This quote from the recent Guardian Politics Weekly podcast by John Harris (see the accompanying piece here) about social insecurity in the fashionable and prosperous market town of Frome connects to Bourdieu’s point towards the end of Pascalian Meditations about the relationship between economic security and a sense of the future. To have expectations about the future implies a practical orientated rooted in a secure present. When the future recedes as a coherent horizon of action, other ways of projecting forward can rapidly fill the void:
Below a certain level, on the other hand, aspirations burgeon, detached from reality and sometimes a little crazy, as if, when nothing was possible, everything became possible, as if all discourses about the future – prophecies, divinations, predications, millenarian announcements – had no other purpose than to fill what is no doubt one of the most painful of wants: the lack of a future.
Pascalian Meditations pg 225-226
This highlights the cultural and political implications of a rapidly plummeting standard of living for the vast majority of the population, with macroeconomic policy likely to make the insecurity worse. Seeking to aggressively suppress demand in an environment where disposable income has dropped precipitously, deliberately injecting economic fear into a population already economically terrified, will likely act as an accelerant to this process. If Labour wins the next election but fails to address the underlying structural problems in the British economy, we will see the conditions in which the Conservatives could effectively regroup under the banner of National Conservatism to constitute a MAGA style insurgency 5-10 years down the line.
(To what extent can the growing trend towards liberal populism (the angry creed of the Waterstone’s Dad after one too many craft beers at home) be seen as a refusal to recognise these shifting political coordinates?)
Mark Carrigan 