You're not stupid. I still think you're wrong.

The People You Speak For, and the People You Speak From

There is a problem with modern politics that is often described as a problem of ideology, misinformation, education or economic inequality.

It may be something slightly different.

It may be a problem of psychological position.

Consider a newspaper such as the Guardian. It is perfectly possible for its journalists to be sincerely concerned about inequality, poverty, insecure employment, declining public services and the political abandonment of poorer communities. It is also perfectly possible for many of those same journalists to come from highly educated, professional, middle- or upper-middle-class backgrounds.

There is no contradiction in that.

But there may nevertheless be a profound difference between speaking for a group and speaking from within its psychological world.

That distinction matters.

Speaking about people and speaking from among them

Imagine two journalists writing about a struggling industrial town.

The first is highly educated, culturally sophisticated and politically sympathetic to its inhabitants. She knows the history of deindustrialisation, understands the economics and can explain the political failures involved with great precision.

The second grew up in a town much like it. Perhaps his father worked in a factory. Perhaps his family worried about redundancy, mortgages and bills. Perhaps he learned early that certain institutions were not really places where people like his family felt they belonged.

Both may reach exactly the same political conclusion.

But they do not necessarily see the town in the same way.

The first might instinctively see a population that has been economically disadvantaged and politically neglected.

The second might instinctively see people who have been disrespected.

Those are not the same thing.

The first asks: What has happened to these people?

The second may ask: Why do these people feel that people like us don't matter?

Neither perspective is inherently superior. In fact, a good society needs both.

The problem begins when one perspective becomes so dominant that it mistakes itself for neutral reality.

Class survives education

Britain is unusually conscious of class, yet strangely bad at recognising how deeply it operates.

We tend to imagine that education and professional success allow people to leave their class background behind.

They certainly change a person's circumstances. They can change vocabulary, occupation, income, social circle and political beliefs.

But they do not necessarily erase the deeper instincts acquired while growing up.

A person's background can influence what feels respectable, what feels embarrassing, who seems intimidating, who seems ridiculous, what kinds of institutions feel like "ours", and what kinds of people seem naturally entitled to occupy positions of authority.

These things can survive almost invisibly.

They are especially visible in humour.

The psychology of wit

Consider Oscar Wilde.

Wilde's extraordinary wit was not simply the product of being privileged. He was extraordinarily talented. But his cultural confidence was part of the environment in which his talent operated.

He could enter elite social spaces and turn their conventions into material for comedy.

He did not have to stand outside the drawing room wondering whether he was permitted to enter.

He could walk in, understand the rules better than many of the people inside, and make the rules themselves ridiculous.

That is a particular kind of psychological freedom.

Something similar can sometimes be observed in modern writers who possess enormous cultural confidence. Marina Hyde, for example, has a highly polished, often devastating form of political satire. She can take the codes and assumptions of political and cultural elites and turn them against the people who use them.

That is a valuable journalistic function.

But it is not the only kind of valuable journalistic function.

Another kind of humour

There is another tradition in British humour, particularly associated with working-class culture.

Its characteristic question is not necessarily:

«"Can I expose the absurdity of your sophisticated social conventions?"»

It may instead be:

«"Who the hell do you think you are?"»

The difference is subtle but important.

One form of humour attacks the powerful by demonstrating that their codes are ridiculous.

Another attacks them by refusing to grant those codes any special dignity in the first place.

This is part of what makes John Crace's political sketches so interesting. His politicians are often reduced from grand statesmen to recognisably ridiculous human beings: vain, petty, cowardly, greedy, childish, pompous and absurd.

The effect is democratic in a very literal sense.

The great man becomes just a bloke.

The minister becomes an idiot.

The grand institution becomes a room full of people behaving badly.

And the reader is not necessarily being invited to admire the sophistication of the person doing the mocking.

The reader is invited to laugh.

The Guardian paradox

This creates an interesting paradox for a newspaper such as the Guardian.

The paper can be politically hostile to elites while being culturally produced by people who are relatively close to the professional and educational elite.

It can passionately defend ordinary people while sometimes sounding as though it is explaining ordinary people to one another.

A working-class reader can therefore encounter a peculiar experience:

«"You are on my side. But you don't quite sound as though you are one of us."»

That is not necessarily hypocrisy.

It is something more subtle.

