Authentocrats: Culture, Politics and the New Seriousness

by Joe Kennedy

"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.In contemporary Britain, a lot has been said about what it is that “real people” want politically. Forgotten by elites and sick of globalisation, so the story goes, they demand patriotism, respect for the military, assurances on defence, and controls on immigration. In trying to meet these supposed wishes, politicians attempt to appear normal, salt-of-the-earth, authentic. Authentocrats examines the function of this “authenticity” in a centrist politics which, paradoxically, often defines itself as cosmopolitan, technocratic and opposed to populism. Casting a doubtful eye over – amongst other things – latter-day James Bond films, contemporary nature writing and stand-up comedy, Authentocrats suggests that the sooner we can break with the sententiousness of a skewed conception of authenticity in aesthetics and politics the better.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Society, Class, Theory, Philosophy

241 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 19, 2018

Reviews

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 1 out of 5]

One of the joys of having had leukaemia is I get to do what I think of as “the conversation”. It goes like this: someone makes a comment about how sickness benefit claimants are workshy parasites. I say I used to be one. Double take, then wary question: “what was wrong with you?” I cite the aforementioned condition, explaining that it comes under the general category of “cancer”. Then get told I'm ok because cancer is a “real illness” and they only object to benefits going to the non-real illness sufferers, such as depressives. And then I have to pitch in on how I don't agree that depression isn't a “real illness” and I don't need any sympathy about “fighting”, since I never did any, cancer isn't a “battle” it's a just a shit job you can't walk out of. And so on.

There are many different ways in which “realness” and “authenticity”, and the presumed moral authority of suffering (the right sort of suffering, of course) are deployed as rhetorical moves in current political and social debates. The game doesn't belong to Right or Left or Centre, “real people” have been called in as mute witnesses to all sorts of propositions by both Tories and Labour in my lifetime and long before. There is a large backdrop, as the widening of cultural access from the start of the 20th century has led to many voices and styles getting promoted for being “realer” than the prissy conventional world of bourgeois or aristocratic phantoms. Behind these movements is usually someone of the old guard who can sense which way the public mood is turning, and gives it a nudge using the publicity machine available.

“Realism” is of course a contestable concept in philosophy even before it became an identifiable trend in visual art and literature. Let's not get in to the variously drawn abstract debates between realism, idealism and anti-realism, except to note that quite a lot of modern Anglophone philosophy focussed on them, though that seems to be completely unknown to modern Eng.Lit. graduates. It was already known well before Barthes that “realist” fiction operated through its own conventions and elisions, and that “Germinal” is not a very reliable picture of northern mining life during the Second Empire.

The topics mentioned in the previous 2 paragraphs get mentioned in “Authentocrats”, but unfortunately with not much more detail. Instead the book is stuck in a parochial little world of modern Labour politics in which events from the 2016 leadership contest get quite a lot more attention than most of the country ever gave to them at the time. There is intense focus on the way in which particular motifs are given significance, although Kennedy doesn't notice that this is simply a side-effect of trends in lifestyle journalism that are always straining after the Telling Detail at the expense of analysis; this has fed back in to other strands of commentary so everyone quickly recycles and amplifies the latest misconception to avoid appearing “out of touch”. Mark E.Smith sensed the rise of this style, and sneered at “information anxiety”, 25 years ago.

