The Rise of ‘Welfare Chauvinism’
Britain is concurrently undergoing
long-term generational changes in the values that guide British society and shape the outlook of voters. These value shifts have also left older white working-class voters behind, as a worldview which was once seen as mainstream has become regarded as parochial and intolerant by the younger, university-educated, more socially liberal elites who define the political consensus of twenty-first-century Britain.
.. One side “draws disproportionate support from the salaried middle class, notably socio-cultural professionals” while the other “is rallied by small-business owners, production and service workers.” The authors argue that while
small-business owners and workers prefer cultural demarcation and defend national traditions, salaried professionals strongly favor international integration and multi-culturalism.
.. the new politics of identity traps progressives on both sides. Whatever political position they adopt is bound to alienate either their working-class voters, who tend to be more conservative with regards to values, or progressive-values voters and the millennial generation, who are turned off by the more nationalistic rhetoric that appeals to the traditional or core voter base.
.. Populist parties on the right are moving beyond their adamant opposition to immigration, the European Union and the welfare state to become proponents of a more lavish, but also more restrictive, domestic social spending regime under a policy European scholars describe as “welfare chauvinism.”
.. The current failings of the American system are less the fault of politics per se than of the irreconcilability of the conflicts that politicians are forced to reckon with. Globalization and technological advance are driving punitive employment practices that no one has figured out how to address. Illegal immigration by men and women determined to raise their living standards is difficult if not impossible to restrain. Social-cultural issues like abortion and same-sex marriage involve competing moral absolutes that do not lend themselves to compromise.