinous murder should not be allowed to live out their natural lives’ (p. 30), or ‘hold to the view that a person with a penis cannot be a woman’ (p. 31). The point is that spatial references (in Embery’s case, to Dagenham) appear but then immediately disappear in favour of an attitudinal outlook and the primacy of resentment. Notwithstanding his consistent use of spatial labels, Goodhart’s (2017a) ‘somewheres’ – the term he uses for populations that are cast as ‘traditional’ and ‘rooted’ – come about without much concern for the specificity of their spatial circumstances; they are tied together by shared attitudes towards mobility and cultural modernity and by resentment. The shift between places and people that are left behind is conspicuous in a recent House of Commons Education Committee Report (2021) on ‘left behind white pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds’. The report’s initial focus on geographies of deprivation and its spatial account of inequality (2021, sect. 3) contrasts with its attempt to single out ‘white working class’ experiences and arrive at policy prescriptions that prioritize this group’s experience of ‘disrespect’ (2021, p. 17).

In the left behind corpus, material conditions and affective states often become coextensive. Eatwell and Goodwin (2018, p. 132) consider economic dislocation, but then go on to prioritize resentful responses to ‘hyper-ethnic change’. Timothy (2020, p. 109) initially provides a spatial account of deprivation, with Blackpool as a stark example of economic decline, only to suggest that ‘Britain has forgotten people living across the country as a whole’. There are ‘struggling cities [with] the highest percentages of people working in declining industries’ (Timothy 2020, p. 108). Yet it is not poverty, but reliance on public services – not being able to draw on private health care and education – that distinguishes the left behind. Timothy (2020, p. 109) highlights insecurity about downward mobility as a shared characteristic but does not clarify the basis for this feeling. What remains is the experience of disrespect as the overwhelming focus and as the marker that gives the left behind a semblance of unity. Where this framing acknowledges economic injustice and precarity, they remain background conditions, of interest for how they foster cultural resentment and instantiate moral crisis. Deindustrialization, deprivation and income equality exist, but they form part of an extrapolitical reality that these authors take for granted. Cultural grievances, by contrast, are situated in a space of heightened political concern, where they require detailed reflection and accommodation.

Another slippage occurs around acknowledgements of ‘race’. Some accounts offer clear references to ‘racial self-interest’ among white people, claiming that the impossibility for white people to ‘stand up for themselves’ constitutes a source of disrespect (Kaufmann, 2019, p. 10; Timothy, 2020, p. 128). Others are more ambivalent. Goodhart’s (2017a, p. 3) ‘somewheres’ include ‘older white working class men’, for whom he reserves the left behind-label, alongside others who are ‘more social conservative and communitarian by instinct’ and show different attitudes towards mobility. Embery (2021, pp. 15, emphasis added) claims to disavow ‘whiteness’ and suggests that his use of the ‘term “working class” in its more traditional sense remains perfectly valid and will be widely understood’. Among the traditions he highlights is attachment to ‘place and community as an antidote to galloping globalisation and rapid demographic change’ (Embery, 2021, p. 11). Where other accounts prioritize whiteness, the racial composition seems less clear here, although there are other signs that Embery construes his left behind subjects also as predominantly or entirely ‘white’. ⁴

The demographic, economic or spatial background that authors invoke sets the left behind up for the (much) more detailed inspection as subjects of grievance and disrespect. The left behind becomes visible based on claims about its affective and relational disposition, rather than its demographic composition or spatial location. To be sure, demographic and spatial aspects of its groupness – such as the resonance of Blackpool in Timothy’s perfunctory attempt to suggest a location for left behind grievance – matter. They evoke images that are part of an implied scenery of grievance that is widely familiar. Yet the overt focus in the left behind corpus is on potentials towards cultural resentment and outgroup hostility.