When he goes outside the world of Corbyn vs. Centrists he is not particularly deep or reliable. Someone who thinks that Enoch Powell was “obviously upper class” (pg 34) has missed the point that the Powellite origin story has it that their idol represented the lower-middle class Conservative conscience against the complacent aristocratic grandees of the Party, a rhetoric of “authenticity” that the Tory Right and UKIP fall back on in their factional battles when it suits them. But amongst Corbyn supporters it is deeply indecent to know anything much about other Parties. Kennedy is also not much good with the literary examples he brings forward: he manages to discuss Christine Brooke-Rose's “The Middlemen” whilst missing the point that it shows how the old elite had found ways to subvert and control the New Post-War Britain, including the Gaitskellite Labour Party. And if you're going to bring in Henry Green as a witness to changing memories of the War, why choose “Back” when you can use “Caught” which describes the Blitz itself with unsentimental descriptions of class division and paranoia about sexuality and playing up to expected gender roles. Like Owen Hatherley, Kennedy has a very tiresome tendency to think that he's being original in taking a sceptical view of Churchill and the Good War. Plenty of Tories have trodden that ground, such as Alan Clark, Maurice Cowling and other poisonous windbags purveying what M.R.D.Foot called “mock-serious history”. The British have been arguing in public about the War since before it ended, if you include some apocalyptic pre-war literature you could say the arguments were around longer than the war itself. The immediate post-War generations who enjoyed it via films and comic books and were mostly too young to take part in the final wars of Empire should not be allowed to own something they simply inherited... but we haven't been waiting since 1945 for Corbyn supporters to teach us this. My dad lived through the Blitz on Portsmouth. It made him a supporter of European integration, as I like to tell UKIPpers.

With regard to future war, Kennedy is very agitated by that Question Time edition that gave rise to the famous “wall of gammon” image. I haven't bothered watching QT in a very long time, so I'll have to take Joe's word for it about what was discussed on the show. What I glean from this is that he feels very smug and superior compared to the stupid old men who think DPRK or Iran might launch a direct attack on Britain. This is not likely, well spotted. However what gets missed in this discussion is why those countries want nuclear weapons – namely, as deterrent to use in the (quite likely) event of a massive conventional attack by US forces. By acquiring nuclear weapons and some means of launching them against US assets or resources, they change the balance of power. But that's the same logic behind the UK having nuclear weapons to set against Soviet or Russian conventional forces. No one ever proposed we launch an unprovoked strike on Saratov or Kazan. There is of course a debate to be had about whether we really need them (and serious people like Denis Healey changed sides on that issue) but Corbyn fans never seem to engage with it. It's either sniggering at gammon or sententious reminders that missiles can kill.

I have written a long review because I feel a period of British politics is ending, and this book is a specimen of that world that is passing away. I don't expect to have to think about a lot of this stuff again, and some of it never bothered me to start with. Though I feel sure I won't be able to avoid people who have strong opinions about “real illnesses”, and that particular discourse isn't going to be ending soon.

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Authentocrats: Culture, Politics and the New Seriousness' is a new book by Joe Kennedy. It begins with recalling an incident from a few years ago, when Owen Smith, who was then regarded as a potential leader of the Labour party, made a bizarre comment about how 'frothy coffee' (cappuccino) was new to him in a small cafe in Wales. The author takes apart this remark with the grace of a surgeon. He explains how that area, like many others in the UK, had been shaped over generations by waves of Italian immigration, and that Smith’s remark was shaped out of ignorance with the intent of appealing to a vague notion of working class authenticity. For a certain kind of person this can be reduced to an exclamation over what Smith called 'posh biscuits and a little cup':

'He was not some member of the metropolitan elite, he was saying, unlike Corbyn: no, he was a real prole, stunned by coffee, dumbfounded by little biscuits. And yet anyone, by spending about twenty-five seconds on the internet, can tell that Smith is by background part of a liberal middle class, endowed with substantial cultural capital, and by profession — namely as a one-time PR consultant for a huge, European-based pharmaceuticals company — precisely the kind of person who could instantly pick a cappuccino out of a lineup of seven hundred ways of serving coffee.'

Smith is perhaps one of the softer targets of the book – the 'frothy coffee' remark was considered risible from the moment it was uttered – but this incident works well as one of the most absurd examples of a trend that's evident in the behaviour of almost every significant political and media figure in Britain. I was only surprised that the book doesn't spend much time on Nigel Farage, but perhaps he would require a volume all to himself. On the whole it's highly perspicacious, funny and true. It feels like a very modern blend of polemic, critical theory and memoir; a bit more rigorous than the average online opinion-haver, while revelling in a certain aggro vibe that leaves it lurking several steps away from academia.

