A week before the Iraq War began, in the middle of the night, I got on a filthy, retired Greyhound bus commandeered by unreformed communists. Together we went to an anti-war protest on the Washington Mall. Roughly 50,000 people showed up. In the days before smartphones, it was easy for mainstream media outlets to downplay resistance to the war, or indeed pretend it didn’t exist. Many supported the Iraq War, but just as many did not. Either way, back in those lost pre-smartphone days, the country argued, protested, debated heavily and often. Many politicians and journalists embarrassed themselves repeating Bush propaganda. For good and for ill, talk about the war was everywhere, and that’s just not the case now.

Now, though, American politics now operates in a post-kayfabe era. In the sweaty, steroid-filled world of professional wrestling, “kayfabe” refers to the meticulously maintained illusion that everything in the ring is real: the melodramatic rivalries, the improbable alliances, the blood feuds. Up until the late Nineties, wrestling promoters protected this illusion because they believed the entire spectacle would crumble if the audience understood that the whole thing was choreographed. But as the new millennium dawned, rising public cynicism meant wrestling bosses stopped trying to hide the truth: and instead asked the audience to just embrace the ludicrous nature of the spectacle.

Something similar has happened in American politics under Trump — yet unlike what liberal politicians and commentators seem to believe, the fall of American kayfabe was inevitable. Trump was merely the conduit for obscene forces already at work within American institutions. The Iraq War, in many ways, was the last great performance of American political kayfabe. For anyone paying attention, the pretexts for the war in Iraq were comical — but at least people were paying attention. More than that, the government still felt obligated to construct a coherent narrative for war, the media still treated political messaging as something that needed to be defended, and the public still believed that exposing lies might actually change policy. The performance had not yet collapsed; the audience was still expected to believe the show was real.

In the post-liberal, post-kayfabe era of American politics, not only is the public too preoccupied with the latest happenings in their social media algorithms, nearly everyone has given up on the idea that American politics is anything other than the theater of the absurd. No one embodies that oeuvre better than Donald Trump himself. From his Dadaesque speeches to his frat-boy mannerisms, nearly everything about Trump is larger than life, beyond belief, and too much to bear. The President is the very definition of “over the top” — the living, breathing singularity of absurdity. The gravity of Trump’s supreme ridiculousness pulls nearly everything and everyone into its orbit, then down into a dark psychic funnel of confusion where we must constantly ask ourselves, “Wait, did he really say that?” “Is he doing what I think he’s doing?” “This man is our President — is it all a joke?”

It’s tempting, of course, to compare all this with previous debacles. Wasn’t Dubya a joke too? Well, it’s true that the Iran War, Iraq, and even Vietnam feel similar in their dubious justifications and blood-stained pointlessness. Nonetheless, the trajectory of this latest war continues to evolve along its own absurd imperial logic. Unlike with Lyndon Johnson, after all, no longer does the American president seem to care if the public deeply opposes the war, nor even if the Wilsonian pretense of “making the world safe for democracy” is even halfway believable. Trump simply proceeds as if his own population’s reservations didn’t exist, unabashedly pursuing not national self-interest but something closer to an nth-generation copy of “national self-interest” distorted through a childhood game of telephone.

Don’t believe me? Just compare Condoleezza Rice’s justification of the Iraq War:

The Iraqis are building weapons of mass destruction, we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud — pass it on.

To Trump’s meanderings on Iran:

We are in the “final moments” to prevent Iran from getting a nukes… Not good… Not good.

So while it’s tempting to laugh, everything about the Trump era has been characterized not by comedy, but what late-stage Soviet anthropologist Alex Yurchak called “hypernormalisation”, a concept made famous by Adam Curtis in his 2016 film of the same name. Little could have been more prescient than Curtis seizing on this idea right before Trump took office.

“Hypernormalisation” describes the idea that during the later stages of a dying empire, politics becomes defined by bureaucratic ritualism, ideological decay, and surreal, performative politics. All the elites inside the Soviet Union knew that the leadership was lying. Eventually, by the early to mid-Eighties, Soviet citizens did too. The fraud of the whole system was obvious and undeniable. But nearly everyone went along with the charade anyway, because there was simply nothing else to be done. My fellow Americans: we are here. We know the language is fake, the justifications are recycled, and the outcomes are predictable, yet the machinery continues anyway.

Who, besides the most MAGA diehards, believe that the war in Iran is necessary, much less worth its absurd economic consequences? Whether it’s the price of gas at the pump, the inflation of everyday goods, or the possibility of food shortages due to the absence of necessary fertilizers, all of these downstream effects of the war in Iran are likely to be more economically consequential than anything that ever occurred because of Vietnam or Iraq. Yet Americans still can barely look up from their hand-held gambling apps and TikTok feeds to muster concern. Even as its consequences become intimate, the war feels distant and immovable.

A majority of Americans disapprove of the war in Iran. An even greater majority want the war to end quickly. Only 25% approved of the initial air strikes that launched the war in the first place. Practically speaking, no one other than true-believer followers of Trump and Netanyahu wants what’s currently happening. Unfortunately Trump’s constant breaking of every norm of political etiquette over the last decade has so turned up the dial that Americans — and everyone on Earth — have been lulled into accepting it as normal.

Certainly, we all seem completely uninterested in trying to mobilize any kind of serious opposition. In the early days of Trump’s ascendancy, the Democrats and their legions of legacy-media allies jumped the gun so many times trying to portray Trump as a “fascist” and a “threat to democracy” — long before anything substantial actually took place — that we’ve all become numb to the grotesquely out-of-control actions now actually happening inside Trump’s White House. On Monday, according to the Financial Times, over $580 million in financial bets were made on the oil futures just 15 minutes before the President’s announcement of supposedly “productive conversations” with Iran.

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Whether it was someone in the Trump family or their friends or confidantes, whoever made these futures trades likely made out with more than $1 billion in profit. All this insider-trading corruption surrounding the White House has followed a distinct pattern throughout Trump’s second administration, including polymarket bets made prior to the conflict in Venezuela. While nearly every American I know is financially struggling, our political insiders extract generational wealth by gambling on events they control from start to finish.

In “normal” times — when the country wasn’t at war, facing mass job losses, or runaway inflation — these corruption scandals, which are worse than anything that happened under Nixon, would dominate the discourse. But Democrats and their media allies conducted perhaps the greatest “Boy Who Cried Wolf” campaign in modern Western politics. Long before Trump took office, they declared him an existential threat in the most alarmist terms possible. After a while, everyone stopped listening, which only contributed to our current hypernormalisation. Everything is always the “end of democracy” — and so nothing ever is.

Six months ago, when Pete Hegseth pushed for the Department of Defense to change its name back to the Department of War, it seemed little more than a perverse stunt. But, in fact, it couldn’t fit better with our new post-liberal, post-kayfabe reality. Just seven months later, Trump and Hegseth launched the most aggressive and unpopular war in the nation’s history and yet few Americans believe there’s anything to be done about it. That’s hypernormalization working its magic. The spectacle becomes so overwhelming, so frenzied, so totalizing, that you stop seeing it as a performance and start forgetting there was ever anything else.

The dystopia of the Iran war, then, is not that it began on illegal grounds, or that the justification for it barely makes any sense, or even that most Americans oppose it. Its dystopia lies in that none of this seems to matter. The machinery of the American empire now runs independent of public opinion, political norms, or even coherent rhetoric. Maybe Trump will “TACO” and wrap up the conflict in the next few weeks. Or maybe, to cover up his failure to anticipate the difficulties of the war, Trump will be the first head of state to drop a nuclear weapon post-Nagasaki. Who knows.

In 21st-century America, our wars begin, they spur corporate profiteering, and then presidential cronies suck billions out of our economic system placing bets on events only they can accurately anticipate. Everyone knows all this is happening, but the response is not outrage or protest — it’s total resignation. This is what hypernormalization looks like in practice. A society that knows what is happening, knows it is absurd, knows it cannot last, and yet continues behaving as if everything is perfectly normal. But, hey, maybe there’s something good on Paramount plus. I hear they’re merging with HBO Max, that might be alright… or unimaginably terrible. Who knows.

Davey, one might conclude, had joined illustrious company, becoming an heir to the venerable tradition of Lloyd George and the young Churchill. Yet few would associate the weighty hand of history with today’s MP for Kingston and Surbiton. Remember, Davey’s most noteworthy moment at the last election wasn’t a striking policy proposal or a clippable statement of principle, but his repeated tumbles off a paddle board. Over the weekend, at his party’s spring conference in York, the Lib Dem leader continued his unique brand of guerrilla marketing. Taking to the stage to “Daddy Cool”, the former Secretary of State was later seen “dad dancing” to Chappell Roan. Forget Keynes and Beveridge; even the hinterland and gravitas of Charlie Kennedy now feels as distant as the Edwardians.