Subjects, relations and audiences

The following works through different sources of grievance and dimensions of hostility in the left behind corpus, including the ‘destruction of working-class traditions’, liberal disrespect and victimization by ‘identity politics’ alongside the evaluation of left behind subjectivity as valuable and tragic. It tracks three dimensions of ‘crisis work’, examining how authors draw an image of tragic and resentful subjectivity, suggest antagonistic relations and bring spectators of crisis into the frame.

Subjects of grievance and tragedy

The ‘destruction of the national group’s historic identity and established way of life’, Eatwell and Goodwin (2018, p. xxi) suggest at the outset of their study of ‘national populism’, is ‘not always grounded in objective reality’. This sense of destruction, then, appears to be grounded in a structure of feeling, which the authors attribute to the left behind and invoke as explanation for (in this case) the success of ‘national populists’. This resonates with other accounts that claim to uncover the ‘deep story’ of majoritarian resentment, such as Hochschild’s (2016, p. 139) attempt to capture grievances about undeserving others by white southerners in the US: ‘[y]ou resent them, and you feel it’s right that you do’. ⁵ The participation in such affective structures gives a sense of coherence to populations that are claimed to be united by anger. The context for such ‘deep stories’ of resentment often remains in the background, as it does when Goodhart (2021) claims that ‘the great weight of negative history [is] bearing down on poor whites’, as a ‘community that progressive politics forgot’.

Such claims about unity based on grievance and perceived loss operate at different scales. At the national level, Kaufmann (2019, p. 330) invokes ‘resentment’ that ‘majority ethnic groups, men or other advantaged categories [experience as they] are prevented from developing their culture and identity’. With local circumstances in mind, Embery (2021) makes the alleged destruction of working class traditions visible in a close account of demographic change in Dagenham, East London.

‘Race’ and whiteness play an important part in such accounts, and the role of relevant social others will be explored in more detail below. The idea here is that the left behind, due to liberal-modernist assumptions about ‘race’ and leftist, anti-racist posturing, are denied voice and legitimate standing to rally around the most conspicuous feature of their shared identity, whiteness (Kaufmann, 2019, pp. 330, 516). As mentioned, the data authors provide for specific resentment about the denial of whiteness (different from resentment that defines whiteness in the first place) tend to be patchy, and the subjects who experience this subjugation of their identity, and therefore qualify as left behind, are often defined without much precision, such as when well-off conservatives are lumped together with precarious parts of the British working class based on claims about resentment due to the ‘denial’ of whiteness (e.g. Timothy, 2020, p. 128).

The authors attribute the dismissal of left behind identity to shifting accounts of the liberal mainstream, on the one hand, and radical wokeness and anti-racist activism, on the other. They invoke affective knowledge about the experience of disrespect: it ‘often feels that those who have driven the liberalisation of Britain in recent decades have looked with dismay on poor whites and their apparent failure to abandon some traditional attachments’ (Goodhart, 2021, emphasis added). Timothy (2020, p. 114) surveys political theory to arrive at the claim that ‘the cultural crisis [of the ”white working class”] can be traced back to ultra-liberal ideology and policy and, in some cases, flawed assumptions in liberal philosophy itself’. ‘Identity politics’ and ‘wokeness’ on the fringes of the left are as much to blame as ‘the middle-class liberal and graduate types who dominate today’s Left [and] are happy to sneer at anything that could be associated specifically with white working-class culture’ (Embery, 2021, p. 105).

