The liberal superego and the conservative id

Your guilty conscience may force you to vote Democratic, but deep down inside, you secretly long for a cold-hearted Republican...

The Queen’s funeral was moving, a ceremony perfectly judged in tone. Amid the atmosphere of the day, in many ways a reverse of the events following the death of Diana 25 years previously, it felt like even quite outwardly liberal people felt themselves tugged by feelings of national pride and a sense of religious transcendence. 

Many would view patriotism as crass at best, and sinister at worst; the attitudes of the intellectual circles which Orwell scorned before the War have, since the 1960s, became acceptable, then mainstream and eventually dominant; in normal circumstances university-educated Britons would cringe at the thought of flag-waving, but not this time. 

It's not the only kind of patriotism we’ve seen this year. Across the most sophisticated and progressive capital cities of western Europe, from Dublin to Vienna, we’ve never been more festooned with flags; not just the now ubiquitous Pride colours in its various incarnations, but even more so the yellow and blue of Ukraine. 

It's everywhere, the Ukrainian national flag, and something especially popular with people of a centrist-left persuasion; it’s patriotism for people who don’t like patriotism. And there’s nothing wrong with that, nor is there anything inherently contradictory or hypocritical about liberal internationalist types sporting the Ukrainian colours. It’s perfectly logical to dislike nationalism, to support free movement of law-abiding migrant workers, and at the same time to side with a country fighting for its survival against a brutal predatory neighbour. It’s not own-worthy — but I do wonder if, as with the royal funeral, it’s an example of permission structures at work. 

‘Permission structure’ originates in the world of marketing, but has come to be used in politics, too. Barack Obama used the phrase back in 2013, which led USA Today to call it ‘the hot new term in Washington’, although it’s hardly become well-known since. The then-president was talking about budget disputes with the Republicans, who for partisan reasons could not cooperate, so he was going ‘to create a permission structure for them to be able to do what's going to be best for the country’. 

A permission structure, according to one definition, is something that ‘provides an emotional and psychological justification that allows someone to change deeply held beliefs and/or behaviours while importantly retaining their pride and integrity’.  

The idea is that people often want to do something, are fairly convinced it’s right, but social pressures are too embedded to allow them to act. This is the constant tug-of-war in the minds of the upper-middle-class who dictate both social norms and government policy, especially found in areas where ideological desire crashes against reality and causes real-world problems – in particular crime and education. As economist Garett Jones put it: ‘Half of modern progressivism is searching for a socially viable path to pursue conservative policies.’

A few years back a study at the University of Leicester found that many middle-class, middle-aged people were more conservative than they thought. They voted for Left or centre-Left parties and they identified as liberals; they disliked the Tories, and that was before Brexit radicalised many, and most of their friends had similar views. But their lifestyles were quite conservative, and deep down so were many of their political instincts.

Many notional urban liberals are much more conservative than they claim, or even believe themselves. While it’s true that in Haidtian terms, they may have different moral flavours — although the great transition has shown many on the Left behaving in quite conservative ways — I suspect that a significant number of Bobo’s are liberal for convention’s sake. They would like many conservative norms and policies, but lack the permission structure.

They are often more patriotic than they think, because it’s instinctive to want to be part of a group filled with self-respect. Anti-patriotism is the norm for educated people and has been for five decades, and it’s what everyone around them thinks. Yet they get a good feeling from the oxytocin hit of communal events, whether it’s to do with the royals, the military, churchgoing on occasions or the national football team (although in the past they were put off by the thuggery and racism of the fans). They find patriotic displays somewhat cringeworthy but I suspect that’s partly because of the sort of people who like them — older, provincial, more Right-wing and less educated. If people like them were more prominent, they would enjoy it more.

They’re also mildly snobbish, but because conventional snobbery is not permitted, they can only be openly disdainful about people with bad opinions rather than those who behave badly. The absence of permission on this latter issue helps make education an especially difficult area of psychological conflict.