More to the point, and given the meteoric rise of both Reform and the Greens, one might ask: why does Davey persist with the slapstick persona? A decade ago the Lib Dems, past masters of the by-election upset, would have fancied their chances in Gorton and Denton. Last month, by contrast, they lost their deposit. It feels, in short, like almost everything in British politics has changed over the past year and a half — except for the Liberal Democrats.

Advocates for Davey’s brand of leadership might reply that whatever one’s views on his style, the results speak for themselves. Beyond his party’s success at the last election, Nowcast and YouGov predict further gains at the next one, the latter putting them on 85 seats.

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But is that really so impressive given that the Lib Dems have long been Westminster’s third party, and that the big two are in freefall? While it’s true that Davey made hay in 2024, cruising home in Tory strongholds like Chichester, Witney, and Guildford, he has not managed to make comparable inroads into Labour territory. Instead, it seems that everyone but the Lib Dems is ready to feed on the carcass of Keir Starmer’s majority, from the Greens and SNP to Reform and Plaid Cymru. Rather than dancing to Gen Alpha bangers, Davey should be asking why Farage and Polanski are making the political weather instead of him.

One explanation is that such ambition is institutionally off-limits. The Lib Dems have learned the hard way — principally from the doomed SDP-Liberal alliance of the 1980s and Clegg’s disappointment in 2010 — that conservative gradualism is better than radical failure. In 2024, Davey delivered on the former, and then some, with a relentless focus on Tory seats in the south of England, especially those that contain a Gail’s bakery. But given the sudden rise of Zack Polanski, who has taken the Greens to more than 200,000 members and a by-election win for the first time in their history, that now feels like a limited strategy.

Perhaps Davey habitually affects a jocular manner because liberalism itself has become an unserious worldview —  so much so that any Lib Dem leader would struggle embody gravitas. Liberalism is bereft of thick ties across society; nor does it offer a deeper sense of meaning to its devotees, something one certainly can’t say for Reform or the Greens. Today’s liberals, in short, believe in little beyond the dying status quo. Their post-Cold War triumph was so utterly overwhelming that, almost two decades after the Global Financial Crisis, they lack the tools to change course.

Adrian Wooldridge, author of Centrists of the World Unite!, provides an insightful explanation of how liberalism conquered all while losing its mojo. As he wrote for UnHerd, liberals “reaped the benefits of the past 40 years of economic and moral deregulation”, yet are “now incapable of running the world which they have made.” It should therefore be little surprise that, over the last decade, the Liberal Democrats have been perennially negative: stop Brexit, stop Corbyn, stop Boris — and now stop Farage. They can’t stand for anything because this is the world they wanted. And it sucks.

That applies to both pillars of what Wooldridge persuasively labels “double liberalism”. Why double? Because it combines the excesses of economic neoliberalism, increasingly pervasive since the early Eighties, with the dismantling of any conception of a shared moral universe, a change that goes back to the 1960s. It is the combination of these two liberalisms that political and media elites have in mind when they talk about the “center” — an increasingly meaningless concept, not least because it is neither the middle ground of public sentiment nor popular. “The strength of the post-liberal argument,” Wooldridge notes, “is that it recognizes this synthesis is now producing more problems than benefits.” What is presented by elites as a politics of moderation often animates resentment and even hatred. The leadership class of the Long Nineties, Tony Blair more than anyone, appears incapable of grasping that.

Yet, left to itself, post-liberalism also gives rise to wantonly self-destructive pathologies. If Davey is incapable of taking himself seriously, then Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage can, on a range of issues, appear outright deranged. How else do you explain the allure of the MAGA-sphere for so much of the British Right? We can ascribe some of the blame to the demise of an ideologically curious liberalism. As a result of this intellectual seppuku, politics on the extremes have become ever more puerile. I say this as a socialist: a historically literate politics of the actual center only serves to refine my own views.

Consider the economy. For all the fanfare around Elon Musk’s cost-cutting DOGE unit, the Brookings Institute recently suggested that America’s fiscal situation is actually deteriorating. In other words, Trump, for all of his radical, disruptive rhetoric, has retained the default platform of the Republican Party since Reagan: deficit-funded tax cuts and rising public debt. As long as the petrodollar exists, that strategy might remain viable for Washington. But it certainly isn’t for the Europeans and Brits, because we don’t benefit from having the world’s reserve currency. That Reform is still barking about a British DOGE — even now — should terrify us all. The enthusiasm underscores the extent to which we are the backwater franchise for a political operation already discredited across the Atlantic. And because liberals at home are ideologically bankrupt too — or, worse still, don’t actually care about ideas — imitation of the Americans still passes for radical, cutting-edge thinking.

It’s a similar story with foreign policy. The radical Right is becoming progressively unmoored from reality over Iran and the wider region, partly because the center has no credible blueprint of its own. At the end of February, Farage was as eager as anyone to become embroiled in yet another overseas conflict, a position he quickly disavowed. The same was true of Badenoch, who initially demanded strikes in the Middle East. Matt Goodwin, who finished second as the Reform candidate in Gorton and Denton, said he was willing to pay more to fill up his car if that was the cost of depriving Iran of a nuclear weapon. Such opportunism has been exposed only because, on this one occasion, centrists — specifically Keir Starmer — took a position founded on reason rather than complacent liberal interventionism. As a result, and unusually for his time in government, Starmer finds himself aligned with public opinion.

Perhaps a decisive position on the war in Gaza would have achieved something similar — especially had that position been taken earlier on. Yet the Iran response remains instructive. On the one occasion that Labour has broken with the liberal default of recent decades, Labour has Farage on the back foot. It’s strange indeed to see both Richard Tice and Tony Blair knocking a Labour prime minister. This may also be part of a wider pattern, or at least the start of it. Before dancing the Macarena last weekend, Davey argued that the entirety of Britain’s nuclear deterrent should be built at home. It’s important to remember that our Trident missiles are actually from a “shared pool” housed across the Atlantic. Green shoots of pragmatism? Maybe.

Don’t expect a transformation, though. It’s often suggested that contemporary Left-wing politicians aren’t as talented as Tony Benn, and that their Right-wing counterparts are less erudite than Enoch Powell. But why wouldn’t they be, when the ideological school that reigned supreme in recent decades has been so disinterested in ideas? Peter Mandelson is perhaps the most grubby example here, but there’s also Justin Trudeau, who led a country afflicted by a drug epidemic while insisting on the gender-neutral term “peoplekind”, and Kamala Harris — whose presidential bid was a series of meandering speeches and clips of her dancing on social media.

Looking back on his rivals, it is obvious why Trump prevailed not once but twice. While trying to lean into the attention economy, rather than defend politics as a serious vocation, centrists were a handmaid to the very populism they claim to abhor. Trump’s endless, shambling monologues — despite being occasionally funny — were only captivating because what the alternative was a world of clipped soundbites devoid of personality or political substance. Ironically, this also fueled the rise of Barack Obama, whose singular ability to speak capsized the Clinton campaign ahead of 2008. But Obama was the outlier, and Clinton the default for double liberalism. Even then, there was little of substance to what the senator for Illinois actually said.

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All of this helps explain the allure of Mark Carney. The Canadian PM’s recent Davos speech was both brave and intellectually coherent. Notably, Carney acknowledged some of liberalism’s failings over recent decades. But his words were conspicuous precisely because liberalism so rarely produces politicians of substance. For Wooldridge, there is little to read into this shortage of great statesmen. But there’s an argument that it’s structural, emerging from the inherent contradictions of the tradition. Carl Schmitt, a critic of liberalism, claimed it seeks to “dissolve the political into ethics and economics”. Should it really surprise us, then, that given the culmination of the liberal project meant the abolition of politics, competent exponents of the craft would gradually vanish too?

So what might a reanimated liberal politics for the mid-21st century actually look like? First, instinctive complacency would be replaced by an acknowledgment of what has gone wrong. In Europe, particularly, we may be in the foothills of our own Century of Humiliation.

On the level of politics, the priorities should be clear: sovereignty is a tool for solving problems — and national identities matter. People want a state that protects them and that stands as a source of authority; if it fails to be either they view it as a useless, wasteful encumbrance. The national community is real. That doesn’t mean forsaking your fellow man in other parts of the world, but it does mean accepting the nation-state as the primary locus of political action.