The journalist may genuinely care about the reader. The journalist may genuinely fight for the reader's interests.

But the psychological origination of the writing can remain elsewhere.

This distinction may help explain why some political and cultural institutions can be simultaneously progressive and alienating.

They can have the right opinions while occupying the wrong psychological vantage point.

The same problem in American politics

Something similar may help explain part of the hostility toward liberal institutions among sections of the American working and lower-middle classes.

Imagine an American equivalent of the Guardian.

Its journalists might write passionately about economic inequality and argue that working Americans have been betrayed by elites.

But a reader might still think:

«"You are one of the educated people who tells people like me what we ought to think."»

That feeling does not necessarily disappear because the journalist has good intentions.

Nor does it mean that the journalist is wrong.

It means that belonging is different from advocacy.

This may also help explain some of the difficulties experienced by Democratic politicians such as Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris. Their policies, intentions and political records are complicated and cannot be reduced to a single psychological theory.

But a recurring problem for establishment liberal politics is that it can sound as though educated professionals are speaking on behalf of ordinary citizens while simultaneously occupying the institutions those citizens distrust.

The message becomes:

«"We understand you."»

while the emotional signal is:

«"We are the people who understand things."»

That difference can be fatal.

The danger of overcorrecting

There is, however, an enormous danger here.

Once we recognise the problem of cultural condescension, we can make an equally disastrous mistake: concluding that the answer is to reject educated people, institutions or expertise.

It isn't.

A working-class background does not make someone automatically wise.

A university education does not make someone automatically foolish.

A person can have genuine grievances and still draw terrible conclusions from them.

A person can be economically sophisticated and politically stupid.

A person can be working class and profoundly misinformed.

A person can be wealthy and have excellent political judgement.

Class is not a substitute for truth.

Nor should respecting somebody's authority over their own experience mean accepting every conclusion they draw from that experience.

This distinction is crucial.

You are not stupid — and I think you're wrong

A healthy democracy needs to recover the ability to say something that has become surprisingly difficult:

«"I respect you. I believe you are capable of deciding for yourself. I understand why you think this. And I think you are making a terrible mistake."»

There is nothing inherently elitist about that.

In fact, it can be more respectful than telling people that their political choices are simply the product of ignorance, manipulation or prejudice.

Sometimes people really are wrong.

Sometimes they make stupid decisions.

But stupidity should not be used as a blanket explanation for political disagreement.

A person may have perfectly legitimate reasons for being angry and nevertheless choose a catastrophically bad vehicle for expressing that anger.

This is particularly important when foreign powers attempt to exploit domestic divisions.

Suppose citizens become genuinely furious with their political establishment. Suppose they feel ignored, humiliated or culturally despised.

That anger can be entirely authentic.

An adversarial foreign power does not need to manufacture the grievance.

It merely needs to weaponise it.

This creates an extraordinarily difficult democratic problem.

We must be able to say:

«"Your grievance is real."»

and simultaneously:

«"The people offering themselves as the solution may be exploiting your grievance."»

Without the first, we become condescending.

Without the second, we become naive.

Burning down the house

There is a particularly simple metaphor for this.

Imagine people becoming furious with their government, their political class and their institutions.

They decide to burn down the house.

Perhaps the house genuinely deserves major renovation.

Perhaps the people inside have treated them badly.

Perhaps some rooms really do belong to an elite that has forgotten who owns the building.

But if the house burns down and the remnants are handed to somebody who has been waiting outside for precisely that opportunity, the people who lit the fire have not necessarily liberated themselves.

They may simply have destroyed their own shelter.

And this is where democratic politics needs to become more adult.

It must not say:

«"You are too stupid to understand what you are doing."»

But neither should it say:

«"Whatever you decide is authentic, therefore it must be right."»

It should say:

«"You are an adult. The country belongs to you. I will treat you as an equal — and I will argue with you as an equal."»

That is a much harder politics.

It requires persuading rather than managing.

Psychological equality

Perhaps this is the missing concept.

We talk endlessly about economic equality, political equality and equality of opportunity.

But there is also something like psychological equality.

It means recognising that people who did not go to university possess authority over reality.

Not merely authority over their feelings.

Not merely the right to be consulted.

Authority over reality.

Their experience of work, money, family, institutions, dignity and place is evidence.

It should affect how society understands itself.

