Authentocrats: Culture, Politics and the New Seriousness is a new book by Joe Kennedy. It begins with recalling an incident from a few years ago, when Owen Smith, who was then regarded as a potential leader of the Labour party, made a bizarre comment about how 'frothy coffee' (cappuccino) was new to him in a small cafe in Wales. The author takes apart this remark with the grace of a surgeon. He explains how that area, like many others in the UK, had been shaped over generations by waves of Italian immigration, and that Smith’s remark was shaped out of ignorance with the intent of appealing to a vague notion of working class authenticity. For a certain kind of person this can be reduced to an exclamation over what Smith called 'posh biscuits and a little cup':
'He was not some member of the metropolitan elite, he was saying, unlike Corbyn: no, he was a real prole, stunned by coffee, dumbfounded by little biscuits. And yet anyone, by spending about twenty-five seconds on the internet, can tell that Smith is by background part of a liberal middle class, endowed with substantial cultural capital, and by profession — namely as a one-time PR consultant for a huge, European-based pharmaceuticals company — precisely the kind of person who could instantly pick a cappuccino out of a lineup of seven hundred ways of serving coffee.'
Smith is perhaps one of the softer targets of the book – the 'frothy coffee' remark was considered risible from the moment it was uttered – but this incident works well as one of the most absurd examples of a trend that's evident in the behaviour of almost every significant political and media figure in Britain. I was only surprised that the book doesn't spend much time on Nigel Farage, but perhaps he would require a volume all to himself. On the whole it's highly perspicacious, funny and true. It feels like a very modern blend of polemic, critical theory and memoir; a bit more rigorous than the average online opinion-haver, while revelling in a certain aggro vibe that leaves it lurking several steps away from academia.
Aside from the directly political angle, the book also goes off on several long digressions into the nature of authenticity in popular culture. The author allows himself a very long leash in these chapters, which range far and wide through literature, film and TV. Some of the examples seem more relevant than others; certainly I couldn't summarise now what point was trying to emerge about Peter Jackson and the Lord of the Rings movies. But I enjoyed the passages on Henry Green, who is still one of our most interesting and neglected post-war novelists. And there's some very good stuff here about the nineties in Britain, our long hangover from lad culture, and the uneasy relationship between Millennials and Gen Xers.
The thing about engaging so thoroughly with the question of authenticity in politics and culture is that it becomes difficult for the book to extricate itself from it. At times the theory here seems to be urging the reader to turn away from arguments about 'the kind of people' they see before them towards a kind of broad class-based solidarity, based on the idea that we all have more in common than what separates us. But at the same time, it can't quite set aside the language of 'reactionary traditionalism' that it spends so long lamenting elsewhere. Meaning still pivots on assumptions about things that belong and things that don't.
I like, for example, that the author lampoons the fact that 'the Times and the Telegraph both employ several writers whose job seems to involve little but acting as if the greatest social ills facing the UK in 2017 are the popularity of the avocado, the rise of craft beer and the ubiquity of beards.' This is true. It is a stupid tendency. We know this. But immediately after these lines, a whole crowd of other assumptions pile in:
'Such writers have an implied audience of comfortably-off professional people — generally men, given the masculinist tone of this writing — in their forties and early fifties who know, or think they know, what a “hipster” looks like and where they can be found. Indeed, the reason they are aware regarding the whereabouts of the people they believe are hipsters is that, frequently enough, they’re collecting rent from them.'
As drive-by humour, this kind of works. It's a passage which creates a whole little society of its own, in just two sentences. But we're supposed to take it more seriously than that. The problem is that it's rejected the character-based assumptions of the avocado/craft beer/beard-complainers, and replaced them with a set of its own. Not long after this, the author recounts a story from a friend who complains that their landlord turns up to carry out house inspections 'on a fucking Vespa'. By now we're a long way from frothy coffees, but the implication is surely that they didn't really belong on that scooter.
Another example. At one point the Labour MP Jess Phillips is cited as an example of someone who brandishes their working class credentials as part of their public persona; gleefully the author comes in with the left-field rejoinder that 'Phillips talks incessantly about her West Midlands upbringing whilst typically failing to note that it was entirely middle-class'. It may be true that her accent and her demeanour feed into our ideas about what a 'real' politician looks like, but to scrutinise her origins in this way is just playing the authentocrats at their own game. This kind of assessment requires the kind of snap-judgement of authenticity that the book spends so long bemoaning.
The book expends a great deal of energy in undermining the media-led construct of a homogenous majority of working class people whose 'legitimate concerns' include our nuclear deterrent, immigration, benefit fraud, etc. This is right, I think, and on that front the book is a strong and focussed corrective to that idea. But at the same time, there is a certain amount of eye-rolling at the idea that anyone could believe earnestly in these things. It's difficult to explain what I mean by this without falling into the same old trap: that to pretend to cater to 'legitimate concerns' is to manifest a secret contempt for the working class. To be clear, I've nothing at stake: I don't have to cater to anyone. I have no interest in listening to points of view I find immoral, and in most cases I'd much prefer if politicians were more open and principled about their disagreements.
The problem is that this book has nothing to say to anyone who might earnestly believe in some of the things it holds at arm's length. Should it? I don't know. Whether or not that's a problem for the reader probably depends on what they are expecting. There's not much in the way of solutions here. It takes a certain amount for granted from its audience: that the idea of a nuclear deterrent is oxymoronic; that immigration has brought vast benefits to this country, many of which are incalculable; that a Corbyn-led Labour party would in general be a highly progressive force for good in the world. And yes, these are all positions that I agree with – I'm not the one who needs convincing here. But Authentocrats left me with no idea of how one might go about talking to anyone who thinks differently.
At one point there's an anecdote about encountering a flyer in a pub, printed with some cringeworthy pro-English doggerel. The author has a bit of fun with the poet’s complaint that nobody teaches Shakespeare or Wilde or Shaw anymore. But then the flyer slips away, useful only as a prop for a wider point about the vacuous nature of English patriotism. Nationalism holds no appeal for me; maybe such things are mostly deserving of contempt. But given that these feelings have thrived on (real or imagined) intellectual contempt for so long, I can't help but wonder what would happen if we tried something else.
