The Guilty Rich aren't 'Woke', they just want to look 'Woke'

Perhaps the rich, as well as being guilty, are increasingly fearful. Stories about ‘cancel culture’ make these people ever more worried about what they say and do

In an excellent essay on Unherd, Kathleen Stock, while looking at whether or not Britain has a liberal elite, hit on a very important social phenomenon: what I call the ‘guilty rich’.

“What they do have is a suppressed sense of guilt for being so rich, a vague fear that they might make the wrong joke, and a fervent hope that the moralising will stop soon so they can talk about the football or cricket instead. Many of them also have children who lecture them about social justice. They can’t stand up to them either.”

We have a generation of successful people who, if not intellectually certainly emotionally, have swallowed the marxist claptrap about their riches being somehow obtained at the expense of people who aren’t rich. This sense of guilt, to my thinking, explains the continued existence of the Liberal Democrats as a sort of scapegoat onto which these guilt-ridden millionaires can offload their sins by voting for trendy-sounding (“Layla’s a pansexual you know”) people espousing right-on policies while not rocking their selfish economic boat by, for example, supporting the building of houses, warehouses or reservoirs.

So when we talk about the ‘British Elite’ we are, in part, talking about these people. As Stock points out, such folk are not personally ‘woke’ or even especially liberal it’s just that while they are “... not intolerant of political disagreements; it’s just that people don’t really have them at dinner parties.” These successful people are, to make a link with a more lower class bunch, just richer posher Deanos.

“Deano is a man in his late 20s or 30s, is married (or is at least in a long-term relationship), works in real estate or some similar service profession, is comfortable but not rich, is too busy enjoying the finer things in life to be engaged in politics and crucially – is a homeowner.”

The question is whether the rich and successful but not politically engaged or interested people - mostly men - who Stock describes represents the elite or just a group of people whose wealth and success insulates them from the worst excesses of the ‘woke’ world? Or maybe they embrace ‘wokeness’ - hyperliberalism - publicly at least partly out of fear. Ed West, writing on the same issue seems to suggest so:

“Why do people consistently think that they have to pretend to be more progressive to rise up in their chosen careers? Because those are the establishment views. If I was advising a young person going to work in any area of the British establishment, whether the civil service, MI5, the National Trust, the judiciary, the Girl Guides, the education bureaucracy or anything else, I would advise them to keep any conservative opinions to themselves.”

Perhaps the rich, as well as being guilty, are increasingly fearful. Stories about ‘cancel culture’ and the hounding of people from office for breaking one or other progressive taboo make these people, regardless of their success, ever more worried about what they say and do. This especially applies to those heading up organisations where the middle management now filled with millennial humanities and social science graduates steeped in the ideologies of hyperliberalism. Peter Klein and Nicholai Foss published some research into this suggestion and argued that:

“Wokeness arises from middle managers and support personnel using their delegated responsibility and specialist status to engage in woke internal advocacy, which may increase their influence and job security.”

We can probably argue all day about what we might mean by ‘wokeness’ but it is noteworthy that Klein & Foss’s contention didn’t get dismissed out of hand. Indeed Ed West in the article I cite above hints at the same issues, pointing at ‘Diversity, Equalities and Inclusion’ (DEI) as a factor in creating a more fearful world for ‘unwoke’ senior executives: “...almost every major institution has sizeable DEI departments whose function is to make progressive ideas the social norm.”

So it isn’t just that, as Kathleen Stock hinted, the powerful and successful are guilty about their riches but that they are also fearful of those who work for them, people granted power by the law to assert rights and protections. Senior management fear accusations of racism, misogyny, transphobia or homophobia and tend therefore to behave like The Bear Who Left it Alone and bend over too far backwards in making sure they don’t offend what they see as the expectations of DEI (and very often Human Resources in general). The problem is that this over-reaction creates a new problem for the organisation by making frankly ridiculous things hard to question or challenge. To continue with James Thurber’s teetotal bear:

“In the end he became a famous teetotaler and a persistent temperance lecturer. He would tell everybody that came to his house about the awful effects of drink, and he would boast about how strong and well he had become since he gave up touching the stuff. To demonstrate this, he would stand on his head and on his hands and he would turn cartwheels in the house, kicking over the umbrella stand, knocking down the bridge lamps, and ramming his elbows through the windows. Then he would lie down on the floor, tired by his healthful exercise, and go to sleep. His wife was greatly distressed and his children were very frightened.”

The downside risk of not being woke (as an institutional leader or senior manager) remains, however, far greater than the downside risk of bending over backwards to accommodate a middle management steeped in hyperliberal ideology. In the latter case the worst might be a critical article in the Daily Mail or a Tory MP spluttering about it at PMQs, in the former case the leader might find themselves out of a job. And while being brave and out of a job sounds heroic, our institutional boss has a big mortgage, school fees to pay and the annual skiing trip to fund. A little bit of public wokeness is as nothing next to the instinctive self-preservation of top managers!

I’ve a feeling that, while the guilty rich (as Kathleen Stock and Ed West suggest) are not especially woke, they do not see hyperliberalism as either a threat to the institutions they lead or as a problem for wider society. They may be privately conservative - married, family, old-fashioned personal values, entirely content with capitalism - but they are ideologically liberal in that their instinct is to support greater ‘rights’ and to protect minorities. Our guilty rich know they can protect themselves and their families from the worst of ‘woke’ and worry far more, at least in private, about the left’s economic agenda than about its social aims. And they see value in projecting something of the hyperliberal to the world since it may, as well as protecting them from cancel culture, provide new opportunities for advancement.

I don’t know who is or isn’t elite. I’ve a suspicion that, ‘woke’ or not, most of the people running the nation’s grand institutions have a genealogy encompassing a lot of people who used to run those same institutions 50, 70 or 100 years ago. The fact that Giles with his Oxbridge degree in English Literature prides himself on being very liberal as he climbs the ranks in the civil service doesn’t mean he isn’t, with his Rear-Admiral grandfather and Oxford professor uncle, firmly part of the nation's establishment, with all the privilege that grants. The problem is that Giles, and hundreds of other Giles’, tell us that they aren’t part of the elite and point to anonymous (or merely Tory) people over there as the people who are really running the country’s institutions.

In one respect those Tories and assorted anonymous bankers and businessmen are running the country but these people are dependent on Giles and his ilk to do that running. So they seek to neutralise hyperliberalism by bringing it inside the tent (such as when the new Conservative government in 2010 enthusiastically completed Labour’s Equalities Act) so as to sound good and look right. PR and HR departments shovel out press releases and policies designed to present the right image to what they perceive as a ‘woke’ millennial market - Pride days, lighting up the HQ on Trans Visibility Day, celebrating ethnic diversity, and encouraging non-Muslim employees to forgo lunch during Ramadan. Sensitivity training is given to staff and rules are passed about pronouns and gender identity. And the guilty rich who run the organisations and institutions feel confident their position is safe, they won’t be called out, won’t get cancelled and will get the big promotion when Sir Gerald retires.