Capitalism doesn’t care about your feelings. But the market cares about how it can monetise your feelings

In which I bemoan the 'botoxification' of politics and culture and it's pernicious influence on the left and emboldening of the right.

A few weeks ago I was at a party with a large group of people many of whom were lifelong Labour activists. This party was being held in one of the Constituencies that had been in the news during the early part of the election and many of the activists there felt - rightly in my opinion - aggrieved about the way they had been treated by the Party. This isn’t a story about the rights and wrongs of Labour’s heavy-handed selection process. But I add this as context for some of the behaviour I describe below.

At this party, I was asked by a group of them how I had found conference. Or rather, how awful conference had been (as was their expectation). I pointed out that, actually, I had spent conference largely with people connected to the environmental movements - NGOs and businesses as well as senior politicians - and that the mood had been extremely positive. There was a real sense of both optimism and dynamism in that space.

One of my interlocutors was a man about 20 years my senior. No at nearly 50 that makes less difference than it used to (or does it? Read on!) but it was still a difference that I felt was stark. This man had come to the party wearing some badges with slogans on. It wasn’t a dressy party but that was still a conscious sartorial choice made when he got dressed that day. His clothes weren’t just going to protect his body and modesty. They were going to tell you in very simplistic terms where he stood. his clothes shouted at me before he did.

But he did shout at me too. My optimism and my attempt to portray a world that didn’t fit his priors were extremely offensive to him and so, at this party, he was quite rude to me.

Now, at this particular party, I was neither up for - nor in the social position to have - a fight. I wasn’t drinking and he was. I wasn’t smoking weed and he was. If my behaviour had been poor, it would have hurt my hosts far more than his and I didn’t want to do that. So I shrugged it off and turned to my cousin to talk about music instead. One thing I have got better at over the years is extracting myself at parties from bully bores and so I went on to have a nice time avoiding this particular chap.

That party, and this behaviour in particular, has stayed with me though. Because it felt like a crystallisation of something I have been thinking about for a while.

Why do so many grownarse adults behave like teenagers now?

I think this comes down to two interrelated issues. And they both have big - and negative - implications for politics and the left.

The first issue is the culture in which we have all now grown up. And it’s not the one we think it is.

Now before I go on I want to be very clear. I do not believe that it was the culture wars that lost the Democrats the election. It was - to expand on James Carville’s phrase - it was the everyday economy, Stupid. My focus on culture here is not about the issues being fought over in what has been branded (and is ever expanding) ‘culture wars’. What I am talking about is the cultural practice of politics.

For my whole lifetime, the Left has thought of ourselves as counter-cultural. This has become not simply an integral part of our way of thinking about ourselves, but also a way of thinking about our political beliefs.

But that particular belief is harder and harder to justify in a cultural environment that is absolutely (thankfully) skewed to socially liberal ideas. But that has taken that as the natural arc of progress rather than an idea to be constantly examined and debated, fought over and fought for.

In the 1960s a counter-cultural movement that had been building since the 1950s started to gain serious cultural cache.

In the 1970s this was confronted by a punk movement that rejected the ‘hippy’ ethos but also basked just as much as those a decade before in their outsider status. These were both youth-driven movements and they were also a lot less widespread than either their coverage or the memory of them allows for. At least at the time.

Ever since, be it goths or grunge or the rise of the geeks - there have been movements that have tapped into a counter-cultural vein of thought that makes its adherents feel like they are the edgy ones. The ones fighting the good fight against overwhelming odds. Sometimes - and certainly on weeks like these that can still feel very, very true.

What I think is vastly overlooked though is how true that feels to people who don’t share my liberal values, but who also feel like outsiders. Also feel exceptionally countercultural when they voice their opposition to what they see as liberal culture going too far. And how they now are getting that sugar hit of rebellion when they do so.

I have illustrated this post with a picture of the Brilliant 1980s sitcom The Young Ones. God I loved and still love this show. I can quote vast swathes of it. I still think of it a lot. Especially when I am in the theatre. I saw a show at a major theatre last summer and when asked to describe it, I likened it to being lectured by Rik from the Young Ones.

(Rik styled himself as ‘the people’s poet’ (and the poetry was hilariously excruciating). But he was frequently bested by the punk Vyv who believed in nothing but destruction, himself egged on by ‘Mike the cool person’ who was the closest the audience had for a stand-in. At the time, Vyv was also widely cheered on by viewers as well - an audience made up largely of the leftist student milieu that the show was parodying but seemingly more able than their successors to laugh at themselves and their flawed comrades.)