But psychological equality must work in both directions.

The educated professional is entitled to say:

«"I think you're wrong."»

The manual worker is entitled to say:

«"I think you're wrong."»

Neither is entitled to say:

«"Your social position means your opinion doesn't count."»

That would be the beginning of a genuinely democratic culture.

So what would a newspaper built on this principle look like?

Perhaps Britain needs a newspaper that does not attempt to become "the working-class Guardian".

That would immediately create another problem: professional journalists deciding what working-class people supposedly think.

Instead, imagine a newspaper founded on a simpler principle:

Nobody owns reality.

Its newsroom would deliberately contain people from radically different social backgrounds.

Not a token "working-class correspondent".

Actual reporters, editors, political writers, foreign correspondents, economists, culture writers and columnists from different social worlds.

A person who grew up on a council estate might become the defence correspondent.

Someone from a wealthy professional family might cover housing.

A former factory worker might become an economics columnist.

A public-school graduate might report from a deprived town.

Nobody would be employed merely to "represent" their class.

They would be employed because they are good journalists.

Their backgrounds would nevertheless matter because they bring different instincts to the same reality.

The objective would not be diversity of opinion alone.

It would be diversity of psychological origination.

The newspaper should contain arguments, not tribes

Such a newspaper would deliberately resist the idea that every writer must represent a constituency.

It would want the sophisticated satirist.

It would also want the person who finds sophisticated satire irritating.

It would want the economist.

It would also want the person who asks what the economist's theory feels like when applied to an actual household.

It would want the establishment insider who understands how government works.

It would also want the outsider who instinctively distrusts government.

And it would need writers who can tell all of them when they are talking nonsense.

Most importantly, it would need humour.

Not humour directed at a designated class.

Humour directed at everybody.

Especially itself.

The newspaper should have someone whose job is, metaphorically speaking, to walk into the editorial meeting and say:

«"We are becoming unbearably pleased with ourselves."»

That may be one of the most important journalistic functions of all.

A new British newspaper

So perhaps the paper should be called:

THE CITIZEN

The name is deliberately unglamorous.

It does not say "the workers".

It does not say "the elite".

It does not say "the people".

It says citizen.

A citizen is not a consumer demographic.

A citizen is not a victim to be managed.

A citizen is not a voter to be manipulated.

A citizen is not an ignorant person who needs an enlightened professional to explain the world.

A citizen is an equal participant in the country.

The paper's editorial principle could be:

«You decide. We'll tell you what we think.»

And its founding declaration could be:

«We will never tell you that you're too stupid to decide the fate of your country. We will tell you, however, when we think you're making a terrible decision — and we'll respect you enough to explain exactly why.»

That would mean taking readers seriously enough to disagree with them.

It would mean acknowledging that their grievances may be justified even when their proposed solutions are not.

It would mean acknowledging that experts can be right without being socially superior.

It would mean acknowledging that working-class people can be wrong without being stupid.

It would mean allowing privileged people to contribute without allowing privilege to become the invisible default perspective.

And it would mean recognising that democracy requires something more difficult than agreement.

It requires equal standing among people who disagree.

The real editorial test

The ultimate test for The Citizen would therefore not be:

«"Does this article have the correct politics?"»

Nor:

«"Does this article appeal to working-class readers?"»

The question would be:

«"From where is this article looking at the world?"»

Who is being treated as the adult?

Who is being explained?

Who is being mocked?

Who is assumed to possess authority?

Who is assumed to need educating?

Who gets to define what is normal?

And, perhaps most importantly:

«"Could a person who lives the life being described recognise themselves here without feeling that an intelligent stranger has just explained them to themselves?"»

If the answer is yes, the newspaper may be doing something worthwhile.

If the answer is no, it should try again.

The purpose would not be to create a newspaper that is always right.

That is impossible.

The purpose would be to create a newspaper that disagrees with its readers without looking down on them.

A newspaper willing to say:

«You are right about this.»

«You are wrong about that.»

«We don't know about the other thing.»

«Here is the evidence.»

«Here is what we think.»

«And you are perfectly entitled to tell us that we're wrong.»

That may sound like a modest ambition.

In an age of increasingly bitter political division, it may actually be a radical one.

The country does not need another group of people telling ordinary citizens what to think.

It needs more institutions willing to treat them as citizens.