The policies of a new liberalism should be an extension of such thinking. The wealthy should do their duty to others and their country by accepting the need for a new economic settlement. Wealth is, essentially, collectively produced — and a liberalism that is indifferent to exploitation deserves to die. A renewed liberal politics, retaining its old aim of allowing individuals to be the authors of their own lives, must also ensure that access to the basics is guaranteed: cheap housing, transport, cheap energy. Nobody is reading the collected works of Jane Austen, or learning Mandarin, when they are living in their overdraft.

A great advantage of democracy, of course, is that systems can self-correct. Yet even here there are warning signs. Some centrist commentators have claimed that the Westminster system should become less, rather than more, democratic. Unconvinced by the merits of party primaries, which keep politicians on their toes, they argue for a political class that is even more insulated from the public. It’s ironic that advocates of a worldview built on reason, public deliberation and Enlightenment values often argue for the kind of decadence you might associate with the Hapsburgs or the late Ottoman Empire.

Fortunately, however, such voices are becoming quieter. Given the benefits that serious-minded liberalism has brought to all of us — from defending the rule of law to upholding freedom of expression — its reinvigoration, in a form fit for the present day, would be a welcome one. Just don’t expect Ed Davey to lead the charge.

You hear it in the friend talking of how public figures they loathe will “inevitably” fall from grace. You read it in writers’ pronouncing about how “future historians will say” whatever they fervently believe right now. And you detect it in talk of how certain things are “outdated” or “not relevant” to “the modern era”: invariably an excuse for the powerful to consign things they dislike to the Dustbin of History.

These assertions all relate to time in a particularly progressive manner: as a vehicle of improvement. This means that, by definition, the future will be better than the past; that which is of the past — and therefore not modern — does not belong and must be removed. Time appears to this progressive style not merely as a succession of moments taking us from one minute to another, but as a redemptive force, clearing out what is wrong in the world and bringing in what is right: newness, change.

Crucially, the idea also gives an exalted role to the person who understands progressivism: the wannabe theorist who claims to understand the sweep of history, seemingly without temporal or geographical limit. He — and it is normally a he — knows how social improvement comes about. He knows what needs to be promoted and eliminated in order for History to move forward. And anyone can take on this role if they get the style right.

This is the case even for those who stand on the anti-progressive side of our culture wars. Earlier this year, the political scientist Eric Kaufmann unveiled the “Buckingham Manifesto for a Post-Progressive Social Science”. It argues for a “critical approach to progressive social science’s ‘critical’ claims”: including those which relate to systemic racism, sexism, heteronormativity. Progressivism, as Kaufmann has put it, is “synonymous with the hybrid ideology of Left-modernism”, which is located at the overlap of expressive individualism (including avant-garde modernism), cultural egalitarianism and humanitarianism. It is “more Lennonism than Leninism”, he writes, but it is on the wane.

The manifesto is a serious attempt to redirect Western intellectual life, proposing, as Kaufmann puts it, “a reunification of grand theory with positivist social science”. However, this idea of “a Post-Progressive Era” immediately set my progressive radar off. For it presents the intervention both as political (a new initiative seeking to win support) and as sociological analysis: an assertion that what is desired is in fact happening, that history itself is moving in the way proposed.

Besides the Lennon-to-Leninist kind, there is another powerful strain of progressivism in our culture which I think is reflected in Kaufmann’s paper: the Protestant-inflected liberal idea of progress. This form is generally less invasive than “Left-modernism”, albeit it served to justify British imperial expansion and the conquering of North America. Its narrative of ever-rising freedom and prosperity, summed up by Herbert Butterfield as “the Whig Interpretation of History”, first appeared most obviously in Britain before becoming a foundation myth of the new United States.

It has faith in history rather than gripping it by the throat. And it has also tended to trust in power, vesting particular faith in economic power: thereby serving as an Establishment ideology.

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A century ago, in his defining tome The Idea of Progress, J.B. Bury referred to progress as “the animating and controlling idea of western civilization”. He added: “The phrase CIVILIZATION AND PROGRESS has become stereotyped, and illustrates how we have come to judge a civilization good or bad according as it is or is not progressive. The ideas of liberty and democracy, which have their own ancient and independent justifications, have sought a new strength by attaching themselves to Progress… Socialism, at an early stage of its modern development, sought the same aid.”

The progressive style of supporting its desires with predictions certainly gives any creed or proposal a little extra oomph, invoking social power as well as right. This creed isn’t just right but is going to win, the message goes, so you had better get on board or face the consequences. History as progress therefore ends up mobilizing interest perhaps better than any other form of assertion that doesn’t invoke God.

And so we find thinkers and politicos almost reflexively putting themselves and their ideas forward not just as desirable but inevitable: they are not just right, but destined to win. And this is so not just on the progressive Left. Donald Trump has always done this, presenting himself as the ultimate winner in the American style. Nigel Farage tries to emulate him in a more eccentric English manner. Islamists do it too. The Labour peer Lord Glasman, a prominent anti-progressive, recently said of his opponents in the party: “I think their time is gone… It’s changed”: assuming, perhaps, that we have indeed entered a new post-progressive era.

The terms “post-liberal” and “post-liberalism” tap into the same sort of energy. C.B. MacPherson proposed a “post-liberal democracy” as far back as 1964, to push back against liberalism’s anti-democratic tendencies. More recently, John Gray and David Goodhart have invoked it in their writings, as have Catholic thinkers such as Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule. However, as with “post-modernism”, there is an inherent dualism to post-liberalism. Both terms suggest a change, away from modernism or liberalism, as well as implying that this change is occurring or will occur afterwards, later in history. They represent both proposal and prediction, even the statement of historical fact. And post-liberalism is or will be better, more suitable to the times.

In other words, the progressive mindset is so deeply ingrained in Western culture that even anti-progressives show elements of it. It is as if we need to certify our opinions and desires with the findings of sociology and historical analysis to make them somehow valid in a scientific style. It shows a lack of confidence in ourselves and our species: that the society we want, the life we want, who we are, requires “independent” blessing by the forces of history to become real. And the adoption of this style as a social currency leaves us vulnerable to those who are more able to mobilize the forces of social and historical analysis, in academia and other sites of knowledge production: places that remain pretty much dominated by what Kaufmann calls “Left-modernism”.

The temptation is to imitate their techniques. However, the style only really works for those with power to hand, with the baubles and titles, the nomenclature of “expertise”. Notwithstanding how they are linked to change, progressive assumptions serve to justify existing power: offering it a bit of magical authority, with its specialized knowledge of the future.

There is another way, if we are prepared to think, in the frank embrace of politics as politics, to return to what J.B. Bury called the “ancient and independent justifications” of liberty and democracy, justifying measures by what we or the people want (and don’t want): returning to human agency as a legitimate source of political action. Moreover, such a style of thinking would embrace truth in a way that progressive historicizing claims to, but falls short of.

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Nevertheless, we should admit that there is something in the air: some sort of genuine historical change going on: a passing from one era into another, perhaps. During Trump’s first presidency and 14 years of Conservative-led government in Britain, Left-liberal hegemony was barely touched. Indeed, it seemed to get stronger in some respects. But there are some signs of change now, positive change in certain respects, suggesting a possible new era both for intellectual life and for politics and society more broadly.

A true “post-progressive era” would be something different though, requiring a huge change in the way we think and see the world. It is intriguing to think about how it might look. However, for the moment, we must admit that it is a long way off, that progressivism remains in our existential bloodstream, whichever way we turn: that we are all progressives, really.

The first: nothing. The truly shattering revelation from the era since Brexit has been that you can experience a so-called “political earthquake”, followed by years of ululation and hand-wringing, and after it all dies down, the same spreadsheets-and-chinos people will go on pushing more or less the same policies as before, and ignoring more or less the same structural issues and popular preferences. It is the post-democratic and transnational new normal. We might call it “actually existing post-liberalism”. The election of Starmer will simply entrench it further.

But just because a political consensus exists across nominally opposing parties, it doesn’t follow that politics as such is over. This wasn’t true even before the mass franchise, and it isn’t true now, when growing numbers perceive the franchise to be all but worthless. But the terrain on which politics happens has changed, from the ballot box to an increasingly politicised lobbying ecosystem — even as the terms of our polarisation have changed too, from “Left” and “Right” to new and increasingly existential forms of identity politics. More ominously, the still larger question concerns the suitability of post-liberal governance in a 21st-century world of interlocking, and ever-escalating crises.

