You’ve doubtless heard of such figures as White Van Man, Mondeo Man, Essex Man – vaguely demographic stereotypes which all seem to be male and working-class.
Well behold a whole new concept in shorthand categorisation that, while still resolutely male, is actually middle-class: Waterstones Dad.
This latest addition to the “You Know The Type” gallery was unveiled last week in the New Statesman, where his discoverer, one Gavin Jacobson, laid out the previously undocumented stereotype’s defining characteristics. He was born between 1956 and 1978, works or worked in the media, advertising, the arts or public sector bureaucracy and – alas this will rule out many hopefuls looking to audition for the part – earns “£90,000 or more”. Lucky him.
He’s also not just a walking cliche but the very definition of a floating voter, opting for “Tony Blair in 1997”, “David Cameron in 2010 and 2015”, and “the Liberal Democrats in 2017” – it was Tim Farron, Gav, though it’s fair to say that no one could be expected to remember that.
There are some other vital signs that identify this mythical beast, including being a Remainer “who is anti-racist but uncomfortable with movements such as Black Lives Matter”, a fondness for LBC’s black-cab-driver-baiting James O’Brien and the young Times columnist James Marriott, who is described as a “cognoscenti princeling”. Waterstones Dad also has a subscription to Private Eye.
Is there not a distant echo of the internet meme Centrist Dad in this slightly idiosyncratic assemblage of motifs? Well just possibly, but the crucial distinction, as suggested by the name, is a particular interest in books: Waterstones Dad apparently likes all the wrong ones. His tastes are for non-fiction and high-concept, brand-name historians such as Antony Beevor and Simon Schama, and mournful tomes on why politics has gone wrong.
He also likes books that reaffirm the post-Enlightenment notion of progress – Steven Pinker comes obviously to mind – but also the kind of lengthy warnings from history that Anglo-American hegemony is not guaranteed (think Niall Ferguson). And he’s got an absolute jones for “meta-takes”, books that explain everything from the beginning to the end, like, for instance, Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens or David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything.
In other words, Waterstones Dad is that highly scientific and sociologically specific hybrid of everyone who has ever annoyed Jacobson at a dinner party or maybe even from a growling-under-his-breath distance. This hardback-reading numbskull that he has painstakingly identified has a panoramic blindspot. He doesn’t even acknowledge, Jacobson writes, “the material foundations – capitalism – upon which his comfort rests: rising house prices, stock market booms, asset bubbles, bailouts, quantitative easing, steady work in the core and exploited labour on the peripheries of society, and the plunder of the world’s resources.”
We all recognise the type who is a stickler for recycling but also has a weakness for luxury holidays in the Maldives and weekend jaunts to the second home in the country with its charming globe-warming Aga. Yet it’s really quite remiss of Waterstones Dad to have neglected the economic underpinning of his hypocrisy because one of the books he’s supposed to have read, according to Jacobson, is Peter Turchin’s End Times, which critiques the inequalities arising from the post-1980s empowerment of free-market capitalism. And we’ll have to strike off Graeber and Wengrow because their whole shtick is alternatives to capitalist individualism.
But let’s not get bogged down in details when, like any self-respecting Waterstones Dad, there’s an opportunity to get worked up about not very much at all. Possibly in reaction to being named and shamed as a Waterstones Dad icon, Marriott wrote a column last week bemoaning the “angry liberal” and the “centrist zealot”, and in turn naming and shaming O’Brien as the “world’s angriest centrist dad”. Other miscreants he cited were Alastair Campbell, Jon Sopel and Emily Maitlis (presumably a Waterstones Mum).
This is confusing because Jacobson maintains that Waterstones Dad prides himself on his reasonableness, bourgeois moderation and willingness to disagree “agreeably”. Is that why he listens to O’Brien? Is the obstreperous radio host the irrepressible id to Waterstones Dad’s superego? But surely we’re getting a little too Freudian for our high street bookshop-lingering friend’s empirical preferences.
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Although while we’re on the subject of Freud, what all this second-guessing of others’ tastes seems to point towards is what the founder of psychoanalysis called the narcissism of small differences. For is there a more edifying pleasure than standing by the checkout of a prominent bookshop chain and passing sniffy judgment on the purchases of those in the queue? That bloke with the smug look on his face has bought Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live: A Life of Montaigne, whereas you have The Complete Essays.
But hold on, wouldn’t the comfort-addicted study in unthinking double-standards that Jacobson describes be ordering his books from Amazon, with all its efficiency and ease for the consumer and punishing workload for the faceless drudges in the warehouses and delivery vans? Probably, but let’s face it, Amazon Dad sounds a little too anthropological for satirical purposes.
Who cares whether Waterstones Dad actually exists, he’s a welcome addition to the watch-your-back merry-go-round of British social life, and a handy label with which to dismiss people who are very much like us, but appear to earn more and are different in small but critical ways. Voting for Cameron and Farron? Come on, you’re having a laugh.
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