What's the Matter With Mugsborough?

 As I discussed in a previous post, Ezra Klein devoted a recent episode of his podcast over on the New York Times website to the famous "What's the matter with Kansas?" problem. As he framed it at the top of the episode: "One of the big problems in left-wing politics is that the very people who Democrats, liberals and socialists think should be the most excited about the big, new government programs intended to help them are often the least excited — and are often voting for the party that wants to cut government."

Why is this? Why are the people who seemingly stand to gain the most from expanding social programs in fact voting against them? Why is "socialism" suddenly most popular only among people with graduate degrees living in leafy-green college towns and suburbs; whereas people in rural and depressed post-industrial rustbelt towns voted for a man in 2024 who proceeded to slash food stamps and Medicaid for the poor, as soon as he was in office, in exchange for increased tax subsidies to the rich? 

I recently finished reading Robert Tressell's great epic of socialist and working class life, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists—set in the fictional small town of Mugsborough; a book which has been on my list for a very long time. It did not disappoint. I found this classic novel to be many wonderful things—but one of the many things it is, is a comprehensive study of this "What's the matter with Kansas?" problem. We might therefore as well rename the conundrum: "What's the matter with Mugsborough?"

The working class characters in Tressell's novel, after all, toil their entire lives for a bare subsistence wage—one that "just keeps life from day to day / In your limbs, as in a cell / For the tyrants' use to dwell" (to quote Shelley's "Masque of Anarchy")—with only the workhouse to look forward to in old age. 

Yet, in spite of getting essentially nothing in return for devoting their whole lives to the task of keeping the upper classes in luxury and idleness, these characters keep on voting for Tory members of Parliament; they keep sending their sons to die in imperialist wars; they keep physically assaulting and catcalling after any socialist pamphleteers they find in town; and they furiously object to any policy that looks more to their own and their children's future wellbeing than that of the King and the Royal Family. 

As a character ponders in Arthur Koestler's historical novel The Gladiators (which obviously functions as an allegory as well for twentieth century European politics): "How had it come about, their barring the gates and marching to man the walls with flaming enthusiasm—the serfs to defend their bondage, the wretched to guard their misery, the hungry to risk life and limb for the growling in their guts?" 

Koestler's character Fulvius at first frames the "What's the matter with Kansas/Mugsborough" problem as follows: he seeks to find the "causes which induce man to act contrary to his own interests." But then, he realizes that this is putting it too broadly: "he remembered the numerous suits he had conducted in his capacity of lawyer, recalled the tenacity and artfulness of his clients guarding their interests, ever ready to hound their neighbours to dungeon or scaffold for the sake of one stolen goat." 

And so, he reframes the problem: "He had often thought about what made man act contrary to his own interests where great issues were concerned, whereas he guarded his advantage with so much cunning and obstinacy when small matters were at stake." 

Tressell is interested in this same seeming paradox. 

One the one hand, he notes, the inhabitants of the town are strangely, almost superhumanly self-sacrificing. They ask for nothing from their "betters" other than to be sweated and ruled. They gleefully return Tory and Liberal MPs to parliament year after year despite getting nothing in return for their loyalty. They are "ragged-trousered philanthropists" in the sense that they toil all their lives to keep other people, without even expecting gratitude for it (indeed, they express gratitude when the latter offer so much as a crumb from the sumptuous table the workers have filled). 

The socialist Barrington sums up the situation in one of his inner monologues: "The blind, stupid enthusiastic admiration displayed by the philanthropists for those who exploited and robbed them; their extraordinary apathy with regard to their own interests; the patient, broken-spirited way in which they endured their sufferings, tamely submitting to live in poverty in the midst of the wealth they had helped to create [...] and the savage hatred they exhibited towards anyone who dared to suggest the possibility of better things[.]"

But when it comes to dealing with small affairs between members of their own class, Tressell notes—often this same infinite self-sacrificing altruism and generosity is nowhere in evidence. "[A]though they were so [...] contented to be robbed on a large scale, yet in small matters, in the commonplace and petty affairs of their everyday existence, most of these men were acutely alive to what their enfeebled minds conceived to be their own selfish interests, and they possessed a large share of that singular cunning which characterises this form of dementia." 

In other words—they act "contrary to their own interests," as Koestler would put it, in large matters which affect their lives and futures, and their children's futures—but they "guard their advantage" when it comes to petty things like cutting corners on a job or cadging a few extra pence. 

Tressell offers many possible explanations for this paradox. He shows how working class solidarity breaks down because its equally impoverished members make invidious distinctions between themselves: the "skilled" artisans see themselves as more respectable than the "unskilled." Both in turn see themselves as above comparison with the "tramps" and "unemployed" marching for food and work in the town square. Many of them wish to suck up to the higher orders in the hopes of receiving favors or tips; or because they wish to identify themselves with someone powerful and "successful." 