Back when Boris Johnson won his landslide on the promise to “get Brexit done”, it did seem for a moment or two that a political worldview that became known as “post-liberalism” was about to enjoy its moment in the sun. Leaders just had to set aside the liberal fiction that government need not have a substantive moral vision. If they could do this, so the hope went, perhaps they might be able somehow to restore little platoons and small farms and shops, and make people want to live with their ageing parents in thriving small towns, instead of pumping them with useless degrees and debt, then trapping them into childless, hand-to-mouth existences doomscrolling over industrially farmed GMO slop in overpriced urban shoeboxes.

It was not to be. Boris won, and in the blink of an eye, Covid happened. Suddenly everyone was stuck at home, doomscrolling while eating GMO slop. No more little platooning, even for the dwindling cohort that actually wanted to. Instead, we now enjoy the other post-liberalism. Not the one envisioned by writers who were mostly just social conservatives, but with extra Tolkien. The one in which state power is, yes, aligned with an explicit vision of the good — but one that has very little to do with the Bilbo Baggins Nationalism that bloomed for a moment in 2019.

Actually existing post-liberalism takes as its baseline what came next: the moment the populist uprising was crushed under a fusion of state and commerce, with the population under curfew and everything mediated by the internet. In other words: our nadir of maximum individual isolation, underwritten (aspirationally at least) by total penetration of the state, big business, and Big Data.

Under liberalism, the unacknowledged backdrop to politics was a Christian-inflected moral outlook centred on human dignity and individual freedom. The political unit was usually the nation state, and the franchise was a load-bearing element in political decision-making. This order corralled dissent via moral censure or physical imprisonment, while much of the political dialectic concerned which unintended side-effects of “liberation” should be prioritised for political remedy. Should politicians try to mitigate the negative side-effects of social liberalism, such as broken families, or of the economic sort such as poverty?

That world has gone. Never mind Tolkien Nationalism; under the post-liberalism we actually have, governing elites enjoy more in common with one another transnationally than with their nominal citizens, whose nation states are in any case heading for obsolescence (except when there’s a threat of war). In this post-post-Westphalia geopolitics, governance is internationalised and technocratic, and policy is shaped a long way upstream of elections. Humans, meanwhile, are believed not to possess any distinctive cultural, genetic, or affective bonds, but are seen instead as radically interchangeable, fungible work units that may be deployed anywhere according to economic imperative.

And the shared backdrop to all this isn’t a moral one, but a common relationship to the technologies that mediate citizenship, from participation in the digital public square to politics as entertainment. In accordance with this, dissent is no longer managed so much via social sanction or even incarceration; witness the now-common policy of releasing even serious criminals halfway through their sentences. Instead, it happens via the digital direction of public attention, while the most serious dissent results in revocation of access to the technologies that mediate public life, from posting privileges to banking services.

Having “got Brexit done”, the Tories in theory had a one-off opportunity to change the frame. They could have used the time to pack Britain’s NGOcracy with their people, or even tackle the plethora of New Labour constitutional innovations that paved the way for the post-liberal order. But they didn’t take it, which suggests that either they had so poor a grasp of the political machine they supposedly operated as to make an inadvertent case for the technocratic “experts” they affected to deplore. Or else, perhaps, they understood how that technocracy worked, and liked it just fine.

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The latter position is understandable, if not commendable. When you can leave the machinery of state largely on autopilot and focus instead on lining your own and your friends’ pockets, who in their right mind would want actual responsibility? There are honourable exceptions to this: Danny Kruger and Miriam Cates have both stuck their necks out, while for voicing mainstream British views on migration control and the inadequacy of multiculturalism, Suella Braverman was smeared as the reincarnation of Oswald Mosley.

But that’s three MPs, out of what was (until the Tories’ roundly deserved electoral hammering) several hundred. As for the others, their behaviour in Parliament suggested that whatever the electorate may have hoped, they mostly accepted it is Tony’s world now, and we all just get to live in it. On Thursday, the electorate recoiled in disgust from this discovery, gifting Starmer a majority nearly twice the size of Boris Johnson’s on fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn secured to lose against Theresa May in 2017. The public didn’t so much vote for Labour as for anything but the Conservatives. And having done so, we’re now in for a programme of constitutional changes that will entrench post-liberalism still further. Labour’s manifesto undertakes to drain what’s left of parliamentary supremacy away, with vetoes granted to regional representatives and courts. Meanwhile, the franchise may be diluted and trivialised still further, by extension to 16-year-olds whom the Left would in other contexts treat as barely having reached the age of criminal responsibility. We can be sure that no very serious decisions will be entrusted to an electorate that includes literal children.

But is wonkocracy even so bad? Maybe 21st-century civilisation really is too technical for government by elected non-specialists, voted into power by the masses. The tribulations of small UK businesses after Brexit arguably illustrates what happens, when you set about making major changes to the operations of a complex, high-tech state without a cadre of compliant nerds thinking through all the details for you. There’s always the chance you’ll end up with 10-mile lorry queues or a £25 billion slump in trade with your closest geographic partners, not to mention Cheeseageddon. So maybe His Toniness was right all along, and the plebs should be protected from meaningful political agency for everyone’s good.

What Starmer chooses to focus on in his first few weeks will offer some indication of how committed he is to this view, as well as how in reliant he is on the more bonkers factions in his own party to deliver it. If he expends his post-election political capital imposing VAT on private school fees against the interests of his own middle-class voters, or perhaps institutionalising Islamic blasphemy laws or rolling back women’s rights, we can infer that he feels vulnerable to attack from his own factions. But if he prioritises gutting what remains of Britain’s unwritten constitution, we can assume that he has both the desire and political headroom to govern as a loyal Skywalker to Blair’s Obi-Wan.

But it doesn’t follow that politics will come to an end. On the contrary: if the old order had to wrestle with the unintended side-effects of freedom, the new must grapple with the externalities of trying to unite a polity through technocratic means. For even if the Davocracy likes to imagine that all peoples are interchangeable, some subsets of the population really do have more in common than others. Some cultures really are incompatible, and some really do seem more conducive to wealth and power than others. Humans really can’t change sex, no matter how clever your surgeon. And so on.

I expect much of the day-to-day noise in Starmer’s administration to come from his regime’s efforts to manage this reality. Which identities may be noticed and celebrated, and which must be treated as non-existent or even taboo? We got a glimpse of this negotiation during Covid, when churches and playgrounds were closed on pain of arrest, but racism was agreed to be a public health emergency justifying large and sometimes violent street gatherings. We can assume Starmer’s reflex incentive will be to push for egalitarianism by fiat; the predictable consequence of this will be identitarianism across the board.

Already, race-consciousness among British youth is not restricted to ethnic minorities or Left-wingers, but now includes an increasingly radical Right-wing white version. Starmer has already promised to entrench race consciousness in law and public policy, via a new Race Equality Act that promises guarantee equal pay across ethnicities, and to impose a public sector duty to collect data on staffing, pay, and outcomes by ethnicity. Anyone who imagines that this won’t intensify muttering among disaffected white British zoomers really hasn’t been paying attention.

Meanwhile, a question-mark hangs over the shattered remnants of the Conservative Party. Given that the scale of Tory losses were due not to an increased Labour vote share, but voters abandoning the Tories for a more Right-wing alternative, even the most wall-eyed of the surviving Tory “wets” will have trouble persuading the party membership that the future of conservatism is tacking to the centre. Not, of course, that this will stop them trying. But when the Tory “centre” in practice seems to have meant complaining about “wokeness” while ignoring the electorate’s preferences and governing for their friends, perhaps this coalition has in any case run out of road.

What will succeed it? My bet is more and more varied identity politics. Starmer’s post-liberal government will find itself harangued from one direction by the Muslim bloc vote that emerged in this election as a self-aware and increasingly well-organised political force, and from another by an also increasingly self-aware “Anglo-Saxon” one. Other blocs will likely emerge to join these. It is difficult to see much of a future for the surviving rump of Tory “wets” in that context, unless they do what they should have done long ago, and merge with that other clearing-house for obsolete political groupings: the Liberal Democrats.

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As representative politics fractalises into interest-bloc lobbies, we can also expect pressure to increase on First Past the Post. As it stands, Reform secured 14% of the vote to the Liberal Democrats’ 12%, and yet won four seats to the Lib Dems’ 70; UK politics and the UK electoral system are now starkly mismatched. Labour was the greatest beneficiary of this disjunction on Thursday, meaning Starmer has little incentive to change it; this will doubtless fuel resentment against his regime from many quarters.