My opinion, however, was not in the majority of those who saw the piece as it got rave reviews. So I guess there is an audience for what a theatre friend and I have taken to calling “Legz Akimbo” theatre - after the League of Gentlemen theatre troop who perform patronising plays for children about social issues (usually to which they aren’t fully bought in themselves). When I read reviews of this show and many like it, the most frequent words I hear are ‘brave’ and ‘challenging’. But how brave is it really to stand in front of a hyper-liberal theatre audience and feed their views back to them like comfort food? How challenging is it to present a simplistic view of social issues where to even present the challenges their opponents might present would be seen as too much of a capitulation? And so if these views are challenged at all it is by cartoonish straw men easily knocked down so the righteous can win.

Wouldn’t it be more challenging to try to understand and present the arguments of your opponents? And think how challenging it would be right now to make a piece of theatre that had a Trump voter as its central character. Not, necessarily, because they were a Trump voter even, but because they are an interesting and well-rounded character who also voted for Trump.

More challenging still - try to imagine a Trump or Farage fan as a proper - non-baddie - character in a British soap opera. These stories of day-to-day life (and I remain and will always remain a lifelong fan of the best British soap, which is, obviously, Emmerdale) have never really been that day-to-day because the need for new storylines inevitably means that these characters will go through more in a year than most of us will in a lifetime.

But now, there is also the pressure for these shows to give a much wider range of the full spectrum of human experience. This means that Emmerdale - a tiny village of fewer than 50 people is now demographically extremely and unusually diverse. It would not match any census data. But that’s all fine because, in general, it adds to the amount of storylines they can tell. But what they don’t seem to have a lot of in this rural Yorkshire village is people who are anti-vaxxers, or believe that Trump won the 2020 election or that Nigel Farage has a point. I would find it toe-curling if they did. So would the cast and writers I imagine. But it’s a decent argument that can be made by those who feel our cultural life lacks representation of them and those they know and love.

The point of this post is not to berate cultural creators as I have no interest in doing that.

Instead, it is to show that the liberal relationship to culture is anything but counter. Just as the once labelled ‘Alternative Comedy’ of the Young Ones simply became ‘comedy’ what was once counter-culture is now unarguably the mainstream.

But our emotional attachment to being the alternative has not caught up with this. Which has, I believe, led to two separate and equally destructive impulses.

Firstly, if you feel you are in a small and vulnerable minority you are less able to be self-critical about how you protect and defend those beliefs. So we have a huge range of extremely powerful cultural actors who tell themselves and others a story of their victimhood, or their powerlessness and whose brittleness in the face of that sense of their own lack of power (however unrealistic) makes them less able to accept the challenges they do face, including the acceleration of the feelings of minoritisation and victimhood in their opponents, harder to deal with. Opponants are viewed not as people whose life experiences have led them to different conclusions - they’re just fascists.

No wonder when faced with real and genuinely frightening authoritarianism like that we could potentially see under Trump people are not listening to the liberal left. Because we have been ‘the boy who cries Fascist’ and have been for far too long. That insult has been hurled at everyone from George Osborne (a Thatcherite, but not a Fascist) to Julie Bindel (a left wing, lesbian, radical feminist) and it has lost its potency.

Secondly, if you get a dopamine hit of both bravery and acclamation every time you speak out - however repetitive you are. You keep singing from the same hymn book and never develop even as the world and the tactics needed to deal with it change.

I see an awful lot of this in the world of media. In fact, it was in thinking about certain columnists that the phrase ‘botoxification of politics’ first occurred to me.

Both the left and right have a group of columnists, pundits and influencers who made their name by being edgy often in their younger years. But the depressing part now is that they are still writing what essentially boils down to the same bloody pieces - 20 years on. They can’t bring their audience with them on a developmental journey as they are frozen in the market niche they have created. Doomed to retain an endless student politics style existence where everything is simple and you’re either with us or against us. And social media has made this not just possible for them, but commercially essential for them.

Which brings me neatly to my second issue - the triumph on left and right of commercialism.

Someone asked me recently why the Guardian has become such a disaster. Sure, they said, there’s some good political and UK based reporting and a couple of decent columnists. But that maybe makes up for 20 per cent of its output and is drowned out by a sea of Riks. I still read a lot of Guardian content - probably on a daily basis. But I absolutely understood what they were frustrated by.