The left behind then comes into view as a tragic subject, beleaguered by economic circumstance and (more importantly) as the object of cultural disdain and elite devaluation. It is equally set up as a subject of moral worth and decency. In the US context, Hochschild (2016, p. 233) invokes the ‘teasing, good-hearted acceptance’ and her respondents’ ‘famous Southern hospitality’ (2016, p. 243). In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance (2016, p. 9) acknowledges that ‘[n]early every person you will read about is deeply flawed’, whilst professing his ‘love [for] these people’. With reference to the UK, Goodhart (2017a, p. 14) points to the ‘the underlying decency of many Somewhere ideas and intuitions’. This moral vantage point makes it possible to put individual pathologies and problematic attitudes into perspective, such as the racism that – Goodhart concedes – does exist among the left behind. Yet ‘racism’ is ‘highly politicised and much abused term’ that is of little descriptive value for understanding ‘somewhere’ resentment. Furthermore,

. . . even if racism is racism, when it does involve dislike or contempt for a particular group, it is not just about skin colour or even religion as such, it is about what skin colour or distinctive dress represents in terms of different values or behaviours or traditions and the challenge they present to mainstream norms. (Goodhart, 2017a, p. 32)

The ‘liberal reflex to tar legitimate majority grievances with the brush of racism’ (Goodhart, 2017b), then, needs to be rejected. Goodhart positions racism in response to disruptions of familiarity and homeliness; it confirms an otherwise valuable attachment to ‘traditional’ ways of life, a term that is ubiquitous in Goodhart’s work. The subjectivity of Goodhart’s ‘somewheres’, like other left behind groups, derives from the experience of disrespect and from the moral standing that the authors invoke, usually by appealing to notions of tragic subjectivity and undeserved misfortune. This framing attributes coherence and volition to populations that are simultaneously described as resentful, praiseworthy and tragic.

Discomfort and conflict

Claims about its relationship with social others bring the left behind into view as a subject of resentment. Assuming the viewpoint of an industrial worker, Goodhart (2017a, p. 126) – the Eton-educated son of a Conservative MP – offers the following perspective on left behind grievance:

It is one thing to lose your job because your factory has relocated to a cheaper labour country, it is quite another thing to find foreign workers, with little or no historic connection to the country, competing with you in your own country.

Competition for employment and resources plays a role in such accounts, though most prioritize immaterial grievances, disrespect and the disturbance of identity by social others. For the left behind, solidarity based on ‘whiteness’ is not available, Timothy (2020, p. 126) argues, as ‘elite liberals and left-liberals routinely castigate them’ for such attachments. As a result, ‘white working classes feel not only this lost solidarity, but also their deprivation relative to others’ (Timothy, 2020, p. 127): that is, cultural groups that – different from them – are entitled to rally around shared culture. Kaufmann (2019, p. 330) expands on such relational grievances at length and suggests that white majorities are ‘prevented from developing their culture and identity’.

Relational understandings of crisis prioritize conflict and draw attention to competition over resources, access to employment, public services, housing and education. This is an addition to hostility around the use of shared social spaces: resentment about the visibility of others in public life, their ownership of property and the demographic composition of neighbourhoods. Yet the dominant image of crisis among left behind authors draws on more ephemeral disturbances. They direct attention to expectations of homogeneity and homeliness and link the presence of others to grievances about the pace of ‘change’, as well as the maintenance of national, local or group-based identities, which this presence disrupts. St Louis (2021, p. 361) captures this relational positioning as an ‘extrinsic identificatory enterprise’ in his work on contextual productions of whiteness.

There are two conspicuous figures – unsettled Europeans and separatist Muslims – that the authors invoke as they account for the left behind’s relational disposition.

Authors that invoke left behind resentment often refer to European citizens’ itinerant lifestyle as a source of grievance. European citizens’ access to rights, before the UK’s effective exit from the European Union, weakened the commitment that they were willing to make. The discontent about ‘eastern European enclaves’, which Goodhart invokes, takes the double form of resentment over ‘stretched public services’ and the claim that migrants treat ‘the country as a temporary economic convenience’ (Goodhart, 2017a, p. 126). With the transactionalism and fluidity that distinguish their presence in the UK, this is a portrayal of European citizens as a ‘“neither one thing nor the other” category of resident’ (Goodhart, 2018, p. 4). The attribution of ambivalence – suggesting that others’ sense of belonging and attachment to the nation is partial or questionable – is a powerful strategy of unbelonging (see Bauman, 1990). The particular focus on migrants’ transience, their ‘neither here nor there’ status, as a major source of grievance is conspicuous in the left behind corpus alongside the ‘ambiguous racialisation’ that Lewicki (2023) observes for Eastern Europeans in the UK. ⁶

