All this is pretty clear and on point, and undoubtedly correct in terms of the two, allow me the phrase, old-fashioned social and economical "left" and "right" .
But i don't think "woke" in "woke elites" is described even the very ends of the items traditionally used to measure "social left".
I think to measure that and to capture the division between "woke elites" and "the people" you'd need a new set of items, a subscale of "woke" that whilst UNDOUBTEDLY highly correlated with "socially liberal" goes well beyond that.
It would consist of items almost exclusively related to race and gender and use of language in social interactions. Off the top of my head: There are only two genders; It's impossible to change your biological sex; People should use toilets and changing rooms according to the gender assigned at birth and their genitalia and not according to how they identify now; Using certain words for groups of people causes as much harm as physical violence; Women never make up accusations of rape; No person ever says "now" when propositioned for sex but actually wants to be pursued; Racism is still constantly present in the British society; All White people have racist attitudes even if they not realise it themselves; The role of exploitation of non-white people in the British history must be emphasised much more than it's now; All non White people in Britain regardless of wealth and education suffer prejudice and barriers to success; We need to remove statues and plaques to any historical figures who benefitted or were involved in the slave trade even in a small way; Black people from the Caribbean should be paid reparations for slavery their ancestors endured; It's ok to forbid any speech that's racist, sexist or homophobic; etc.
I think if you look at those issues you'd see a much more extreme clustering of attitudes with the "woke academic thought elite" at odds with the majority of "the people" (apart perhaps from some students largely of humanities) -- even those who otherwise support the "traditional socially liberal" set of values.
I'd like to see the dots sized by what percentage of the population they represent. Contrasting certain groups that represent quite different fractions of the population as being equally far from the centre in different dimensions seems to miss something. For example, in the plot highlighting "occupation", he contrasts managers and professionals with blue collar workers and asks which is more unrepresentative; yet actually *al*l of the occupations he shows are more socially conservative than the average (some a little, some a lot) *except* managers and professionals, so I'd probably hesitate to definitively dismiss the argument that these two groups are in a real way more unrepresentative than blue-collar workers. I still find the argument mostly convincing, I just think there are nuances to it that are missed by not showing that dimension.
Very illustrative and interesting, thnx. Just one thing, the first chart featuring political parties clearly has Plaid Cymru as the extreme left in the Economic dimension, not Labour. The second (otherwise identical) chart supports the point that Labour voters is the extreme polar opposite to Conservative ones on economic views. As the scaling is the same on both, I guess the first chart may have an error there?
Doesn’t this make Matt Goodwin’s point: there is a cluster at the edge that we see here in £70k+ AB degreed professionals. If you added London, raised the salary and showed some measure of high social influence (eg work in media, write Substacks) it would be more off centre. The way to show this analytically would be to weight the dots by a proxy for social influence and see how off centre it is and try to do the same for other times and places
All this is pretty clear and on point, and undoubtedly correct in terms of the two, allow me the phrase, old-fashioned social and economical "left" and "right" .
But i don't think "woke" in "woke elites" is described even the very ends of the items traditionally used to measure "social left".
I think to measure that and to capture the division between "woke elites" and "the people" you'd need a new set of items, a subscale of "woke" that whilst UNDOUBTEDLY highly correlated with "socially liberal" goes well beyond that.
It would consist of items almost exclusively related to race and gender and use of language in social interactions. Off the top of my head: There are only two genders; It's impossible to change your biological sex; People should use toilets and changing rooms according to the gender assigned at birth and their genitalia and not according to how they identify now; Using certain words for groups of people causes as much harm as physical violence; Women never make up accusations of rape; No person ever says "now" when propositioned for sex but actually wants to be pursued; Racism is still constantly present in the British society; All White people have racist attitudes even if they not realise it themselves; The role of exploitation of non-white people in the British history must be emphasised much more than it's now; All non White people in Britain regardless of wealth and education suffer prejudice and barriers to success; We need to remove statues and plaques to any historical figures who benefitted or were involved in the slave trade even in a small way; Black people from the Caribbean should be paid reparations for slavery their ancestors endured; It's ok to forbid any speech that's racist, sexist or homophobic; etc.
I think if you look at those issues you'd see a much more extreme clustering of attitudes with the "woke academic thought elite" at odds with the majority of "the people" (apart perhaps from some students largely of humanities) -- even those who otherwise support the "traditional socially liberal" set of values.
To my mind being engaged in these debates either way is probably indicative of being on the limits either way.
I'd like to see the dots sized by what percentage of the population they represent. Contrasting certain groups that represent quite different fractions of the population as being equally far from the centre in different dimensions seems to miss something. For example, in the plot highlighting "occupation", he contrasts managers and professionals with blue collar workers and asks which is more unrepresentative; yet actually *al*l of the occupations he shows are more socially conservative than the average (some a little, some a lot) *except* managers and professionals, so I'd probably hesitate to definitively dismiss the argument that these two groups are in a real way more unrepresentative than blue-collar workers. I still find the argument mostly convincing, I just think there are nuances to it that are missed by not showing that dimension.
Very illustrative and interesting, thnx. Just one thing, the first chart featuring political parties clearly has Plaid Cymru as the extreme left in the Economic dimension, not Labour. The second (otherwise identical) chart supports the point that Labour voters is the extreme polar opposite to Conservative ones on economic views. As the scaling is the same on both, I guess the first chart may have an error there?
Doesn’t this make Matt Goodwin’s point: there is a cluster at the edge that we see here in £70k+ AB degreed professionals. If you added London, raised the salary and showed some measure of high social influence (eg work in media, write Substacks) it would be more off centre. The way to show this analytically would be to weight the dots by a proxy for social influence and see how off centre it is and try to do the same for other times and places
I think the fact that the party placements are all further out than ANY demographics suggests that this is not really a cluster 'at the edge'.
Thx. A101 soc sci made clear for all, and hugely relevant right now!
Really good piece, though I guess I'm pretty much the demographic that would think so...
One of the best books I read about 'Elites' was from George Walden, ' The New Elites''.
He argued that we have an anti-elite Elite; although over 20 years old, I'd still highly recommend it.