Adrift or ashore? Desert Island Discs and celebrity culture

Why do we want to imagine celebrities as adrift, as banished from the rest of the world, and yet, at the same time, to find out more about them? The idea of celebrities as 'intimate strangers', with the media providing us with privileged access to the alleged 'real' person 'behind' a distanced, glossy façade of superstardom, has long been a constituent element of modern celebrity culture. Desert Island Discs' capacity to use and perpetuate such motifs has been a key reason for its success. At the same time, the programme also registers shifts in celebrity culture: towards a less white and male-dominated demographic, towards the hyper-intimate confessional, and towards expanding celebrity power. In this chapter I consider how Desert Island Discs connects to changing formations of celebrity culture, to ideas of meritocracy, and to a social culture of individualization

'We do not have to be vicious, competitive, or managerial'

Akwugo Emejulu discusses changes to 'collective public politics' – including the third sector, activism, community development and political and union campaigning – alongside Black feminist activism, her own intellectual development, and institutional racism at British universities. In these right-wing times, she argues 'we need people in lot of different kinds of spaces and places to take back power'. She outlines the consequences of the defeat of the left since the 1980s and the rise of neoliberal technocratic managerialism in the third sector: how it put already-vulnerable people further at risk and destabilised the political power of NGOS. More recently there has been a surge of interest in political education and in campaigning on 'the bigger political picture' amongst community activists. We need a far more expansive conception of 'activism': for more attention to be given to its role in everyday life, its intersectionality and its sustainability. To do this, and to foreground the diverse contributions of women of colour activists, is to address and redress the 'raceless discussions of the white left'. The interview concludes by considering academia in a neoliberal climate. 'We do not have to be vicious, competitive, or managerial', she says: all academics need to behave well at every level to change institutional racism

Normcore plutocrats in gold elevators: reading the Trump Tower photographs

This article analyses two notorious photos of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage - one on their own, and one alongside Arron Banks, Gerry Gunster, Andy Wigmore and Raheem Kassam - standing in a gold-plated elevator after Trump had won the US election. The article provides a cultural and political analysis of the plutocrats who are playing at being ordinary ‘winners’, or what it calls normcore plutocrats. Analysing the symbolic and material contexts of these two images, it considers the physical context of the lift within Trump Tower; the tangled web of relationships uniting the men in the lift; and the photograph’s later life as a social media meme. Asking how a depiction of glittering luxury can be presented as populist revolt, it discusses how elites draw on discourses of meritocracy, of ‘travelling up the social ladder’ to validate their actions. That Trump and friends are not on a ladder but in an express lift symbolises the attempted velocity of this phase of corporate meritocracy. In the process the analysis provides a multi-layered contribution towards understanding how these normcore plutocrats in gold elevators have achieved and extended their power

Where the fires are

The disintegration of the social in the USA (and elsewhere) creates the need for a strong central authority to secure order and boundaries. Hence the rise of ‘libertarian authoritarianism’, a novel political formation that is an inadvertent effect of neoliberal rationality. In this context Trump and other right-wing populist forces can be seen as part of a further reconfiguration of neoliberalism. White identity politics and male identity politics play a key role within this. In the face of this persistence and resilience of neoliberalism, we need, not hope, but ‘grit, responsibility and determination’. Small acts of local resistance have an important role to play here, and so too does political theory

Young and old meritocracy: from radical critique to neoliberal tool

Meritocracy’ today is generally understood to involve the idea that a fair social system is one in which people can work hard, activate their talent and achieve social success. This credo has come to be ‘common sense’ within modern society. There is more-than-ample evidence, primarily through his own journalistic and social media output, that Toby Young believes that dramatic levels of inequality – the opposite of ‘a level playing field’ – are justifiable (he has often gone on record defending the aristocracy). It is also well known, to those with enough of the relevant cultural capital, that Michael Young’s 1958 bestseller The Rise of the Meritocracy critiqued the concept. The book was a satire, with the first half documenting the expansion of democracy in Britain, and the second imagining a sci-fi dystopia featuring a black market trade in brainy babies. The New Republic columnist Jeet Heer tweeted on 1 January: ‘Michael Young was the great theorist of meritocracy. Toby Young is the living refutation of meritocracy

Meritocracy as plutocracy: the marketising of ‘equality’ within neoliberalism

Meritocracy, in contemporary parlance, refers to the idea that whatever our social position at birth, society ought to facilitate the means for ‘talent’ to ‘rise to the top’. This article argues that the ideology of ‘meritocracy’ has become a key means through which plutocracy is endorsed by stealth within contemporary neoliberal culture. The article attempts to analyse the term ‘meritocracy’, to open up understandings of its genealogy, and to comprehend its current use. It does so through three sections. The first section considers what might be wrong with the notion of meritocracy. The second traces some key points in the travels of the concept within and around academic social theory, moving from Alan Fox and Michael Young’s initial, disparaging use of the term in the 1950s, to Daniel Bell’s approving adoption of the concept in the 1970s, and on to its take-up by neoconservative think tanks in the 1980s. The third section analyses the use of meritocracy as a plank of neoliberal political rhetoric and public discourse. It focuses on the resonance of the term in relatively recent British culture, discussing how what it terms ‘meritocratic feeling’ has come to operate in David Cameron’s ‘Aspiration Nation’. This final section argues that meritocracy has become a potent blend of an essentialised and exclusionary notion of ‘talent’, competitive individualism and the need for social mobility. Today it is a discourse which predominantly works to marketise the very idea of equality