If the Church of England is the Conservative Party at prayer, then Glastonbury is the Church of Woke at play. Can there be a more concentrated form of hyper-liberalism anywhere else on the planet?
The Hindu Kumbh Mela festival, the world’s largest, commands less fervour. Muslims on their hajj to Mecca look agnostic in comparison. Judaism’s Western Wall lacks the virtue on display in sunny Somerset.
When it doesn’t flood at Glastonbury, a little piece of me dies. I could not wish more misfortune on a gathering that has come to symbolise Western ennui. Not even the anus mundi, that is the Eurovision Song Contest, which I so wanted Israel to win this year, comes close.
When the Edward Gibbon of the Decline and Fall of the West appears, in around the 29th century, he’ll include a chapter on Glastonbury. It was when Western civilisation gave up, seeing its enemies as more deserving of support.
With two Jewish leaders fighting wars for civilisation in Ukraine and Israel, Glastonbury chose to offer a platform to tuneless Jew haters and the political genius that is Gary Lineker – fired from the BBC in May for inadvertently posting that Jews were rats.
The Pride flags that adorn every corner of the Glastonbury fields could fly only in Israel.
Glastonbury this weekend blended a deep self-loathing of the West while maintaining all the privileges it makes possible.
Israelophobic bands were applauded the loudest by 30- and 40-year-olds (the average festival attendee is 40) who could hold a Middle East Glastonbury nowhere except in Israel.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas chose a progressive music festival in which to make clear its genocidal intent. The Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, arrived by land and air. The images remain haunting.
Where was the minute’s silence at Glastonbury to honour the young men killed and women raped and kidnapped on that terrible day?
Piling left-wing hypocrisy upon middle-class privilege offers us a window into the appeal of alternatives. Donald Trump has given us one. For too long, a decadent elite preached the virtues of globalism, trans-nationalism and mass immigration. The result was an economic and cultural decline for pretty much everyone else.
Nigel Farage, Britain’s Trump (and the American President’s friend), is now more likely to be prime minster than is the leader of the Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch. Farage’s Reform UK members did not fill many fields in Somerset. They did fill ballot boxes in the May local elections.
This populist revulsion with the Glastonbury elite is, of course, grounded in economic dislocation. But Trump-Farage populism is more than class envy. It requires the mutual contempt of the propertied elite to give it power.
Under the bland festival motto of “hope, unity, peace and love” lurks a disdain for working-class people.
Pulp’s Common People (the greatest pop song of the 20th century, I reckon), and a Glastonbury mainstay, has long concealed a progressive antipathy toward the actual common people.
They are not celebrated so much as controlled. Mass immigration diluted the working-class culture of England’s northern cities. Trendy redefinitions of the family could be funded in the homes of the Glastonbury set. They produced an epidemic of divorce and fatherlessness suffered by poorer children.
The traditional pastimes of working-class people – football especially – are now subject to progressive campaigns, from anti-racism to LGBT armbands. The implicit message: you can have your proley fun but, remember, we are watching you.
But when that elite parties at Glastonbury, there is no equivalent censor. Instead, every anti-British, anti-Israel, anti-western sentiment is indulged or excused. Gary Lineker is promoted to public intellectual.
It is, of course, a long way from Somerset to Appalachia geographically but less so culturally. It was a left-wing sociologist (is there any other kind?), Arlie Russell Hochschild, who explained better than any other commentator the Deep Story of those who found themselves in opposition to everything the Glastonbury elite symbolises.
Hochschild lived among the men and women of Trump’s base. They wanted to reclaim the certainties of faith, family and flag. No one sings songs from these common people at Glastonbury. But they possess a sense of identity deeper than the metropolitan identitarians so keen to deplore them.
There is a lesson here for parties of the right: do not assume the cultural dislocations of ordinary people can be assuaged by just giving them stuff. Rather, make them actors in the great drama of rebuilding a civilisation. That mission will inspire the songs of the next generation. The current generation died in Glastonbury this weekend.
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.
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