The Tory propagandists are also skilled in canalizing any discontent they may feel with their lot toward politically "safe" targets. At the start of the novel, Tressell describes how the Tory papers of his time were afroth with warnings about immigrants and foreign competition; and they managed to convince more than a few working class voters that all would be well if they could only put up a tariff barrier to keep out imports and block any more immigration (sound familiar?). 

As one character reads the Tory periodical in Tressell's novel, aptly named the Obscurer, Tressell notes that "he was not able to understand exactly what the compiler of figures was driving at—probably the latter never intended that anyone should understand—but he was conscious of a growing feeling of indignation and hared against foreigners of every description, who were ruining this country[.]" One character —getting his information from the same source—laments "We're overrun with 'em!" Another sagely observes: "Yes [...] and then thers all them Hitalian horgin grinders [and] Frenchies sellin' hunions."

As Tressell editorializes: "The papers they read were filled with vague and alarming accounts of the quantities of foreign merchandise imported into this country, the enormous number of aliens constantly arriving, and their destitute conditions, how they lived, the crimes they committed, and the injury they did to British trade. These are the seeds which, cunningly sown in their minds, caused to grow up within them a biting indiscriminating hatred of foreigners." 

It would seem than in a hundred and more years, our own ruling class who would like to be supported in idleness have scarcely improved on these methods. Trump, who picks the pocket of the American public every year through running elevated inflation levels and who duped thousands of his own supporters into trusting their savings to a meme coin that proceeded to plummet in value—so that he could skim off the proceeds in the form of actual legal tender from transaction fees—has nonetheless managed to convince millions of working class American voters than Haitian immigrants and Canadian imports are the true cause of their suffering. 

Some of the "What's the matter with Mugsborough?" conundrum, then, can be chalked up to the old phenomena of false consciousness and the "divide and conquer" strategy on the part of the would-be ruling class. But Ezra Klein, in the podcast episode, mentions a more sympathetic explanation too. He notes that many working class voters may not be enthusiastic about new public benefits and government programs precisely because their personal experience of the ones we have currently is so profoundly negative. These programs, he observes, were in many cases set up to be stigmatizing and humiliating. 

Tressell is well aware of this aspect of the problem as well. As withering as he is on the subject of capitalism, his book is also an encyclopedic denunciation of the various half-measures that a guilt-stricken society applies to try to address the problems of unemployment and poverty without upsetting the established order. He describes how some Liberal MPs suggested "technical education" as a solution to the fact that so many people were thrown out of work by automation. Shades here of the old Obama-era line: "Learn to Code" (nowadays, of course, the coders are also being automated). 

He also discusses in detail the absurdities and humiliations of the "Distress Committee" and other charitable interventions. Many of these "charities" in fact just served to re-employ the displaced workers at even lower wages—extracting even more surplus value from them than before; or else they flooded the market with cheap goods—putting other workers and producers out of business. "As a remedy for unemployment," Tressell observes, "this scheme was on a par with the method of the tailor in the fable who thought to lengthen his cloth by cutting a piece off one end and sewing it on to the other[.]"

All these "charities," Tressell writes, ultimately achieved little more than that they "humiliated, degraded, and pauperised those who received them[.]"

And here, indeed, the "anti-poverty interventions" of Tressell's time sound a great deal like the government programs that Klein and Annie Lowrey in the episode are discussing. Lowrey at one point in the episode describes a government form that constitutes the "main application for aid in the state of Michigan." She observes: "it was 18,000 words and 1,000 questions." These kinds of voluminous forms, she says, often delve into details of one's private life so minute and intimate than many of us would not even be able to furnish the answers if we were asked—and would never dream of having to divulge them to a stranger. Things like: "on what day were your children conceived?"

As Tressell writes of the quite similar paper form used by the "Distress Committee" in Mugsborough to ferret out the "deserving" from the "undeserving" applications for charity: "if the object of the committee had been to furnish the applicant with material for the manufacture of an appropriate headdress for himself, no one could reasonably have found fault with them: but the foolscap was not to be utilised in that way; it was called a 'Record Paper', three pages of it were covered with insulting, inquisitive, irrelevant questions concerning the private affairs and past life of the 'case' who wished to be permitted to work for his living[.]"

One can see how people who have to routinely interact with such humiliating and invasive procedures in order to receive food, medicine, and shelter might despair of "government" as a solution to their problems. But the core of the problem here is not the involvement of the state—but the fact that the aid is conceived as a matter of discretionary "charity"—to be withheld from the "undeserving"—rather than a matter of right, to be distributed to people who have done their fair share of work to contribute to the common wealth of society—or would gladly do so if given the chance—but who have hitherto been denied their share of the proceeds. 

This is Tressell's message, trumpeted from every page of his book, reiterated a thousand times in a thousand ways across the 600-plus pages of his tome—and it remains as true today as it was a century ago, if not even truer: we have such abundance of things in our society than no one should go hungry; no one willing to work and toil should be denied their fair share of comfort and rest. And the reason we have such abundance is in large part thanks to the unstinting and self-sacrificing efforts of those "ragged-trousered philanthropists" who sweated their whole lives long and asked so little in return—and were yet denied even that much.