Looking further ahead, I expect whatever version of the Right emerges on the other side of One Nation Tory extinction to be sanguine about actually existing post-liberalism, and at ease with identity politics. One plausible hunting-ground for such a Right would be to accept managerialism as a done deal, and focus on promoting a less utopian relation to difference: that is, one fixated less on top-down imposition of “equity” by fiat, and more on policies that adapt pragmatically to normative variation between identity groups. Combine this with an optimistic view of tech innovation and a law and order policy robust enough to cope with a truly multicultural population, and you have something like the Right-wing progressive caucus already emerging elsewhere.

Despite a generous helping of Hitler-themed screeching in the run-up to the election, the presence in Parliament of Reform’s five new MPs will serve more as an impediment to this programme than an accelerant. I expect them to have minimal direct impact on lawmaking, while Farage is unlikely to become the nativist demagogue of his haters’ fantasies. His instincts are rooted in the liberal bygone England of tolerance and individual liberty, and he’s never to my knowledge expressed the kind of ethno-nationalist sentiment with which he’s routinely associated in the press. Indeed, he’s recently acted to rein in the more combative instincts of younger aides on this front. The one to watch will be whoever succeeds Farage as leader of an increasingly identitarian young British Right; as yet the UK has no Jordan Bardella, but it’s probably only a matter of time.

But if all Starmer has to worry about is race-conscious zoomers on TikTok, he will surely heave a sigh of relief. The portents are gloomy: he has no fiscal headroom, a restive population struggling with the cost of living, and a basket-case economy from which rich people are fleeing like rats leaving a sinking ship. The political fringes are aboil with Islamists and other mutinous groups. He’ll be told an ageing population and falling birth rate means confronting voters with the trade-off between unpopular mass immigration on the one hand, and stagnation on the other. He’ll be told by others that no, immigration doesn’t even deliver the promised economic upside, and by others again that he is obliged to open Britain to migrants displaced by climate change and global conflict.

Beyond Britain’s borders, popular backlash to the same fractious population dynamics have brought Giorgia Meloni to power in Italy, and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, and may soon do the same for Marine le Pen in France. An increasingly Right-wing Europe will, in turn, have ramifications for a future Starmerite response to Channel migrants. This is further complicated by the fact that today Britain is both in self-perception and, increasingly, in beneficial ownership, an imperial province of America, meaning a great deal of what Starmer can do will depend on November’s Presidential election. With mounting concern over 81-year-old President Biden’s fitness for a second term, there remains no very popular alternative to an ebullient Trump. Should the latter be re-elected, and the Trumpist foreign policy faction succeed in its proposed policy of shifting US defence priorities away from Europe, pressure to remilitarise Western EU states will intensify existing divergent interests within the EU, with as yet unknown consequences.

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Against this backdrop, David Lammy’s promised “progressive realism” may need to lean more heavily than he would prefer on the realism, rather than the progress. But realism requires subtlety and leadership; meanwhile, the post-liberal order is optimised for governance without leadership. It favours process, consensus, and institutional power over charisma, inspiration, and vitality. It values and elevates people like Rishi Sunak: intelligent, diligent, and wholly devoid of whatever the special sauce is that inspires mass affection and loyalty.

When faced with an extraordinary situation this headless, faceless, procedural regime produces something like an immune response: a whole-system reaction designed to expel or neutralise the irritant. The financial system’s collective response to the Truss premiership falls into this category, as did the collective chattering-class decision to bin existing pandemic plans, and demand mass lockdowns during Covid. But like an immune system, this kind of response to perceived attack is imprecise, prone to over-reaction, and incapable of strategic thought. If the international situation grows much more restive, this may prove a critical weakness.

So arise, Sir Keir, anointed avatar of actually existing post-liberalism. And good luck. If the worst you have to deal with is racist zoomers, you’ll be laughing. More likely, though, you’ll be battling to consolidate technocratic proceduralism for a population that blames crime, economic stagnation, the escalating cost of housing on (procedurally driven) immigration, the price of energy on (procedurally driven) Net Zero, and everything else on you personally. A leader who finds himself standing as the last island of Blairism, between a Trumpist United States and an increasingly hard-Right EU, at the head of a headless administration hopelessly ill-equipped to respond strategically to any of these challenges. It may be, in other words, that Saint Blair’s successor has taken the helm of a fully post-liberal Britain, at precisely the moment when that ceased to be a workable mode of government.

But if there’s one lesson we should take from the ongoing spectacle surrounding the Hunter Biden laptop, it’s not the avalanche of claims and counter-claims about censorship or bias, or the sulphurous accusation of stolen elections. It’s that polite proposals about a bit more Christianity in the public square are hopelessly behind the times. All of politics is already post-liberal, and mainstream power has already explicitly embraced a faith-based moral order.

That is: American Church and American State have already ended their three-century separation. And Laptopgate is most significant in what it reveals about the contest now on for a suitable post-liberal political regime: a battle that pits the “human” against something more like a “swarm”.

To recap, shortly before the 2020 election, a laptop was discovered in a computer repair shop which was later verified as belonging to Joe Biden’s son Hunter. Emails and other information were found on the laptop that revealed Biden fils to have been up to some dodgy stuff. The story was broken by the Right-wing New York Post, shortly before the 2020 election. It was swiftly censored on Twitter, where for some time it was impossible even to share the story via direct message.

Now, Elon Musk has released internal Twitter emails from back then to journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss. Last week, Taibbi published a lengthy Twitter thread based on this data, setting out his view of the context and events surrounding Laptopgate. And these confirm the extent to which the Biden laptop story was censored, and how flimsy the pretext was for doing so.

Needless to say, the story has reignited Right-wing grievance. Blake Masters fumed: “Any candidate who explained how Big Tech put its thumb on the scale was called an ‘election denier’ — but the simple truth is that the Hunter Biden laptop censorship put Biden into the White House, full stop”.

What is Elon Musk playing at with this intervention? He has claimed that his aim in buying Twitter was to hold it to public neutrality: that is, to the order governed by liberal proceduralism. But this can’t actually be done, thanks to the digital revolution in which Musk himself is an active, heavyweight player. I doubt Musk is unaware of this. Instead, we should read the Twitter files as an intervention in the bitter contest over the form politics should take after liberalism.

If post-liberal theorists called for a re-convergence between political power and an overt moral framework, they got their wish during the pandemic — in classic Monkey’s Paw style. For Covid-19 did indeed prompt Western governments to bypass liberal norms in the interests of a common good. The twist is that as it turns out, Christian-flavoured conservatism isn’t the only moral matrix in town. Rather, to escalating murmurs of disquiet from liberals on both Left and Right, the moral outlook that reached pandemic-era hegemony was the fusion of progressivism with the interests of technocapital whose core credos make up the now-famous “In this house, we believe…” lawn sign.

We might characterise this as progressive post-liberalism, colloquially known as “wokeism”. Its proponents, like all post-liberals, believe that authoritarian measures are just fine, provided they’re ordered to the right moral priors. Because from a post-liberal perspective, whether progressive or otherwise, some values are so existential that “neutrality” is itself a moral failure: “bothsidesism”.

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This re-moralisation of power is chiefly driven by progressives, not conservatives, and constitutes the nuclear core of contemporary “culture wars”. It’s also the backdrop to the Hunter Biden story, and why that story matters beyond American electoral politics. For since 2016, Twitter has emerged as one of the most powerful digital-era mechanisms for elite consensus-formation, with a reach well beyond the United States.

Twitter leaders have justified this role with a claim to liberal neutrality — even as it has grown increasingly clear that content moderation decisions taken by the platform’s employees in fact skewed progressive post-liberal. This is perhaps unsurprising, given that the younger graduates who flock to the tech sector skew progressive — especially the graduate women who, in that sector, cluster in non-coding roles (such as, for example, content moderation). But when a platform that serves in effect as public square is governed according to an overt moral framework, what you have is something like a soft theocracy.

So is Elon just trying to end this theocracy, purge the bad actors, and make Twitter into a liberal neutral space again? Perhaps. But I think it likely he knows how futile such an attempt would be. For there’s no putting the post-liberal genie back in the bottle: it is to a great extent an effect of our transition from print to digital, a profound shift that makes key liberal ideas increasingly untenable.

For example, some censorship is an inevitability in the digital era. At the same time, the digital public square undermines trust in institutional authority — and also objectivity as such. It hollows out localism, attenuating electoral politics and virtualising “communities”, which in turn compromises: “losers’ consent”. At the material level, these shifts combine with the brute fact that the post-industrial masses are genuinely less essential to the functioning of the overall economy than industrial workers, meaning their voice can often safely be ignored.

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Taken together, this all suggests that electoral democracy may continue to grow, if not toothless, steadily less toothful. What, then, might emerge in its stead? If the front-runner for the successor moral freamework is progressive post-liberalism, the front-runner for the corresponding post-democratic political system is still undecided. And Musk’s latest contribution to the Hunter Biden story makes most sense understood as an intervention in this contest.