Aside from the directly political angle, the book also goes off on several long digressions into the nature of authenticity in popular culture. The author allows himself a very long leash in these chapters, which range far and wide through literature, film and TV. Some of the examples seem more relevant than others; certainly I couldn't summarise now what point was trying to emerge about Peter Jackson and the Lord of the Rings movies. But I enjoyed the passages on Henry Green, who is still one of our most interesting and neglected post-war novelists. And there's some very good stuff here about the nineties in Britain, our long hangover from lad culture, and the uneasy relationship between Millennials and Gen Xers.

The thing about engaging so thoroughly with the question of authenticity in politics and culture is that it becomes difficult for the book to extricate itself from it. At times the theory here seems to be urging the reader to turn away from arguments about 'the kind of people' they see before them towards a kind of broad class-based solidarity, based on the idea that we all have more in common than what separates us. But at the same time, it can't quite set aside the language of 'reactionary traditionalism' that it spends so long lamenting elsewhere. Meaning still pivots on assumptions about things that belong and things that don't.

I like, for example, that the author lampoons the fact that 'the Times and the Telegraph both employ several writers whose job seems to involve little but acting as if the greatest social ills facing the UK in 2017 are the popularity of the avocado, the rise of craft beer and the ubiquity of beards.' This is true. It is a stupid tendency. We know this. But immediately after these lines, a whole crowd of other assumptions pile in:

'Such writers have an implied audience of comfortably-off professional people — generally men, given the masculinist tone of this writing — in their forties and early fifties who know, or think they know, what a “hipster” looks like and where they can be found. Indeed, the reason they are aware regarding the whereabouts of the people they believe are hipsters is that, frequently enough, they’re collecting rent from them.'

As drive-by humour, this kind of works. It's a passage which creates a whole little society of its own, in just two sentences. But we're supposed to take it more seriously than that. The problem is that it's rejected the character-based assumptions of the avocado/craft beer/beard-complainers, and replaced them with a set of its own. Not long after this, the author recounts a story from a friend who complains that their landlord turns up to carry out house inspections 'on a fucking Vespa'. By now we're a long way from frothy coffees, but the implication is surely that they didn't really belong on that scooter.

Another example. At one point the Labour MP Jess Phillips is cited as an example of someone who brandishes their working class credentials as part of their public persona; gleefully the author comes in with the left-field rejoinder that 'Phillips talks incessantly about her West Midlands upbringing whilst typically failing to note that it was entirely middle-class'. It may be true that her accent and her demeanour feed into our ideas about what a 'real' politician looks like, but to scrutinise her origins in this way is just playing the authentocrats at their own game. This kind of assessment requires the kind of snap-judgement of authenticity that the book spends so long bemoaning.

The book expends a great deal of energy in undermining the media-led construct of a homogenous majority of working class people whose 'legitimate concerns' include our nuclear deterrent, immigration, benefit fraud, etc. This is right, I think, and on that front the book is a strong and focussed corrective to that idea. But at the same time, there is a certain amount of eye-rolling at the idea that anyone could believe earnestly in these things. It's difficult to explain what I mean by this without falling into the same old trap: that to pretend to cater to 'legitimate concerns' is to manifest a secret contempt for the working class. To be clear, I've nothing at stake: I don't have to cater to anyone. I have no interest in listening to points of view I find immoral, and in most cases I'd much prefer if politicians were more open and principled about their disagreements.

The problem is that this book has nothing to say to anyone who might earnestly believe in some of the things it holds at arm's length. Should it? I don't know. Whether or not that's a problem for the reader probably depends on what they are expecting. There's not much in the way of solutions here. It takes a certain amount for granted from its audience: that the idea of a nuclear deterrent is oxymoronic; that immigration has brought vast benefits to this country, many of which are incalculable; that a Corbyn-led Labour party would in general be a highly progressive force for good in the world. And yes, these are all positions that I agree with – I'm not the one who needs convincing here. But 'Authentocrats' left me with no idea of how one might go about talking to anyone who thinks differently.

