A traditional intellectual for the populist right?

Abstract

While incarcerated, Gramsci spent a great deal of time discussing and categorising intellectuals in his notebooks. Most markedly was his categorisation of ‘traditional’ and ‘organic’ intellectuals, which distinguish between influencers within popular culture/ religion and the media and those in traditional roles within formal institutions (Gramsci 1971: 3–14). These serve to provide moral and intellectual leadership for emerging political ideologies and principles. The rise of right-wing populism in the last few decades has seen no end of organic intellectuals emerge to offer such leadership but a relevant lack of traditional ones. This is particularly the case in Britain, which has lacked the historical populist environment found in the artistic and intellectual traditions in France and Italy and where the new right associated with Thatcherism in the 1970s and 1980s was so embroiled in right-wing politics that there was no room for manoeuvre. Out of this, it appears Matthew Goodwin is looking to emerge from the shadows. To provide a rational voice for the conservative White working class left behinds that have been marginalised by decades of cosmopolitanism, ‘hyper’ liberalism and globalisation. In doing so, he looks to give an ‘intellectual’ overview that appeals to the populist rightwing of the Conservative Party, Reform UK and to the many prominent media commentators that fill the pages of the Daily Mail, Telegraph and The Sun and dominate the airwaves of TalkTV and GB News. His book, Values, Voice and Virtue certainly appears to do this. It has gained immediate coverage in the mainstream British press with its academic distractors being balanced out by enthusiasm it has received from right-wing columnists in the manner that was intended. To a degree the book succeeds in doing what it appears to. It does provide a polished prose written in a manner which eludes a form of respectability, adding formal titles to academics that befits a style from a bygone era which no doubt gives an impressionable learned appearance to Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph readers. The book also follows and repeats the same contradictions inherent within the ideologies of right-wing populist movements. In addition, despite its promise to provide a scholarly explanation to the divisions in British society and an alternative explanation to the post-Brexit Empire-nostalgia of Brexit or the fall-out from austerity favoured by left-leaning academia, the book does not really offer anything new. Goodwin 1187251 CNC0010.1177/03098168231187251Capital & ClassExtended Book Review book-review2023