The Biden administration is fond of talking about “democracy” versus “autocracy”, but it might be more accurate to talk about swarmism and Caesarism. Swarmism is a kind of post-democratic democracy: a mutant form of liberal proceduralism, characterised by collective decision-making in which no one is ever individually accountable. Instead, consequential decisions are as far as possible pushed out to supposedly neutral procedures or even machines. When NGO officials whom you can’t vote out of your political ecosystem talk about “our democracy”, they’re talking about swarmism.

Caesarism, on the other hand, looks substantially the same at lower levels. The main difference is that you get named humans in key decision-making roles — complete with human partiality, eccentricity, and occasional fallibility. Twitter was, until recently, a key vector of elite swarmism. And to swarmists, such rule by a named individual, rather than a collective and some committee-generated “guidelines”, is by definition morally wrong. This core assumption oozes, for example, from this report on the takeover, with its empathetic depiction of the anonymous, collegiate collective of sacked Trust and Safety workers sharply contrasted with the autocratic, erratic individual Elon Musk.

Some defenders of Twitter decision-making over the Hunter Biden case point to the fact that the emails reveal no overt demands for censorship from the CIA or any other political agency. But this is the point: swarmism doesn’t work like that. Consensus-formation is mystified and de-personalised at every turn. The Twitter Files are explosive because they afforded a peek under the purportedly neutral swarmist carapace, revealing not just the named individuals involved in steering it but also human fallibility and political affinities.

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The Hunter Biden censorship was justified by a claim of “hacking” which (according to a source who spoke to Taibbi) was already understood as nonsense excuse after a few hours. But in true swarmist style, once that policy was agreed “no one had the guts to reverse it”. This is a world in which no one is ever directly responsible for anything — even as the things that no one in particular is responsible for come to be the very nuts and bolts of politics itself.

For example, former Twitter executive Vijaya Gadde, who played a key role in Laptopgate and was reportedly behind the decision to deplatform Donald Trump a few weeks later, was subsequently whisked through the revolving door into a Biden White House advisory gig shaping policy on “disinformation”. As a relatively faceless collective, this committee itself constitutes a kind of swarm. The rules it sets in turn constrain the larger nationwide digital swarm, by setting the parameters for “disinformation”, which is to say the moral hierarchy of the tech-enabled attention politics that has supplanted “freedom of speech”. Thus constrained, then, the digital swarm then coordinates public opinion, and by extension delivers something like the successor to “democracy”: a collective hive-mind whose currents and influencers are often mystified, but which has considerable influence, for example in shaping public policy during Covid.

The Twitter Files are Musk’s Caesarist counterpunch. Their explosive power lies in the insight afforded into how that supposedly neutral, procedural, pre-political swarmist sausage is made. By publicising individual, named actors who operated under the bonnet in a crucial swarmist political stronghold, Musk pulled back the curtain, re-humanising the swarm’s supposedly impersonal manoeuvres.

And viewed close up, this reveals that there’s nothing magical or morally refined about swarm governance at all. Rather, it’s a miasma of petty bureaucrats and petty rules, coordinated by class interests and greeting-card metaphysics, plus some algorithms and a desire to look good. It’s powered by the same backroom deals and self-interest as politics since time immemorial. In its way, it’s just as arbitrary. The only thing that’s different about it is that it pretends to emerge spontaneously.

Meanwhile, the truth is that the alternative isn’t much better. It’s just more human — something made explicit by Musk’s autocratic approach to un-banning deplatformed accounts. Musk is, after all, far from being always a populist: he may have tweeted “Vox populi, vox dei” before reinstating Donald Trump after a Twitter poll, but no such amnesty has been forthcoming for Alex Jones. It’s a fairly explicit statement about what (or rather who) serves as the backstop to vox populi, under digital conditions.

Most of Musk’s Twitter interventions make sense in this light: not as a return to liberal proceduralism, or direct democracy, or even against humans merging with the machine (something Musk seems to be actively championing elsewhere, with Neuralink). Rather, it’s a play to re-normalise accepting a final human arbiter for important decisions — even if in practice that sometimes looks disturbingly autocratic from a liberal perspective.

I’m not cheerleading for Musk as Caesar. Just because I dislike faceless proceduralism doesn’t mean I have much appetite to see political authority gathered into the mercurial hands of a transhumanist billionaire who wants to implant microchips in human brains. But the critical thing to recognise is that none of the post-democratic options are, well, very democratic at all. And short of unplugging the internet, there’s not a great deal we can do about that.

***

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Generally, the public mood on armbands and bent knees seems to be split. There are those who assume every organised public gesture in the name of human rights must be altruistically intentioned and beneficial. And then there are those who dismiss all such gestures as self-interested attempts to gain social capital. The relation between the two looks symbiotic: the more enthusiastically the first group don flags, lanyards, and armbands, the more obstinately the second group insists there is nothing but self-promotion at the end of this particular rainbow.

Prospects of a more nuanced take aren’t helped by Left-wing lip service to universal human rights, combined in practice with squeamishness about saying anything robust in their favour which might exacerbate racial or non-Christian religious sensitivities. One only has to compare the relatively muted and qualified response of Stonewall to the stabbing-to-death of three gay men in Reading in 2021 (perpetrator: a militant Libyan asylum seeker with a history of violence) to last week’s impassioned response to a US shooting in a gay nightclub  (perpetrator: a white American with a history of threatening to blow up his mum’s house — although, in an inconvenient plot twist, he has since come out as non-binary).

Apart from leaving the stage clear for Right-wing commentators to claim the divisive spoils, the Left’s squeamishness about cultural insensitivity also entails that activist gestures are most plentiful in the contexts where they are least needed. The safest space for full-throated political activism is apparently one where you can rely on the audience’s proximity to your own values, not to mention their repressed politeness and fear of being judged as the bad people. Many tolerant people in the UK are by now very fed up with all the needless hectoring and guilt-tripping.

This hectoring reaches its apotheosis during the annual farce of Transgender Day of Remembrance in the UK. Nagged into it by Stonewall and other transactivist organisations, last week various institutions fell over themselves to mark the murders of precisely zero UK trans people during the previous year with various fulsome tributes. Perhaps imaginatively accompanied by visions of the Last Post bleakly ringing out over the Somme, the Welsh Parliament even dramatically tweeted out: “Today, we remember the trans individuals who have lived, loved, fought and fallen.”

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Yet for UK political institutions to address a major factor in the majority of trans murders worldwide — working in the sex trade — not only would they have to address male violence and sex-buying, they would also have to take a public stand in some extremely macho and homophobic cultures overseas. Much easier, then, to put all such deaths down to amorphous “transphobia” and then return to the main task of leveraging irrational guilt out of soft-touch Lefties for the purposes of cash extraction and power consolidation.

But those on the Right should not think themselves off the hook either. On the side of those fulminating on Twitter about Kane’s supposed virtue-signalling were various socially conservative and post-liberal types, disapproving of the arrogance involved in imposing Western values on the Qatari nation. This position was, perhaps inadvertently, well-summed up by French captain Hugo Lloris. “When we are in France, when we welcome foreigners, we often want them to follow our rules, to respect our culture, and I will do the same when I go to Qatar, quite simply,” he said last week. “I can agree or disagree with their ideas, but I have to show respect.”

It’s likely Lloris said this for the sake of an easy life. But a growing number these days seem relatively uncritical — even occasionally offering qualified approval — of authoritarian regimes, partly because they are distinctly disillusioned with Western liberalism. Specifically, they are tired with the way that the internal logic of liberalism apparently results in endless quests for new forms of “freedom” — religious, sexual, bodily, and so on — with the result that traditional social structures such as marriage, the family, and local community have been undermined. Whereas many liberals on both the Left and Right would present things such as the advent of the Pill, no-fault divorce, commercial surrogacy, and rampant bodily modification as having no downsides whatsoever, post-liberals tend to be much more focused on what has been lost in terms of social cohesion and stability, and also upon the apparent moral and spiritual emptiness of what replaces it.

I’m not saying that these critics of liberalism would admire a country partly run under Sharia law. I’m suggesting, rather, that keen awareness of the limits of the dominant Western political model tends to make one less likely to criticise more authoritarian alternatives. And yet, no one should kid himself that failing to object vociferously to the imprisonment of gay men, or to the forcing of women to be dependent on male guardians for all their major life decisions, is a simple mark of respect for a less fractured and narcissistic culture than our own. Unless an unabashed cultural relativist, even the most post of the post-libs should acknowledge that personal autonomy — in the basic sense of being able to choose what you do — is a universally important moral and political value, whatever else is also valuable.