At one point there's an anecdote about encountering a flyer in a pub, printed with some cringeworthy pro-English doggerel. The author has a bit of fun with the poet’s complaint that nobody teaches Shakespeare or Wilde or Shaw anymore. But then the flyer slips away, useful only as a prop for a wider point about the vacuous nature of English patriotism. Nationalism holds no appeal for me; maybe such things are mostly deserving of contempt. But given that these feelings have thrived on (real or imagined) intellectual contempt for so long, I can't help but wonder what would happen if we tried something else.

[Horza]

Read it again to take notes. Maybe I’ll even review.

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Authenticity is a powerful rhetorical device, whether it is used to denigrate pop music in favour somehow more genuine guys-with-guitars or to write of claims to justice on the grounds someone else has had it worse or any of the countless other ways a rhetorical insistence on someone else’s greater integrity is used to suppress and assert the morality of Power. There are times when it is obviously being deployed, but Joe Kennedy’s excoriation of 21st century political practices focuses on the more subtle, and while UK focused the case can, to a large degree, be applied to the USA, Canada, Australia, Poland, Italy, India and countless other places with not much more than name changes.

The authentocrats of Kennedy’s title are those who invoke the unheard and downtrodden, the ignored and silenced in the interests of Power that does little to serve their interests, often in contrast to a ‘metropolitan elite’ who not only ignore and denigrate them but have no interest in hearing or serving them. This process may be seen in actions most obviously of the political right – the Tories who invoke the ‘hard-working’ as the beneficiaries of their policies that undercut the living standards of the mass of the population – and all too often turns political struggles into questions of ‘culture’ where, somehow, the privations of austerity are less significant than the maintenance of a nuclear deterrent or the place of avocado and ‘frothy coffee’ in diets. Whereas Kennedy’s points to these populisms of the right (as seen in Farage, Trump, Modi, Orban and Silvani and other’s making the world safe for fascism), his target is the less obvious centrists and most especially the Blairite rump of the UK’s Labour Party.

Some of Kennedy’s authenocrats appear in unexpected places – such as car ads and the Daniel Craig version of the Bond franchise (he’s not wrong, just making challenging and important political connections) – while recent iterations fail to see the satire in some of their invocations and here he makes an important distinction between the image of authenticity deployed in recent political cases (such as attacks on Corbyn) and the absurdist parody of Monty Python’s ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch. He goes on to highlight three key tropes in authentocratic discourses: its invocation in ethnographic political journalism and military commemoration, the notion of progressive English patriotism and in the constructions of tradition and traditionalism in notions of modernisation in the Blairite and Cameronite Labour and Tory Parties. He wraps by exploring the generational aspects of authentocracy and exploring the risks to the reassertion of a social democratic Labour left in the Corbyn era.

The point of the case seems to be that claims to represent authenticity finish up lacking authenticity, and in most cases are little more than an attempt to undermine a politics that challenges Power. Kennedy builds a compelling case drawing on a wide range of mainstream politics and poplar cultural texts. While the generational contextualisation towards the end of the argument is insightful, the strength lies in the analysis of the three key tropes that finish up homogenising those on whose behalf the speakers claim to speak, rather than engaging with the richness, difference and diversity that is the silenced, the dispossessed and the alienated. The detail of the case is likely to date quickly, but the overall point is likely to hold for some time: claims by the powerful to act for the disempowered through ‘knowing what they want’, through engaging with their ‘legitimate concerns’ seldom ring true and often obfuscate a more insidious objective.

What is missing from Kennedy’s case, however, is the (perhaps blindingly obvious) point that claims to harness authenticity are almost always reactionary, backward looking and an attempt to invoke the way things were rather than focus on the way they might be. Kennedy may have convincingly exposed and unravelled the authentocrats, but in doing so he points to the need to unpack the meaning of authentic. This engaging read is a useful way to get to that bigger and more difficult question.

[Gabby_LM · Rating 4 out of 5]

good, was worried reading all the reviews and following Joe on Twitter for the past couple of years would mean there wasn't much left in the book, but found the extra space for developing the book's theses very useful and valuable. Inevitably, after years spent on forums and tumblrs, I found the chapter on Game of Thrones a little ungenerous, but that's a quibble tbf. Reading the whole thing at the festival f.k.a. East Albion Fayre felt like some sort of irony.