The claim that European migrants ‘hollow out’ communal life and fail to evidence commitment, which settled populations resent, has a strong presence in the left behind corpus. It draws on the recurring claim that, as a result of the immigrant presence, ‘the value of citizenship is diminished’ (Braverman in Timothy & Williams, 2022, p. 2). Theresa May’s reference to ‘citizens of nowhere’ – in a 2016 speech that has been attributed to Nick Timothy, her chief of staff, and contributor to the left behind corpus – emphasized lack of belonging among ‘cosmopolitan elites’. The focus is just as much on the transactional behaviour of working class migrants and their lack of commitment to the British nation. Their presence in great numbers offends the ‘millions [who] are crying out for a more patriotic, rooted, communitarian politics’ and the ideal of a ‘nation that sees itself as a home, not a shop’ (Embery, 2021, p. 93).

In frequent claims about a different relational subject, British Muslims, cultural distance plays an important role. The idea that British Muslim life is marked by distance and anger draws on civilizational frames about ‘the Muslim world’ and its ‘rebellion’ against modernity. Such images of crisis attribute coherence and volition to Muslim collectives, usually without considering complex historical entanglements and geopolitical circumstances. They foreground an image of problematic Muslimness – a subject position that is also constituted by claims about crisis – for the benefit of non-Muslim audiences. For British Muslims, ideas of civilizational crisis are often re-described in spatial terms (see Finney & Simpson, 2009). Residential patterns can be brought into focus as the result of Muslim ‘self-segregation’ (Cantle, 2005, p. 71); educational choices showcase Muslims’ desire for separateness (Holmwood & O’Toole, 2018); and political participation is ‘sectarian’ (Dobbernack, 2019). The notion of Muslim ‘distance’ in such work is often slippery and attempts by Muslim agents to demonstrate proximity, showcasing the ‘normality’ of their identities, concerns and choices, are always subject to evasive manoeuvres.

Where liberal elites are not bothered by Muslim ‘difference’, the suggestion by authors examined here is that left behind populations take issue and become resentful in view of ethno-religious difference. Goodhart (2017a, p. 41) draws on survey data to suggest that ‘well over half of the population thinks that Britain would lose its identity if more Muslims came to live here’. The immediate context he offers for this is instructive: it is the sense that British people desire ‘social recognition, having a valued role, feeling wanted and respected and so on’ (Goodhart, 2017a, p. 42). Speaking on behalf of the left behind, the claim here is that the Muslim presence reflects a crisis of community and clashes with desire for working class belonging. In a parallel discussion on ‘multiculturalism’, Embery (2021, p. 106) similarly notes the ‘atomisation and fragmentation that marks some of our communities’, resulting from the failure to enforce assimilation towards ethno-religious communities. Timothy (2020, p. 122) emphasizes the more specific grievance that ‘Muslim men have been found to have systematically abused mainly troubled, white working-class girls in towns and cities including Bristol, Oxford, Rochdale, Rotherham and Telford’ (for context, see Tufail, 2015).

Prominent accounts of Muslim separateness, such as Casey’s (2016, p. 15) influential report, provide a reference point for left behind authors, emphasizing ‘segregation, deprivation and social exclusion [that] are combining in a downward spiral with a growth in regressive religious and cultural ideologies.’ Contributors equally highlight the ‘liberal failure’ to enforce assimilation (Cox et al., 2022). The emphasis is on discontent about the presence of Muslim citizens in spaces that, as a result of this presence, are claimed to be unrecognizable and inhospitable to the left behind. A recent report, co-authored by Timothy (Timothy & Williams, 2022, p. 13) for the Centre for Policy Studies, advocating for the large-scale removal of ‘illegal migrants’, went at considerable length on Muslim ‘segregated communities’ and the danger ‘that radical diversity can undermine a common identity, and the social trust and solidarity that make community and commitment to others possible’ (Timothy & Williams, 2022, p. 14).

