Authentocrats · Culture, Politics and the New Seriousness

"The Authentocrats" claim to the be the new voice of common sense that speak for the common man and woman; right-wing, traditional and dangerous, Joe Kennedy argues that they are everything but what they purport to be. 

We are entering, we are told, a post-liberal age. So-called illiberal

democracy and authoritarian populism are in the political ascendant; the

shelves of our bookshops groan with the work of attention-grabbing

thinkers insisting that permissiveness, multiculturalism and "identity

politics" have failed us and that we must now fall back on some notion

of tradition. We have had our fun, and now it’s time to get serious, to

shore our fragments against the ruin of postmodernist meaninglessness.It’s not only the usual, conservative suspects who have got on board with this argument. Authentocrats critiques

the manner in which post-liberal ideas have been mobilised

underhandedly by centrist politicians who, at least notionally, are

hostile to the likes of Donald Trump and UKIP. It examines the forms

this populism of the centre has taken in the United Kingdom and situates

the moderate withdrawal from liberalism within a story which begins in

the early 1990s. Blairism promised socially liberal politics as the

pay-off for relinquishing commitments to public ownership and

redistributive policies: many current centrists insist New Labour’s

error was not its capitulation to the market, but its unwillingness to

heed the allegedly natural conservatism of England’s provincial working

classes. In this book, we see how this spurious concern for

"real people" is part of a broader turn within British culture by which

the mainstream withdraws from the openness of the Nineties under the

bad-faith supposition that there’s nowhere to go but backwards. The

self-anointing political realism which declares that the left can save

itself only by becoming less liberal is matched culturally by an

interest in time-worn traditional identities: the brute masculinity of

Daniel Craig’s James Bond, the allegedly "progressive" patriotism of

nature writing, a televisual obsession with the World Wars. Authentocrats charges liberals themselves with fuelling the post-liberal turn, and asks where the space might be found for an alternative.

Joe Kennedy is from the north-east of England and teaches English

and Cultural Studies on the University of Gothenburg's programme at the

University of Sussex in Brighton. He writes on literature, critical and

cultural theory, politics, music and sport for a range of publications.

His first book, Games Without Frontiers offered a radical reappraisal of our understanding of association football.