[Andrew Galley · Rating 2 out of 5]

I got my copy of this from The Left Book Club so I definitely expected a high dose of politics in the book, though the sub-title of “Culture, Politics and the New Seriousness” naturally made me think there’d be more to it. I’ll admit that I went into this book excited and thinking it would be worth reading: in an era of “culture wars” and an appeal to populism leading to the successful campaigns for Brexit and Trump, I looked forward to its insight on why many a politician (or person trying to seek financial or political capital) bows to a faux “common” image.

What I actually got was a book that was overwritten, inconsistent in tone and strangely scattershot: this book reads far more like a needlessly extended opinion article you’d find submitted to The Guardian but rejected due to bloat. The editor of this book either got lazy or doesn’t know how to edit.

An early warning sign was that even after the introduction and the majority through the first chapter, there were declarations of “this book will talk about”. If you’re having to introduce your book to me in the first chapter AFTER the introduction I question what your introduction was for.

The next chapter talks about a famous moment on Question Time with a chapter title that I guess is supposed to be witty… but reads far more like a stretch to make a joke. Your witty writing shouldn’t be so easy for someone to consciously realise. It was also a prime example of schizophrenic tone, not deciding whether it wanted to be throwing out witty one-liners in a more “bloke down the pub” way, or whether it was trying to be a historical document that was impartial. The author really should have picked one tone and left it.

The third chapter is an essay about characters such as Bond and Batman being reimagined in their mid-noughties debuts as far more grim and serious than previous campy portrayals. I'm rather film literate so the majority of the information was not new to me. That being said Kennedy's commentary is fascinating in one respect: it's desperate to throw out big words in an attempt to sound smart yet comes across as very shallow. Nothing I read about taking Batman from his campy 1960’s TV show and reinvigorating the character with a level of grit did anything more than say “hey, we all noticed this right?” with a few big words thrown in to disguise how shallow the observation was.

I'm not scared of an author flexing their vocabulary and sometimes I find that even when I dislike an author’s choice of big words for the sake of it I get a new word in my vocabulary. (here’s looking at you Jordan Peterson). What I'm not a fan of is when it reads unnaturally. In Chapter III words like "Machiavellian" and "Ameliorate" are used in an intellectual capacity... along with "shit-stirring". The book is filled with examples like this and I'm convinced the author was just eager to reiterate intellectual things he's heard but couldn't work out the way to use them organically. You can tell when this kind of thing happens when the following sentences are filled with very simple English.

To me the worst part of this book is simple: it doesn’t actually seem to add anything to the conversation. Rather, it exists to point out stuff you’ve already noticed. The best way to explain this I think is with a stand-up comedian. Often they’re just making fun of stuff we’ve all noticed before so there’s a shared joke. The difference between a comedian making simple observations, and an author of this kind doing it, is context. When I watch a comedian make fun of a simple observation I get a laugh. When an author like this points at something with nothing to add I question the point of what I’ve just read.

I’ll summarise this book simply: some politicians will act in a way that they think appeals to the average person so that they seem down to earth in the hopes that they will get your vote. If this is something you’ve never considered before then chances are you’re not into politics and could learn something from this book… but I’d question why you want to read it if you’re not into politics. If you are already aware of the notion that people will act in this way you’ll get nothing deeper.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

