Politics

Boosterism: the questionable credo now steering Britain


It is, Downing Street has been briefing, the new government’s mantra: boosterism. There are, however, three slight issues with this. First, it’s not clear how well the strategy works, second, the word actually means something slightly different, and that definition is not particularly flattering.

Let’s start with how Boris Johnson’s team appear to view it: as, essentially, an economic credo, to be laid down in the autumn budget, of spending heavily on infrastructure while also cutting taxes.

As such it combines fiscal stimulus – putting “rocket boosters” under the economy, as No 10 insiders have reportedly briefed – with a more nebulous attempt to gee up confidence in growth, similar to Johnson’s simultaneous attempt to increase optimism about Brexit.

Economically, this sounds like a philosophy with a longer and fairly chequered history: Reaganomics.

As US president, Ronald Reagan boosted growth with his combination of tax cuts and extra spending, but also saw public debt soar, and inequality widen, as the promised “trickle down” effect of tax cuts for businesses and the wealthy failed to materialise.

The secondary element of the Johnson definition – talking up the economy – is at least closer to the accepted historical use of the word, though again the connotations are by no means always a compliment.

In North American usage, “boosterism” is the heavy promotion of a place, or person, with a hint of hyperbole, even huckster-ish tendencies.

In America it has been most associated with efforts to support small towns through new buildings, infrastructure or gimmicks. Historically it has been linked to attempts to inflate local property prices, perhaps excessively so, tempting unwary investors.

These days it is often associated more with breakneck gentrification, a similar process except the new money, gimmicks and suddenly unaffordable property prices are intended to revitalise a once-prosperous area.

Recent pre-Johnson uses of the term by the Guardian have tended to focus on this sense of talking up a place or project perhaps beyond the realms of realism. One 2017 editorial managed to have its linguistic cake and eat it by using boosterism to describe Elon Musk’s over-promotion of his planned space projects.

Perhaps the most famous, and fundamental, use of the word is less favourable still – in Babbitt, the popular if idiosyncratic 1922 satirical novel by writer and social reformer Sinclair Lewis.

George F Babbitt, the eponymous protagonist, is a real estate salesman in the fictional midwest city of Zenith, where trade is bolstered by the city’s creed of boosterism – talking up its virtues to increase local fortunes. Such was the novel’s initial influence that for a period “Babbittry” was used as US slang for a sort of over-inflated sales pitch.

Babbitt proudly wears a badge proclaiming his membership of the local Boosters’ Club, a sort of masonic lodge meets chamber of commerce, around which much of his business and social life revolved.

The novel describes his disaffection with this cosy, bourgeois life. Babbitt initially preaches conventional morality, but then begins an affair.

Eventually, and this could, arguably, be the point where the modern connection is broken, he has a crisis of confidence and resumes his conventional life.



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