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This seems to be well-recognised with respect to the past, with leading post-liberal writers such as Patrick Deneen rightly decrying slavery. Qatari women and sexual minorities, living in the here and now, deserve no less a defence. Radical feminists have long complained of the tendency of liberal feminists to go suspiciously quiet when it comes to the authoritarian repression of women in non-Western cultures or minority communities. Post-liberals must not make the same mistake. And nor should they tell themselves that Qatari women don’t know what they are missing. It might be true that women in medieval England couldn’t miss what they didn’t know they didn’t have — but unlike them, Qatari women have at least some access to the internet.

Another source of reluctance to intervene here might be a general scepticism about the notion of human rights. Certainly, there’s no need to be credulous about every audaciously solipsistic claim made in the name of the “rights” of an identity group. It’s also reasonable, in my view, to have a relatively pared down account of what human rights actually are: not quasi-religious edicts coming down to us from some mysterious ethical realm on high, but rather requirements derived from basic and universal human needs, articulated in terms of the minimum standard required for well-being and not the maximum. We can argue about whether free movement across the globe is a human right in this sense, but it would be difficult to argue that free movement around your own village is not.

So, though it’s a shame that Kane eventually bottled it, I think it’s great that he initially wanted to take a public stand in Qatar. Despite what Piers Morgan thinks, whether a gesture like armband-wearing counts as “virtue-signalling” surely depends on the context. Within relatively progressive enclaves in the UK, public gestures in favour of values most people already hold there are superfluous — and the primary motive for them does indeed start to look like a desire to show off your moral superiority rather than to tackle the political non-issue in question.

But in profoundly illiberal Qatar, things are very different. I see no reason not to take any armband-wearing over there as a sincere and admirable attempt to speak up for the rights of oppressed others, and it seems to me highly uncharitable to take it any other way. Hell, never mind Qatar — in UK football, things are also very different. As is well-known, there are almost certainly gay players in the Premier League but none who will dare come out publicly, so great is the stigma. In either of these contexts, then — despite the critics — a rainbow armband or two is surely a wonderful thing.

I didn’t expect excitable millennials to quote Hunter S. Thompson at me, at a conservative event. But at the National Conservatism II conference in Orlando last week, Fear And Loathging In Las Vegas was everywhere: the mood the night before kickoff had that exact sense of giddy incipient lunacy.

For my adult life, being both young and a conservative has been deeply, irretrievably cringe. Not so here, where the modal attendee was a bearded, trim, often tattooed male Hunter S. Thompson fan, under the age of 25. NatCon II was where Conservatism Inc. met Conservatism Ink.

The Conservatism Ink guys sported blue blazers and Richard Spencer haircuts. They made the bar noisy and excitable, added youth and buzz to events — and were notably absent from the centrepiece panel, in which the event’s organisers attempted to craft a ‘new fusionism’.

Here, conference organiser and Burke Foundation chairman Yoram Hazony took to the stage alongside the Catholic integralist writer Sohrab Ahmari, whose 2019 article ‘Against David French-Ism’ saw the first full-scale battle within the American Right, between the liberals and the then still emerging ‘post-liberal’ strand.

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For Ahmari, David French epitomised a Right-liberal thinking that conceded too much territory. By accepting the liberal idea that moral values should be kept out of the public square, the argument goes, conservatism merely becomes a strategy for losing more slowly. Instead, Ahmari states that the Right should aim for “defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good”.

It’s hard to see, though, how this stance can easily be made to square particularly with Ahmari’s co-panellists Dave Rubin, a noted libertarian, and Douglas Murray, the ne plus ultra of anti-woke right-liberalism.

For me, this event encapsulated the NatCon’s quandary: what kind of alliance, if any, is possible between liberals and post-liberals? And, crucially, ordered to which values? Everyone on the panel was unenthusiastic about wokeness, at pains to stress that they weren’t rabid authoritarians, and seemingly unsure about how to resolve the question of how state power could align with moral values, without treading on at least some of their friends’ toes.

Hazony argued that America could and should re-Christianise its public square, and simply manage some kind of ‘carve-out’ for groups such as gay people and orthodox Jews. Murray, meanwhile, argued that the Church only had itself to blame for mass secularisation. (He didn’t quite say they were all nonces but it was heavily implied.) Ahmari, perhaps the lone post-liberal on the stage, was surprisingly conciliatory.

Afterwards, Conservatism Inc. raved about the discussion. At the bar, though, where they were ignoring the whole event, the Conservatism Ink bros were less sure. They drank bourbon and muttered that with anti-woke liberals such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali on-board, nothing would ever change. Too big a tent means a lack of focus. 

It wasn’t just the Gen-Z raw-eggs-and-dank-memes boys. “I was into this before it was cool” is the abiding cry of hipsters the world over, and it was (more or less explicitly) everywhere over the three days of conference. But if the the purists of NatCon I were complaining about liberal entryism, this isn’t just about new money coming into the movement. It’s also an effect of how radically the political backdrop has changed since 2019.

Between Brexit/Trump in 2016 and the pandemic in 2020, there was a widespread feeling that something new was needed to replace the technocratic ‘double liberal’ consensus. And indeed, since then something new has emerged, in the wake of Covid-19. It’s just not what was envisaged.

Back in 2019, people were dreaming about ordering Western state power to a more substantive moral programme than that of empty individual freedom and consumerism; a new, human-scale politics of meaning and necessary limits.

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And behold, the pandemic state of emergency did indeed shatter the consensus about individual freedom. Across the developed world, the liberal privileging of individual freedom has been replaced by a de facto acceptance that state power absolutely must be ordered to the common good, up to and including coercive measures where necessary. In other words: all politics is now post-liberal. 

But inasmuch as we have achieved consensus on what ‘the common good’ means, it doesn’t extend much beyond ‘public health’, understood in bare terms as the preservation of physical life: lockdowns, masks, vaccinations and so on. The new Western normal is one of authoritarian regimes now visibly reluctant to relinquish their grip on a state of emergency.

But these regimes are more, not less, technocratic — and there’s been no new politics of meaning. Instead, the last year and a half have felt like a relentless assault on everything that makes us human: interpersonal bonds, organic social organisations, in-person contact.

This situation has confused the hell out of the loosely post-liberal caucus who made up the intellectual backbone of NatCon I in 2019. It aimed to revive a more substantial nationalism capable of incorporating realist foreign policy; industrial policy; patriotism beyond divisive racial politics. There was a Republican in the White House; I’m told policy debates were detailed and impassioned. You never knew what might trickle up to actual centres of power. 

And the liberal mainstream was sincerely shocked by their suggestion that maybe state power and moral values should be aligned. Now, though, there’s no longer any need to make that case: in response to the pandemic, states across the West have enthusiastically seized power.

The pre-pandemic post-lib pipe-dream was of a revived human-scale politics of meaning, to challenge the bloodless grip of technocracy and its mantra of never-ending progress. Post-liberals were happy to talk about limits and state power as means of pursuing such a politics of meaning. Now, plot twist: existing post-liberalism has ordered state power to a set of moral values that 2019’s national conservatives really don’t like.

So the ‘state power’ bit is settled in principle. (Though for conservatives under Biden, the question of how to obtain it for themselves is both open and, they’d argue, urgent.) The ‘moral values’ bit is a bitter battlefield — even within the national conservative caucus.

With that in mind, it was perhaps inevitable that the programme trended negative: toward focusing on what we can all agree we don’t want. Along with Hazony’s sincere but inconclusive panel effort at shaping a ‘new fusionism’, this meant plenty of speakers whose primary argument was not for anything particular so much as against wokeness. Playing conference bingo with a friend, we were obliged to delete ‘cultural Marxism’ from our cards a few hours in because it came up too often. 

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To my eye the most interesting attendees were those who sought to address the how of power, or the what of values — without simply relapsing into complaints about wokeness. Informally, perhaps the neo-reactionary Curtis Yarvin (also known as Mencius Moldbug) qualifies here. He ran a kind of three-day mobile conference plenary, in which (seemingly without ever needing to draw breath) he addressed a little flock of the Conservatism Ink bros who followed him like ducklings.

Elsewhere, New Founding’s Matt Peterson outlined a plan for a commercial and cultural startup, aimed at propagating a positive lifestyle vision for the American Right. It was a for-profit entrepreneurial approach to moral renewal that felt both very American and somewhat baffling to a Bongland ex-Lefty.