One of the essential problems with education is that a small minority of (mostly) boys are unteachable, and make it impossible for everyone around them to learn, too. A huge amount of a secondary school’s resources is spent trying to contain this element, who cause huge stress both to teachers and to other pupils. But for essentially ideological reasons it’s difficult and expensive to do the necessary thing and remove them, although after wasting enough hours and making enough people miserable and scared — and sometimes injuring them — it does happen.

Educated upper-middle-class liberals know this, and would dearly like to spare their children the pain of being dragged down (or physically threatened) by these boys: they just don’t have the permission structure to make it a priority. The effort involved in changing so many minds is much greater than the effort of going private, or moving a mile or so to a school with a less challenging catchment area.

These people are notionally non-judgmental about lifestyles, because that’s what they’re expected to be, but they don’t really believe it, and their revealed preferences are usually towards very conventional relationships.

The same is true of crime and civility. People grow very used to even the most squalid of conditions if they think that’s the way it is, but it’s forgotten how even in the late Queen’s lifetime England was a way more law-abiding and peaceful society than it is now; crimes which today would seem petty were relatively newsworthy, while today elderly people being brutally murdered by intruders is barely noticed.

Even if you live in a reasonably nice part of London, your neighbourhood will experience quite regular incidents of serious assault and street robbery, while car and bike theft will be routine. None of this is at all inevitable or untreatable, it happens because the influential class don’t feel they have permission to seriously act. The only people they hear or read advocating effective (‘punitive’) punishments are low in education, status and nous, and a modern educated liberal would rather be seen robbing from the poor box than echoing the opinions of the poor.

Deep down, I suspect, many share those feelings and will occasionally reveal them; after the London riots of 2011, for example, several high-profile Twitter users with impeccable liberal credentials expressed views on the rioters that would sit easily in the Death Star council alongside Peter Cushing and Darth Vader discussing new crime reduction measures in the galaxy. Perhaps it was the heat of the moment, and their blood was up, or perhaps they felt like they had permission to express their true feelings (which I happen to share).

Similarly, cycling in London is very ‘left-coded’ and cyclists tend to see cars as the Daily Mail in metal form, but get any enthusiast on the topic of bike crime and they become the Taliban. Their identity as cyclists gives them permission to.

In the US, where crime is far worse, some urban centres became so intolerably violent in the 1980s that a critical mass of people felt they had permission to do the unthinkable, and vote for Republicans or seriously crime-fighting Democrats. And, of course, it turned out that most liberals felt pretty happy about conservative solutions; incredibly, the urban experience was actually improved by not being screamed at by crack addicts on the way to the shops.

People largely don’t feel they have permission to be anti-crime because it’s gauche and conservative, just like flag-waving, to attack groups seen as vulnerable, and that includes criminals. In the same way, it’s socially acceptable to criticise the presence of immigrants when it’s the super-rich, and rich foreigners are routinely blamed for London’s housing crisis, supposedly buying up properties and leaving them empty. In reality the number of empty homes in London is very small, proportionally the tiniest of any city in Europe, and super-rich foreigners have far less impact on availability than the significant numbers of foreign-born in social housing; the difference is that people feel they have permission to criticise one group, but not the other. But such is the hype about empty homes that at one point a senior Labour politician even started talking about ‘requisition’.

Similarly, and for understandable reasons, in the past few months it’s become permissible to say things about Russians that would be intolerable when spoken of any other group; in some cases, people have lost work simply because they were Russian, which is horrendous. The war in Ukraine has created a permission structure for the feelings of nationalism and xenophobia deeply ingrained within us. 

It doesn’t take that much to trigger the switch. Conservatism is the human default, while liberalism is adapted for relatively modern urban environments; progressivism is a form of runaway liberalism in which people often competitively take ever more extreme viewpoints for reasons of status or pathological empathy.

But people’s commitment to liberal and progressive causes is often quite thin, a form of decorum exaggerated by preference falsification. Conservatives just need to create the permission structure, and it all comes off like a group of drunken buttoned-up Brits on holiday.