The Common Sense Swindle

The Common Sense Swindle: Inside Britain’s Culture-War Playbook

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.”

— W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming

When Farage talks, a rectum is relieved of its wind. His words are of the fragrance of a freshly laid turd. And yet, many consider his pronouncements as the final word, the gospel of the pub bore, where proof is optional, volume is virtue, and prejudice passes for plain speaking.

1. Pub talk and plutocracy

Somewhere between a pint of Tribute and the closing credits of Question Time, a man in a wax jacket tells his neighbour that “Nigel says it like it is.”

The petty bourgeois bigot is not poor, exactly. He is semi-retired, his mortgage paid off, but he has just enough unease to keep the bile warm. His half-baked opinions are as thoroughly thought through as a gerbil’s acceptance of the invitation to a rimming party. The pub bore doesn’t know that the network funding the political project he’s cheering is underwritten by billionaires in offshore trusts. His knowledge, or lack of, equals the gerbils’ understanding of what a cardboard tube is used for.

But the chap in red trousers feels betrayed. He feels betrayed by the “metropolitan elite,” or by the immigrants, or by the children who don’t seem to know which bathroom to use. He thinks it’s mad to see black faces advertising washing powder on the telly, but of course he is ‘not racist’, just a patriot who longs for a ‘white’ Christmas again.

The scene in the pub is ordinary, banal, yet almost comic. Here lies the modern tragedy: a politics that has severed thought from truth and has turned belonging into performance. It is precisely this fracture that Antonio Gramsci — writing in Mussolini’s prison a century ago — foresaw as the prelude to authoritarian renewal.

When the old common sense decays, Gramsci warned, the people seek meaning in ghosts. Just a few years later, those ghosts became real and wore the best-tailored suits in Europe.

2. The breakdown of the old story

For the past forty years, we have lived with ‘common sense’: this was a faith that markets are meritocratic, globalisation is benign, and growth is the measure of virtue.

It was a secular religion, and like all religions, it carried its own morality; the good person competes, consumes, and never complains. The good person hustles, the good person self-brands, the good person accepts the gig economy as freedom. Poverty is weakness, poverty is self-inflicted, and poverty is a sign of moral degeneration.

Then came 2008. The temples of finance cracked, wages stagnated, rents rose, and the promised “trickle down” turned out to be a drought. What collapsed wasn’t merely an economy but the story of capitalism’s claim to moral legitimacy. When a pandemic, then a war, arrived, a fist was punched into the cracks, widening the fissures until a scream of pain erupted from below.

Gramsci called such moments organic crises: the ‘ruling class’ can no longer lead, and the ruled no longer give their consent. The “common sense” that once stitched the social fabric begins to rot. Today, voters see the Tories as a failed party, and about as attractive as a slap in the face with a well-soiled nappy. Labour has adopted the Tories’ clothes, and is slipping down the public’s approval rating faster than a teenager’s jizz down a Soho hooker’s throat.

We have entered what Gramsci named an interregnum:

“The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Farage is one such symptom; Trump another; Musk and Thiel are the financiers of the contagion. They feed on the disorientation of a culture that no longer believes in its own progress but has nothing yet to replace it, except a new faith in technology. A new church has been created, and its believers are as gullible as flat-earthers.

3. The morbid symptoms

Farage’s populism today functions as both narcotic and confession.

Its slogans — “Take Back Control,” “Make America Great Again” — are hymns to lost agency. Beneath the roar lies a whimper: I no longer matter.

Gramsci would recognise this as the revolt of a subaltern class that cannot articulate its suffering except through the language of its masters, and the flying of its flags.

In the 1930s, that language was nationalism; today it is algorithmic resentment, coded in hashtags and broadcast by billionaires who find rage a profitable commodity.

The working-class base that once organised in unions now organises in Facebook groups. The solidarity of labour has been replaced by the solidarity of anger.

And anger, when it cannot find justice, always finds scapegoats.

4. The new “historic bloc”: billionaires and the dispossessed

Here lies the central contradiction of our age:

The global capitalist class — now composed not of industrialists but of multi-billionaires and data lords — seeks power beyond the nation-state.

To secure that power, it needs a mass base willing to dismantle the very institutions that limit its dominance.

But the available mass base — the Farage voter, the MAGA rally, the QAnon disciple — is drawn largely from what Marx called the surplus population: people rendered economically redundant by automation, offshoring, and financialisation.

They are no longer needed to produce surplus value, nor can they consume at the pace capitalism demands. They are, in system terms, waste. Another contradiction is that capitalism in the UK is sucking money out of the pockets of those it needs to spend.

And yet, paradoxically, these consumers are politically indispensable to the billionaires who would transcend democracy itself.

The alliance is therefore both necessary and impossible.

The rich need the rage of the redundant to destroy the regulatory state; the redundant need the fantasy of nationalism to feel useful again.

It is an anti-hegemonic bloc glued together by affect rather than interest — by humiliation, nostalgia, and a shared hatred of “wokeness,” that catch-all ghost of moral decline.