Claims about conflictual relations with social others are crucial in how the authors make the left behind visible. The authors do not merely invoke conflict over material resources. They attribute preferences for ‘traditional’ modes of being, homeliness and affective attachments, usually – but not always – around whiteness, which others disturb and liberals diminish. Kaufmann (2019, p. 482) notes that ‘[t]he argument that minority ethnic groups are encouraged to take pride in their identity while whites are not strikes me as undeniable in the present climate’. ⁷ Douglas Murray (2018, p. 35), whose comments on whiteness are more pointed than most authors’ positions considered here, argues that ‘the only thing white Britons could do was to remain silent about the change in their country, [as] they were expected simply to get on, silently but contentedly, with abolishing themselves’. Discontent about immaterial ‘change’, a pervasive theme in the left behind corpus, coalesces with demographic anxiety about white identity. In this way, left behind grievances become largely or wholly coextensive with white identity politics, based on the (more or less explicit) claim that racism constitutes its natural outlook on unwelcome social others.

Authors, audiences and politics

There is considerable public interest in the texts considered here, which appear with publishers such as Penguin and Polity Press. It seems that left behind authors successfully generate visual vantage points that, by putting subjects of crisis into the frame, provide attractive positions for groups of spectators. These may be fleeting vistas that audiences occupy for short periods of time as they form a temporary connection with authors’ accounts of the left behind experience. Yet spectatorship is a crucial analytical dimension in how the authors assemble this constituency and place its ‘bodies in action before an assembled audience’ (Rancière, 2009, p. 2).

More generally, the presentation of the left behind – resentful and misguided but also fundamentally decent (Goodhart, 2017a, p. 13) – resonates with historical perspectives on other tragic subjects. Victorian accounts of urban poverty employed different terms but provided similar viewpoints on despondency and deservingness (Ginn, 2017). Populations in ‘forgotten places’ are set up for moral evaluation and for inspection from the vantage point of benevolent patronage that also becomes evident in the panorama of crisis that emerges around the left behind.

The perspectives that relevant authors suggest have also proven influential among British policy communities, not least those that are engaged in culture war politics. The claimed defence of the left behind, based on the images of crisis considered above, filters through different policy proposals. Reports and think pieces suggest new directions for immigration, integration and education policy based on the appeal to common sense knowledge about left behind subjectivity, whiteness and suffering, the relative deservingness of ‘forgotten’ groups and their grievances.

A ‘policy bite’ for the Policy Exchange think tank on the future of immigration policy after Brexit draws on the idea of left behind grievance. Goodhart (2018, p. 4) frames his request for a less permissive framework of movement and settlement rights in response to unhappiness about European migrants’ ‘indeterminate’ status. Neither ‘tourist’ nor permanent resident, ‘[m]any of those taking advantage of free movement in recent years have enjoyed the rights of the latter with the attitude of the former, one of the reasons free movement has been unpopular in many areas’ (Goodhart, 2018, p. 4). Claims about the relational disposition of settled majorities underpin the argument for a restrictive immigration regime. The devaluation of belonging through liberal immigration policy, Goodhart (2021) claims elsewhere, ‘reinforce[s] a sense of displacement for many poor whites and a sense that one’s national citizenship confers less value than it used to’. Drawing on similar ideas of discomfort and displacement, Timothy and Williams (2022) make a parallel case for the massive expansion of asylum-offshoring and for the UK’s abrogation of international treaties protecting refugee rights.

