Fortunately, we made an early call. Many who made a similar decision later on found themselves at the mercy of Uber, facing huge price hikes. Apparently, the Uber algorithm, more sensitive than the local cab company to the fluctuations of supply and demand, sent prices through the roof. A similar power cut in March 2018 meant that stranded commuters were faced with Uber price surges of up to 500%.

Suggested reading

The battle for the Tory Party's soul

By Peter Franklin

Amongst the most disturbing lessons that my father attempted to teach me as a child was that something is worth what someone is prepared to pay for it. There is no such thing as intrinsic value, he maintained. Value is simply a function of supply and demand.

Well, I didn’t like it then and I don’t like it now. For the kindly Muslim taxi driver that took us home, the algorithm was pretty simple: the job was worth his time plus his costs plus a reasonable profit. Our misfortune was not something to be exploited by a profit-maximising algorithm. And I thank him for that.

Now it may have been entirely incidental that our cab driver was a person of faith. And I absolutely do not put his behaviour down to the fact that, as a believer, he was a better person than those greedy, pagan executives over at Uber. But what I did wonder, as we trundled down the M1, was whether we had been the beneficiaries of a world-view in which things do, in fact, have intrinsic value.

The Uber algorithms, perfectly embodying the spirit of market forces, make all value beholden to fluctuations of supply and demand. Here, nothing is fixed. Everything is relative. It’s a metaphysics, of sorts. Or perhaps – because it’s so wholeheartedly materialist – an anti-metaphysics. Capitalism represents the triumph of the immanent – that there is nothing to human value except the ebb and flow of human behaviour. Value is not rooted in anything transcendent, beyond the continual drift of human desire.

Suggested reading

When will Uber feel the techlash?

By Marshall Steinbaum

This is why, at a philosophical level at least, capitalism and religious belief are fundamentally enemies. The former is inherently relativistic and free-floating, the latter rooted in a view of the world where there are immutable and stable values.

I mention this little story only because it sits neatly alongside a movement that seems to be gathering force, especially in the US, in which conservatives – and often religious conservatives – are ousting socialists as some of the most thoughtful critics of capitalism. Last year Peter Kolozi, an academic at the City University of New York, published a timely historical survey of the long tradition of anti-capitalism within US conservatism. To those who have become used to conservatives being capitalism’s most high-profile cheerleaders, this notion may seem odd. But there is no necessary connection between conservatism and capitalism: indeed, there is a strong case that they are antithetical. And that case is re-emerging.

For instance, as Kolozi points out, conservatism in the post-Bellum American South looked suspiciously upon capitalism as a northern phenomenon that threatened the traditional structures of community life. This was a version of conservatism that sought to maintain a form of life built upon racial privilege. And most of us are glad it was destroyed.

Suggested reading

Can America's national conservatives reunite the nation?

By Oliver Wiseman

But the South’s experience of capital’s power to destroy traditional community structures – for good or ill – formed an important part of the traditional conservative tradition (often known as paleo-conservatism) and its attitude towards capitalism.

As Kolizi explains, this tradition came to be obscured by the Cold War. Given the threat posed by communism, anti-capitalist conservatives threw in their lot with free-market conservatives, united against a common enemy. But the end of the Cold War, the 2008 financial crash, worries about globalisation, and the collapse of faith in the market’s ability to sustain community life – often code for church and family – has exposed old divisions within the conservative family. Thus people like Fox news presenter and Trump supporter Tucker Carlson are beginning to say things like this: “Market capitalism is not a religion. Any economic system that weakens and destroys families isn’t worth having.” Damning the “mercenaries” of the capitalist class, Carlson called for:

“a fair country. A decent country. A cohesive country. A country whose leaders don’t accelerate the forces of change purely for their own profit and amusement.”

This could almost have been Bernie Sanders.

More from this author

Why won't Remainers talk about family?

By Giles Fraser

The conservative case against capitalism is built on three basic differences between the two ideologies.

First, the obvious point. Conservatives like to conserve. By contrast, capitalism is the most powerful change-agent the world has ever seen. Karl Marx had it right when he explained capitalism in the opening chapter of The Communist Manifesto:

“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.

To those who are capitalism’s most vigorous moral proponents, this is its virtue: creative destruction. When what is being destroyed is a society of racial superiority, as with the American South, that is a good thing. But when what is being destroyed is a whole infrastructure of mutual care and support – family, unions, church, stable communities – then we might think very differently.

The second difference is the one alluded to in my taxi story: capitalism’s anti-metaphysics – or, to use Marx’s expression, the profanation of the holy. It is not incidental that religion has played an important role within the conservative tradition. For religious belief locates value beyond the to-ing and fro-ing of human desire, beyond human subjectivity. God is the fixed point around which human value turns.

Suggested reading

Why we all need a share in capitalism

By Tim Bale

But hang on, weren’t the religious right of the Regan era, for instance, capitalism’s biggest fans? Yes, but this was more to do with their pathological hatred of Soviet Communism and its programmatic atheism. During the Cold war, the Christian Right imagined that their enemies’ enemy – capitalism – to be their friend. The new style anti-capitalist conservative of the Carlson variety believes this alliance to have been short-sighted.