In a way this book was a surreal experience, taking the personalities I usually encounter only in twitter, or in opinion columns which seem like more of an extension of their twitter personality than an opportunity to interpret the world in at length. Seeing these personalities and facades on the page, and treated to an i depth critique which the people behind these personalities endeavour to avoid or rubbish on forums like twitter.
But this isn't a book redressing twitter grievances, rather it attempts to document, characterise and diagnose a tendency amongst politicians, commentators, and varied forms of arts and media towards a particular interpretation of politics, society and reality stemming from and fetishising the contingent and often arbitrary symbols of working class life or worldly struggle, whilst forgetting (or if you want to be less generous, ignoring) to engage with the material realities and production of such life and struggles.
The critiques posed were in general measured and purposeful beyond the common "anti-reactionary-reaction" responses meted online by equally performative and abrasive commentators on the other side of the cultural divide.
There are sections devoted to analysis of art and media, and to rooting the authors critiques in his own personal life and geographical excursions, both of which give weight to a thesis on a more general cultural moment instead of merely a current strain of pettiness between political figures.
The general figure scetched out is illuminating though bewildering, as any social tendency must be that involves recursive and feedback relationships between art, politics, feelings of identity, political struggles for liberation and assertions over the location of responsibility for the interpretation of history.
Sometimes what emerges is sometimes loose in definitions of phenomena and proscription of responses, and sometimes unconvincing in attempts to assign particularities as key facets of the general phenomena, and sometimes there is a whiff of the snark and tone that are practiced more dramatically and pervasively elsewhere.
However this is relatively minor in the context of the larger book which rejects simple explanations, anti-intellectualosm and bad-faith discourse that have me, and I suspect many others, feeling exhausted and jaded. The references to both pop cultural and academic source material for setting context and providing analytical insight was very well done and I found it very informative on quite a number of tangential matters.
Overall it feels like an essential, through interjection into a discourse polluted by authentocracy which always keeps close at hand and honest and inquisitive of the conditions from whence we arrived where we are, and the principles that should guide our future attempts to interpret and improve political-cultural discourse, and further, the world.

[Willow Berridge · Rating 3 out of 5]

I worked out mid way through this book I must be roughly the same age as the author - I, too, entered my teens in the late major era and grew up on programmes like Red Dwarf and Keeping up Appearances. Looking back, it's easy to see how the kind of iconoclast without a cause comedy critiqued by this book gave me an all too easy route towards being 'cool' and 'modern'.
This said, as the author moves into his critique of the move to 'seriousness' in popular culture, he's a little too willing to caricature the TV shows my generation knows and loves in his eagerness to represent them as tools of a Gramscian hegemony. He's surely not the first person to make the argument that GoT's gritty realism leads us all to accept violence and misogyny as the norm - but actually, there are plenty of characters in Game of Thrones seeking to be decent people and make the world a better place (Brienne, Jon Snow, most the Starks, Tyrion, Varys...). It's the fact that they have to make difficult moral choices in the world that Westeros confronts them with that made them so much more relatable for a whole generation than the flawless heroines and heroes of classic High Fantasy.
One of the issues with the book is that, just as it charges 90s comedy with being dialectically dependent on the traditionalism it satirizes, it is itself dialectically dependent on the 'authentocracy' it critiques. The politicians who feign interest in football are an easy target just because their actual lack of interest in football makes them, well, inauthentic. In mocking the middle class of politicians like Jess Phillips as discrediting her performative Brumminess, the author is playing a kind of authenticity politics himself. And the author rightly criticises rightists for arguing economic problems have cultural solutions, but then - this is of course a major failing of the academic social sciences since the 'cultural turn' - spends most the book critiquing rightist and centrist/apolitical cultural production rather than paying any attention to the core political economic issues he briefly mentions should be most important. For a book that makes a lot of claims about the kind of politics people in the UK's regions really value, it does not really engage with any concrete political data such as surveys and polling. Existing surveys showing scepticism towards Corbynism were dismissed out of hand in one line towards the end of the book, without any alternative data being suggested. So it is hardly surprising that this text, published in 2018, failed to predict the collapse of the Red Wall the next year.

[Michael McNally · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the acknowledgements Joe mentions that the book was written over the summer of 2017.

This is worth bearing in mind, because in that context it’s really impressive that he’s written something that is easily accessible, engaging, and often succinctly insightful.

My experience was often that I would read a sentence or passage and feel that Joe had basically ‘nailed’ the articulation of a point I have struggled to.

Joe’s writing style is very enjoyable to read and he has a real knack for writing in a way that makes the reader feel like they’ve had an epiphany through his own musings.

