worth noting that McDuff
says the 'Brexit connection in the headline was not me', though it's no surprise the use the Guardian wish to put it to.
Culturally insular, not interested in or smart enough to understand real news, generally afraid of people not like him (it’s always a him)
Always a him? I can't believe he's never encountered class and sexist prejudice against working class women along those
same lines. I suppose it's probably lazy twitter rhetoric, but there's some kind of irony that he (is that always a he too?) has divided the working class and disappeared 50% of it in the service of an argument against doing just that. Perhaps it didn't occur to him that in his position he simply may have had the luxury of not noticing it (sometimes I think I can do intersectionality better than the intersectionalists
).
Yeah, what is wielded in the columns and the political speeches is the reactionary weaponised content of multicultural and neoliberal identity politics, used to de-class and homogenise minority 'groups', while class becomes white and itself de-classed, frozen into a fixed identity instead of a living social relation. Once it's pinned in the glass case you can do what you want with it.
In spite of its unwarranted early triumphalism, just as social democracy failed to co-opt it, neoliberalism hasn't been able to erase the working class as an active agent, which I guess is only to be expected. But it is interesting to see how as a consequence a distorted, manipulated debate around class periodically resurfaces in the minds of the ruling class and is reflected in the media etc, on this occasion through the referendum. After a brief spell of hysteria, the established way of ideologically dealing with these situations is brought to bear.
So where class rears its head there is a two pronged attack, where 'understanding'/'listening' is a process of closing off and re-purposing, and where condemning or refusing to 'give credence' to etc shapes the target into a lumpen mass. I think on the one had where McDuff is right it is in large part pretty obvious to those who are the subject of the views he's talking about, but on the other hand he also strays into the kind of narrowing down that he's criticising. In doing so he lets the likes of the Guardian off the hook and allows himself to be used in the top down reductionist 'conversation' that's still dragging on and has been part of the method of shutting out. It was always going to be like that. And so there's a reason stuff about a 'metropolitan liberal elite' is able to hit home, regardless of the agenda of columnists or Theresa May - it's a real thing they're trying to appropriate and make safe. Articles in the Guardian don't move outside of that - who is the audience? There's not even a class label in their topic tags...