Third, anti-capitalist conservatives maintain that the moral life is a communal and necessarily rooted activity. They put particular value on loyalty to place and kin as necessary constituents of moral formation and of human flourishing.

In this regard, they have begun to whisper to each other that the global reach of multi-national capitalism is undermining the very basis of moral existence and human happiness. Capitalism severs people from their roots, treating human labour as just another commodity to be moved around the world at the service of supply and demand.

Suggested reading

Test article

By J. D. Vance

These new-look conservatives have a totally different feel to the ones that progressives have been used to dealing with. Take someone like Kentucky farmer and contemporary poet Wendell Berry. Radically committed to the environment, a lyricist of human rootedness, implacably hostile to technology, broadly Christian, in many ways he feels more Left than Right, yet his moral vision fits more comfortably within the old tradition of Southern Agrarians than it does within that of the progressives.

Or take American writer Rod Dreher, more obviously on the Right, yet whose Benedict Option advises a withdrawal from the values of capitalism:

“what has been missing from capitalism for a long time is any sense of morality, care for neighbor and community, and love for the “other” that Christianity absolutely demands, but that this current iteration of capitalism says is foolish.”

The US TV Series American Gods is premised upon the idea of a war between the old Gods of religion and the new gods of technology and celebrity and finance. This is the war that a new generation of American Conservatives have now joined. J. D. Vance, for example, the Conservative author of Hillbilly Elegy, was baptised a Catholic last week. Agreeing with Carlson, he has asked: “What happens when the companies that drive the market economy — and all of its benefits — don’t care about the American nation’s social fabric?”

Even Vance, a venture capitalist, is wobbling in his faith in the redemptive potential of corporate finance. I suspect that is why he has chosen the old gods over the new.

Ironically, it is progressives – the Clintons, for example – who continue to look to the gods of finance to drive us all towards the sunny uplands of a bright new world. Historically, it is liberalism that was formed alongside capitalism, and liberalism – especially classical liberalism – that shares the same basic assumptions about the freedom of the individual. That is why, for instance, woke liberalism and Silicon Valley capitalism sit so neatly together. And why, to the bafflement of many on the traditional Left, the case against capitalism is now being made more forcibly from the Right.

“I have to ask you to go out and make sure that all of your people vote. Because if they don’t vote, we’re going to have a miserable two years, and we’re going to have a very hard period of time because then – you are just one election away from losing everything you have.”

The Democrats, he said, “will overturn everything we’ve done. And they’ll do it quickly and violently. You look at the anti-fa, you look at some of these groups, and these are violent people.”

Couched in his familiar inflammatory rhetoric was Trump’s concern that this reliable conservative base might not turn out because he himself was not on the ballot. It was pure Trump, of course, but it was also quite possibly true. In 2016, he had won 81% of the evangelical vote. In 2018, that number had dwindled, but only slightly. He is still viewed favourably by 71% of them – as opposed to some 45% of the American public.

But at that dinner, he seemed uncharacteristically worried that the evangelical turn-out would not compensate for his losses elsewhere.

More on the evangelical Right

Just how 'religious' are Trump's evangelicals?

By Giles Fraser

The baffling thing for many people, of course, was the fact that they even turned out in the first place. Here was a man who had supported abortion rights, and who lived a life antithetical to evangelical values. He was thrice divorced; he boasted about his sexual conquests and paid hush money to a porn star. He had also invested in gambling and incurred enormous debts, both of which were anathema to evangelicals. Further, he clearly knew nothing about the Bible.

History suggests the turn out may have had more to do with the party than the man. White evangelicals had been voting more and more Republican since 1980, at the point when Jerry Falwell and his fellows created the Christian Right as a reaction to events of the Sixties and Seventies, from the civil rights movement to the anti-Vietnam War protests, to feminism and gay rights. In the late Eighties, the white South had turned Republican, and later the Christian Right dominated 18 Republican state parties and influenced many more. Obama won the 2008 election, but white evangelicals continued to vote increasingly GOP.

From 1996 to 2000 over 65% voted for Republican candidates for president. From 2004 to 2012, their vote was in the mid-to high 70%. They had voted for John McCain, who had denounced Falwell, and then for a Mormon, Mitt Romney, whom they didn’t consider Christian. Today they make up about a third of Republican voters.

Trump and the evangelicals

Test article

By Nigel Cameron

The surprise, then, was not that Trump had won such a large percentage of their vote in the national election – but that he had won 40% of their vote in the primaries, when he had faced several other Republican candidates who had excellent evangelical bona fides. Or perhaps it shouldn’t have come as such a surprise. He was talking their language.

He had also won without the advocacy of the evangelical leaders, 50 of whom had convened in the spring of 2016 and decided to campaign for the Right-wing Southern Baptist, Ted Cruz. The people in the pews had paid scant attention to their spiritual leaders, whom they accused of mixing religion with partisan politics, and more to the man who they thought could address their concerns.