The book delves into a kind of fake authenticity baked into UK centrist politics, nationalism, media and culture, amongst others - similar to the ‘cultivated amateurism’ marketers use to appear authentic as a means to sell themselves or a product by appearing to be ‘genuine’ on a cosmetic level through cultural signifiers such as: class, grittiness, realness and so on.

In my opinion Joe has really hit on something here and more often than not, the book feels like a thoughtful meditation on this subject.

However, it also at times feels like something that was written quickly and reads like a meandering series of anecdotes and soliloquys that need further development, elaboration, strengthening, and resolution.

As a result, most chapters feel incomplete and unresolved, and points – particularly towards the end of the book - often feel tenuous, circumstantial, missing the mark and ultimately lacking in any insightful conclusions.

Joe is often cutting and succinct, other times inconsistent, lacking accuracy and presenting false dichotomies – eg hipsters being both obsessed with authenticity and irony isn’t necessarily a contradiction, they can be co-existing characteristics depending on the context and circumstances.

There’s no one who really escapes Joe’s ire, which can be cathartic, but by the end of the book and without reprieve ends with a feeling that it’s only cynical and only cathartic - almost petulantly and nihilistically so and similar to the scattergun way that Joe himself criticises Morris and Brooker of in their own social commentaries.

Joe is often so relentlessly and widely critical, that you get the feeling that if this book was written by someone else, Joe himself would find plenty of ways in which to rightly criticise it.

Overall I still really enjoyed it because it’s well-written, articulate, insightful, and often agreeable. I just think that with a bit more time, there’s an even better book in here.

[Amy Carver · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was really refreshing to read and spells out some serious issues within British politics, particularly the centre left and right's muddled relationship with an ill-defined and spurious 'authentic' and 'traditional' Britishness (that has been homogenised by this discourse into a white, working-class, place-based/generalised bloc) that having been 'betrayed', now needs to be respected or honoured in someway politically... Kennedy traces this odd state of affairs back to New Labour's strategy to hegemonize right-wing economics in order to leverage socially progressive politics. With the collapse of the Third-Way, we're now in this weird space where 'progressive thought' needs to emphasise its comfort with atavistic ideas in order to assert the notion of credibility. Prescient today with both Starmer and Farage still banging on about their understandings of the ordinary Brit... Kennedy's vocab is razor-sharp and the new words I took away from reading this which I will be using in my own writing were: spurious, specious, bellicose and atavistic.

'Brexit, of course, is the signal example in modern British history about what happens when liberal culture plays along with the idea that material inequalities are actually about culture.'

[Gavin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard going (particularly the endless diversions into the specifics of Somewheres) but mostly accurate stuff. Stuff like this ages like cream cheese on a summer balcony with the pace of news nowadays though.

[Nick Arnold · Rating 3 out of 5]

Followed the political stuff OK, but some of the literary criticism lost me.

[Jordan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Urgent ideas, terrible writing.

[edga net · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, although a bit cluttered

[Brooke Thomson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kennedy identifies "authentocrats" as politicians and pundits who construct the false notion of a nationalistic, socially conservative, vaguely centre-left "working class" through which to launder and legitimise their own views.

It's an interesting phenomenon of centrist politics, and so it's disappointing that the author only scarcely skims the surface.

It has interesting tidbits, it has no shortage of anecdotes, and it has an over-indulgent bout of literary analysis - but it lacks the depth of insight necessary to justify itself as a book.

[Conor Flynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joe Kennedy needs to cheer up a bit but this is excellent stuff

[Jean Hardee · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good articulation (or as the author themselves would like to say - a reification) of some concepts in British public life I'm depressingly familiar with. Personally, it felt a bit like I was reading something I already hard-agreed with too much at times. However, the breadth of source material used to support the arguments meant that it was an interesting read. Was particularly impressed with the research done into the Mass Observation surveys in the past and the usage of them to challenge one-dimensional caricatures of social groups. The final lines about how depressing it would be if Corbynism pivoted back to the old ways of the Labour party are bleak to read under the curretn Starmer leadership. I'm looking forward to reading what this author writes next.