The UK government’s Sewell Report references the new, distinctive focus on ‘the fate and life chances of poorer White groups’ (Commisson on Race and Ethnic Disparities, 2021, p. 38). ⁸ Sewell’s focus on positive measures for the (white) ‘left behind’ coincides with his dismissal of ‘bespoke interventions that single out ethnic minority groups from the White majority’ (Commisson on Race and Ethnic Disparities, 2021, p. 88). The report sets out to make the case that ‘disadvantaged White communities are a priority for support’, which also underpins the House of Commons Education Committee inquiry (2021), mentioned previously. Caught up in the ambiguity of ‘levelling up’, one of the Committee’s more conspicuous recommendations is for schools to consider ‘whether the promotion of politically controversial terminology, including White Privilege, is consistent with their duties under the Equality Act 2010’ (2021, p. 56). Gillborn (2021) notes that the report is ‘the latest step in an ongoing campaign to use the underachievement of poor white people as a weapon to demonise antiracism and keep the same people angry at the wrong target’. The priority focus on the left behind, with emphasis on discomfort and resentment, finds an attentive audience among a set of British policymakers who channel and operationalize the images that left behind authors frame and popularize.

Conclusion

The article has explored the role of crisis in social-political language, especially how crisis becomes the subject of recurring claims and embellishments attached to social groups. I suggest that it needs to be examined as a category that produces visibility and suggests relationships: it puts social actors into place as subjects, antagonists and spectators. This is an argument for examining crisis as an active element, rather than a simple background condition, and to explore its deployment with an interest in political functions and relational effects. Perhaps this is best understood as the basic groundwork for the conjunctural analysis that follows. Yet it seems clear that the production of crisis, and the rules according to which groups become its subject, requires close attention before conjunctural openness can be on the horizon. The political terrain today is inevitably structured by overlapping panoramic spectacles of crisis.

In response to this spectacle, and even where left behind jargon is not the issue, it is important to recognize the myriad ways in which the working class has been constituted and constitutes itself, not least as a multi-ethnic subject. In The Shadow of the Mine, Huw Beynon and Ray Hudson (2021) give a narrative account of the closure of collieries across South Wales and North East England. They also bring regions, communities and subjects into view that have been ‘forgotten’ (pp. 1, 322) and ‘left behind’ (p. 5), with ‘deep stories’ (p. 2) that need to be excavated to understand grievances that have a role to play in recent political upheaval. Different from the works considered in this article, their subjects are complex agents, with resentment that emerges from historical experience, though this experience equally sustains struggle and solidarity (pp. 122–126, 340–341). They are not the flat subjects of grievance that left behind authors invoke without agency, structural location, historical memory and consciousness beyond resentment.

Among the crucial issues this article has skirted is the matter of self-authorship. It is difficult to see the emplacement of the left behind as subject of crisis, with hostile relations to (mostly non-white and immigrant) others and under the excited gaze of political spectators, as anything but a form of radical alienation. In how the left behind comes into existence, it is an ‘artefact of political domination’ (Shilliam, 2018, p. 154). Despite her reading of Brexit as a ‘howl’ of working class anger, Mckenzie (2017, p. 208) is surely right to attack ‘the patronizing “left behind” rhetoric [that] actively supports this devalued identity of the deindustrialized working class’. This paternalism, which is among the most distinctive attributes of the texts considered in this article, requires sustained critique.

More generally, it is important to understand the production of subject positions and social relations through crisis. The racialization of the ‘white working class’ requires attention as an ideological operation that is backed up by substantial power. Other subjects of perpetual crisis also need to be considered for the claims and images that bring them into view. This means raising questions about spectatorship and attending to the relational politics of crisis, considering how the crisis of one group interlinks with that of another. This perspective, which this article has developed in outline, responds to Roitman’s (2022, p. 694) request that we consider ‘what becomes of the concept of crisis when we problematise practices of representation’. The article’s concern has been to explore the making of the left behind and to add some productive tools to the study of crisis at a point when its permanence and multiplication pose conceptual and political challenges.