But while Riks might annoy an awful lot of us, they do appeal to a niche but affluent group of people who want to be spoonfed their beliefs back to them and will keep funding a platform that does that. The Guardian, endlessly derided by those on the right as basically Communist, is doing what works for it in commercial terms and servicing the consumers it has developed. They have to pander to their vision of a young person and their politics even as the people who hold those views age. And they have to keep that audience feeling that way even as they should grow into more nuanced and rounded thinkers. It’s like we are all living the Steve Buscemi GIF but none of us can admit it.

This reminded me too of a conversation I had with a Tory Peer who was bemoaning the state of campus politics these days.

Now I read The Coddling of the American Mind with interest and some qualified agreement about the destructive nature of what the authors term ‘safetyism’. But what I don’t think was covered was the point I made to the Tory Lord.

When I did my undergraduate degree it was free. I got a student loan to cover living expenses but I did not have to pay tuition fees. Fast forward twenty years and I did have to pay fees for my Master’s degree. And it changed how I behaved. I behaved as a consumer.

Now, in my case, that meant chasing harder for the prompt delivery of grades than I might otherwise have done and expecting certain quality criteria to be met. But I went to an evening university and had a much wider amount of interests and things to do than an undergrad whose time and experience for three years will revolve almost entirely around their university experience. As a student, you might expect them to study ideas that challenge them. But as a consumer - why would they actively pay to be made uncomfortable?

I am not saying that they shouldn’t have a well-rounded and thoroughly challenging education. What I am saying is that we have made this experience, at least in part, one of consumerism and as such, that changes the motivations and expectations of those paying for it.

But as we continue to talk about what went wrong with political discourse. As we blame the right wing media. As we address the weaknesses of the Democratic campaign or the failings of Joe Biden (and of the mainstream media to be honest about them), what we aren’t doing is addressing the very obvious elephant in the room (and the title of this piece):

Capitalism doesn’t care about your feelings. But the market cares about how it can monetise your feelings.

And that money can flow in from conservatives or liberals. Democrats or Republicans. Tories or Labour members, Liberal Democrats or Greens.

In fact, Capitalism loves it when it finds a way to trigger us into more ‘botoxification’. Because in acting like teenagers with wage packets we spend like teenagers with wage packets. We buy the products that carry the MAGA flag, or the Pride flag, or the Palestinian flag or the Isreali flag. We get our dopamine hit of demonstrably feeling our feelings. All for the low low price of a few quid. The left will donate to Stonewall and Planned Parenthood and the ACLU or their British equivalents (all of whom have the same fundraising incentives that the Guardian has to maintain the levels of pain and outrage - thus not sorting the important things that are under threat from the areas where their concerns are less justified).

And as we do so, we also retreat into our metaphorical teenage bedrooms (we may not put posters on their walls the way we once did, we don’t need to - we have them on their Tik Toks/Instagrams/Twitter/BlueSky feeds) safe from the real world we no longer understand how to engage with.

This post was bubbling under long before the re-election of Donald Trump but it has absolutely been written with that in mind. My heart is broken and a lot of this is that blood pouring out of it - a cri de couer.

But in the long term and beyond this moment I remain concerned about the impact on our politics that the monetisation of our infantilisation is driving.

If the response to Trump’s win in 2016 is anything to go by, this is almost as dangerous a moment for liberalism as it is for America and the world. And all the immediate reward - in both social and financial capital - will go to those who want to stand up and shout the loudest. But if we want liberal values to win, we have to understand why they are slipping away from their dominant position.

So, returning to further torture my Young Ones metaphor, if you were to objectively put Rik’s politics next to Vyvs, I would choose the many many exhaustingly many things that Rik thought he was fighting for (by writing poor poerty - or in today’s parlance making TikToks) over Vyv’s nihilism.

But the truth is that in terms of those two characters no one ever wanted Rik to win. And no one ever will.

Despite a headbanger being elected leader of the free world, the Vyvs of this world are beatable. But not by the Riks. Never by the Riks.

So can we remember the last line of the theme tune “We may not be the young ones very long”? God, I hope that can be true and we can all come out of the extended infantilisation we have found ourselves in. Before it really is too late for any of us to grow up.

I do not feel hopeful.

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