5. From petty bourgeoisie to surplus class

Gramsci analysed fascism as a movement rooted in a disoriented petty-bourgeoisie — small shopkeepers, professionals, ex-officers crushed between big capital and organised labour.

They sought restoration through myth: the Fatherland, the Leader, the Purge.

Our new reactionary base is poorer, less secure, and more atomised. It rents, gig-works, and scrolls. Its small capital is cultural, not economic: whiteness, maleness, Englishness. Its enemy is not the banker but the graduate, the refugee, the imagined elite of moral superiority.

This is not a class with factories to defend or shops to save. It is a class defending its ontological status — its sense of being someone in a world that has rendered it superfluous.

Gramsci would see in this a profound danger: a class without material cohesion can be bound only by mythical identity. That is the soil in which fascism grows again. That’s why the flags are flying.

6. Caesarism in the digital age

When no social force can lead morally, Gramsci wrote, societies drift towards Caesarism — the elevation of a charismatic figure who claims to stand “above” conflict.

Trump and Farage perform this pantomime daily: the strong man as everyman, the millionaire as pub companion.

Their genius is affective, not intellectual. They transmute impotence into belonging.

Their rallies and broadcasts create what Erich Fromm called a pseudo-community: a simulated togetherness that hides existential isolation.

But behind them stand the true Caesars: billionaires who bankroll think-tanks, buy media outlets, and manipulate platform algorithms to flood civil society with noise.

What Gramsci saw in newspapers and pulpits, we now find in timelines and “engagement metrics.”

The goal is not persuasion but exhaustion.

When truth becomes relative, power becomes absolute.

7. The colonisation of civil society

Gramsci believed that civil society — schools, unions, churches, local associations — was the trench network through which hegemony was both maintained and contested.

Today, those trenches are crumbling.

Austerity gutted local institutions; social media replaced the public square; universities were marketised; the NHS was managerialised.

What remains are fragments: overstretched charities, depoliticised unions, and citizens fed on culture-war calories.

In this vacuum, reactionaries have captured the moral language once owned by the Left. “Freedom” now means deregulation; “common sense” means prejudice; “democracy” means the algorithmic mood swing of the day.

The terrain of struggle has shifted decisively from parliaments to platforms.

We are not just witnessing a crisis of democracy — we are living through a crisis of meaning.

8. The moral psychology of ressentiment

C. Wright Mills warned that when structural problems are interpreted as personal failings, cynicism replaces politics.

In that vacuum, Nietzsche’s old spectre of ressentiment — envy turned moral — thrives.

The man at the bar resents the refugee not because the refugee has taken his job, but because the refugee symbolises a system that no longer needs him.

His rage is theological: he wants the world to make sense again.

The billionaire populist understands this perfectly.

He offers redemption through punishment — a politics of cleansing rather than repair.

It is fascism without uniforms: cruelty as catharsis, domination as entertainment.

9. When cynicism becomes common sense

What we call “cynicism” today is not the opposite of ideology; it is ideology — the belief that everyone is corrupt, so nothing can be changed.

It is the perfect mental state for authoritarian capitalism: weary enough to obey, clever enough to sneer.

Gramsci’s insight was that consent does not require belief; it requires resignation.

The task of the ruling class is to make alternatives seem not forbidden but futile.

Hence the refrain: “They’re all the same.”

Hence the smirk that passes for wisdom in the post-truth age.

Cynicism is the moral anaesthetic of late capitalism. It numbs the pain while the patient bleeds out.

10. The counter-hegemonic task

What, then, is to be done?

Gramsci’s answer was neither insurrection nor despair but the war of position — the slow, stubborn work of rebuilding culture and moral vision from below.

In our time, that means:

• Reclaiming care as a political virtue, not a private sentiment.
• Re-embedding truth in community — through local media, education, and art that speak to lived reality rather than algorithmic outrage.
• Defending unions not merely as wage-bargaining machines but as schools of democracy.
• Cultivating what Margaret Archer would call reflexivity: the capacity to think critically about the conditions shaping our lives.

In other words, rebuild the moral infrastructure of the lifeworld that neoliberalism hollowed out.

11. Hope as moral realism

Gramsci’s famous line — “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” — was not a slogan of cheerfulness but of discipline.

It meant: see the world as it is, but act as though it can be otherwise.

Hope, rightly understood, is not optimism; it is moral realism — the conviction that human beings are capable of decency even when systems are not.

Every strike, every act of solidarity, every truthful word in a lying culture is a small act of counter-hegemony.

We cannot tweet our way out of Caesarism, but we can outlast it — by re-knitting the social bonds that money cannot buy.

12. The return to truth

At the end of my essay ‘Prophet of Deceit’, I wrote that fascism thrives on moral confusion: the agitator blurs the line between truth and loyalty until they become indistinguishable.

Gramsci knew that the antidote is not technocracy but moral clarity — the courage to name the world’s sickness without surrendering to hatred.

The age of Farage, like all interregna, will pass. But whether it gives birth to renewal or ruin depends on whether we can, in time, make truth popular again — not as doctrine, but as shared experience.

To borrow from Yeats once more: the centre can hold only if we choose to hold it

“When the people cease to believe in progress, they will believe in conspiracies.”