These concerns have been weighed up and elucidated by thoughtful evangelicals. It all comes down to something most of us don’t understand about evangelical culture: Trump’s tirade about the violent Democrats at his August dinner accorded with the Christian Right’s view that the world is becoming more and more wicked, and headed towards Armageddon.

Evangelicals, or many of them, now see themselves in an existential crisis. It has been building since the 1980s, only now the sense of crisis is more acute. It’s not, and never has been, about a single issue but always about the increasing secularisation of society, and their loss of control over the culture.

The Supreme Court, they feel, has been taking away all their rights, such as Bible reading and prayer in the public schools; it has legalised abortion; it has been giving “extra” rights to racial minorities; and it has even approved same-sex marriage. In the 19th-century, evangelicals were the majority, but now they are a minority in a society made up of different religions and races.

UnHerd's award-winning audiodoc

Believers in Trump

By Katie Harrison

They feel under siege, and are deeply anxious that white evangelical culture is passing from the scene. Their elected representatives, religious or not, were not taking their concerns seriously. Those fears are not without justification. White people are now only 62% of the US population, and the percentage of white Christians has shrunk to 43%. Their own numbers have also diminished. According to one analyst, white evangelicals made up 23% of the population in 2006 and make up less than 17% today. Nostalgia has always been the dominant emotion in the Christian Right. Small wonder, then, that Trump’s slogan “Bring America back again” resonated with them.

Many evangelicals over the years have learned that they need power within the Republican Party to arrest the secularisation of the country. They tend to vote at a higher rate than any other religious group, and they have grown more pragmatic. In 2011 only 30% said that an elected official who committed an immoral act in his personal life could behave ethically and fulfil his duties to the public. By 2016, the percentage had risen to 70%.

Further reading

White evangelicals can't be reading the same Bible as me. I'm ashamed they voted for Trump.

By Chine McDonald

Many Christian Right leaders say flatly that they voted for Trump in spite of his personal life. Robert Jeffress, a Houston pastor, and one of Trump’s earliest supporters, said after the revelation about the porn star, “Americans knew that they weren’t voting for an altar boy.” Peggy Nance, the head of Concerned Women for America, said, “We weren’t looking for a husband. We were looking for a bodyguard.” They and other sophisticates saw the relationship as transactional, but many in the pews plucked stories from the Bible to justify their choice: King Cyrus was a heathen, but he defended Israel; King David was an adulterer, but he was never impeached.

Some say they will lead Trump to God – an act one woman preacher compared to landing the white whale. Many evangelicals, however, like Trump and forgive him for what most of their co-religionist see as sinful. These are the populists, who despise the intellectual elites and the experts in Washington. They see Trump as one of their own, and believe that only a bully can push back against the evil that surrounds them.

Since his inauguration Trump has kept his end of the bargain. His vice president is an evangelical, and he has appointed at least six evangelicals to cabinet posts. He and Vice President Pence have made the White House a welcoming place for conservative evangelicals.

In his first year, he moved the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem – a gift to evangelicals, many of whom see Israel through the lens of the Bible and believe that Jerusalem is the hold city of the Jews. He has appointed two conservative Supreme Court justices, possibly putting Roe v. Wade at risk; he has banned refugees from seven majority-Muslim nations, and among other things, he has opened a “conscience and religious freedom” agency in the Department of Health and Human Services.

Further midterm reading

Why non-voters matter most

By Peter Franklin

But evangelicals don’t only vote on what they consider moral issues. Like most citizens, they also worry about the economy and national security. Trump’s immigration policies have angered the heads of many evangelical denominations who believe what the Bible says about welcoming strangers, and who also hope to recruit immigrants, mainly Latinos, to keep their diminishing numbers up. But the rank and file see immigrants not only as competitors for their jobs, but as people who would end white hegemony and white evangelical culture.

Hence Trump’s desperate pitch to evangelical leaders to keep spreading the word. Because, while Republicans may win them easily now, demographics do not bode well for the GOP in the future. Not only is the Republican party’s white evangelical base diminishing, but Latino and Asian evangelicals are increasing in number, and in spite of their social conservativism, over 65% of them vote Democratic precisely because of economics and Trump’s immigration policies.

Just as important, young evangelicals are quite different from their parents. First of all, there are fewer them. Only 8% of the US population under 30 identifies as evangelical, versus 26% of their seniors. Second, according to numerous surveys, younger evangelicals are far more accepting of gay rights and gay marriage than their elders. They care about abortion, but they are much more concerned about issues of social justice than their parents.

These changes haven’t yet shown up in the electoral statistics because Latino citizens don’t vote as much as other Americans, and the young don’t tend to vote as much their elders – although that may be about to change. So for now, the Christian Right, thoroughly integrated into the Republican Party, can pass laws restricting abortion and LGBT rights in many states. But the changes will materialise, at which point the Republican Party will have lost vast swathes of its base and a great many of its voters. No wonder Trump’s worried.