More intelligible from my perspective was the session on ‘Worker Power’. Here, Oren Cass of American Compass joined Brian Dijkema of Cardus and Sean McGarvey of NABTU to discuss the sometimes vexed relationship between conservatism and trade unions. There’s been a lot of noise from the American Right about how the Republicans are now a multi-ethnic, working-class party, and Marco Rubio did endorse Amazon unionisation efforts in Alabama back in March. 

Even so, the souvenir conference mugs were, somewhat ironically, made in China; and attendance at the ‘Worker Power’ session was sparse. This spoke to one of the conference’s real tensions: what relation does this would-be counter-elite actually have to the masses? One approach to this question came from Hungary’s soft-power outreach team, who were present in force at NatCon. Balázs Orbán, Minister of State to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s office (no relation), gave a presentation that positioned Hungary as a successful model for actually existing national conservatism.

Orbán boasted of Hungarian growth, lack of anti-semitic violence, church and synagogue renovation and improving birth rates. These, he argued, demonstrate that national conservatism with Hungarian characteristics is not, as Western liberals like to claim, a totalitarian dictatorship but in fact a popular regime that’s delivering what the Hungarian people want and need.

Whether you nod along with this framing of Fidesz probably depends on your political commitments. But from this perspective, an elite whose values are aligned with those of the masses can use authority to implement those values responsibly throughout the regime. What’s unclear, though, even among sympathetic conservatives, is how applicable the Orbánist model might be in the West — and particularly in America. 

It’s relatively easy for a reigning elite to align values to state power in a homogeneous nation of 10 million people. It’s far from obvious how this might be achieved in a deliberately decentralised, pluralistic nation of 300 million people, with a highly individualistic founding ideology that’s constitutionally allergic to state-mandated values.

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Chris Rufo’s Leninist strategy for ‘counterrevolution’, which I’ve discussed here, offered part of the answer, in the playbook he proposed for getting American conservatives to win the culture wars. In Rufo’s view, the aim of such a counter-elite should be galvanising and providing language and representation for a mass that Rufo sees as subjected to the top-down imposition of alien values by a narcissistic, nihilistic Left-authoritarian state. 

Meanwhile, the writer Mary Eberstadt looked straight past Conservatism Inc., instead making a heartfelt address to Conservatism Ink in the name of shared values as such. She argued that the young have been robbed by ‘zero-sum progressivism’ of everything that gives life a ‘higher purpose’: family connections, faith, belonging, a cultural patrimony.

Taken together, Rufo’s right-Leninism and Eberstadt’s empathetic politics of meaningful relationships felt like the public and private facets of this movement’s better part. Eberstadt brought a deeply matriarchal quality to proceedings. 

She’s emerging as a compassionate figure in a sometimes dour or combative 21st-century American conservatism, and I hope her voice continues to be heard — especially by the Conservatism Inkers her talk addressed. After all, Rufo’s Right-Leninist vanguardism in the name of shared conservative values will make little sense if it’s pursued in the name of a people who don’t actually have any shared values.

But if Rufo and Eberstadt together comprise top-down and bottom-up facets of something approaching a workable, effective and ethically-grounded conservatism, there are plenty of other visions for where this version of the right goes next: Thielite space fascism, Bitcoin exitism, libertarian anti-wokeism, hard-edged nationalism, doctrinaire Catholic integralism or simply reabsorption by the neocon blob. 

It’s a heady and at many points self-contradictory brew, in which the central question — whose values? — remains undecided, a dilemma that will either prove the movement’s greatest strength or weakness.

After three days in bat country, I stumbled to bed on the last night past a swarm of Conservatism Ink chanting ‘Let’s Go, Brandon’ in the hotel bar. I left with an abiding sense that national conservatism has money behind it, but also plenty of punk energy and belligerence.

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As ever, money will play a huge part in what happens next. And there are plenty of boomercons with fat chequebooks, who would like to see room on the ark for at least ‘our’ kind of liberal. In particular, as far as the neocons are concerned, it’s noteworthy that there’s been some debate over whether foreign-policy realists were well enough represented on the roster — especially given how central debates over US military obligations have been to shifts on the Right since Trump.

There are probably plenty as well who would like to see the more punk end of this movement defanged, and Conservatism Ink toned right down. Meanwhile, the Gen-Z right-wingers now flocking to this corner of politics have altogether wilder and stranger ideas, that often owe more to the fringes of the Weird Online Right than the Founding Fathers. And they’re the ones with the energy: they still got up at 6am to lift. Even after all that bourbon. 

Who will win? My best guess is that in the short term we’ll see this movement re-absorbed by the DC blob. Then there’ll be full-scale revolt by Conservatism Ink when they are, in aggregate, old enough to wield power. And then we really will be in bat country.

What was a few short years ago the preserve of marginal discontents is now the hegemonic discourse: it is the liberals who are on the back foot, dreaming up ever-more elaborate conspiracy theories to explain the collapse of their ideology.  

Yet Britain’s most prominent post-liberal theorists are not claiming victory, and are instead mourning their defeat. In a plaintive recent essay, Blue Labour’s Jonathan Rutherford has claimed that “we imagined Blue Labour was about renewal, but, in hindsight, it was already too late. One thinks of the Owl of Minerva taking flight ‘only with the falling of dusk.’” For Rutherford, “Labour no longer possesses the intellectual and philosophical resources for a political renaissance and it does not look beyond itself to acquire them”.

Instead of seizing this historic moment, the Labour Party has lost itself in the abstruse theological disputes of a liberalism increasingly unmoored from reality, and become ever more feverish in policing its ideological purity as its voter base vanishes into history.

To understand the sense of gloom pervading British post-liberalism, we must return to its diagnosis of the West’s political crisis. The argument is this: liberalism contains within its essential nature the seeds of its own destruction. By dividing communities, social and economic classes and nations into a constellation of individuals warring among each other in search of self-advantage, liberalism negates any possibility of collective action or solidarity. Essentially a northwest European secular heresy derived from the Protestant Reformation, liberalism seeks to remake the world in its own image, projecting its own ideal form onto utterly different societies in a mission as doomed to failure as America’s wars in the Islamic world. 

In its purest economic form, liberalism, the ideological nursemaid of capitalism, destroys its social and fiscal base in pursuit of an idealist model, with disastrous results. It is increasingly rejected by voters across most of the Western world. And yet it hangs on to tenuous political power through its capture of the economic elites. Aware of their slipping grasp on power, encircled by enemies, liberals have retreated into fundamentalist fervour, fighting a rearguard battle against democracy while enforcing purity within their own ranks. This is why we are mired in the culture wars; this is why we are trapped in an increasingly heated political interregnum; and this is why political crisis has become endemic across the West. The rulers have lost the consent of the ruled; even when the insurgents win elections, they have no control over the actually-existing levers of power.

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It is in this context that the Blue Labour theorist Adrian Pabst has published Postliberal Politics: The Coming Era of Renewal, which functions as an excellent introductory guide to post-liberal thought for wavering liberals, and a warning to current post-liberals to shun the temptations of authoritarianism. 

For Pabst too, the Covid era transpired to be a “false dawn” for post-liberalism, as “the winners of the shutdown were tech oligarchs such as Amazon, Google or China’s Alibaba while family-owned businesses folded and inner-city shops were boarded up.” Instead of ushering in the post-liberal moment, then, “the ‘new normal’ is largely an intensification of the forces that dominated the old status quo: capitalism, nationalism and technocracy. Instead of resolving the interregnum, politics seems caught in an impasse.”

In setting out his stall, Pabst outlines the failings of a zombie liberalism still holding onto power, in which a dominant class “prefers a world of individual atomized exchange underwritten by an ideology of globalism”, and where  democracy and citizenship are “debased and become merely functional arrangements to advance the interests of a new cosmopolitan class”. 

Yet the most striking aspect of Pabst’s book is not his rejection of liberalism but rather his rejection of existing Rightist strands of post-liberalism, most notably their American incarnation. The dominant theme of Pabst’s book is one of preserving post-liberalism’s position as a strand of Left-wing thought which upholds the genuine achievements of liberalism, a socially conservative branch of socialism rather than an economically interventionist faction of conservatism. 

For Pabst, it is the Rightist “self-styled post-liberals” who are the enemy within: “behind their version of ‘Left on the economy’ and ‘Right on culture,”’ he argues, “lurk forms of statism and moralism that will do nothing to secure shared prosperity or plural societies.” Pabst warns that post-liberalism is too often “associated with a politics that is anti-liberal and anti-modern, animated by a reactionary desire to roll back the new rights of minorities and to return to social and political exclusion along the axes of race, sex or class”.

Taking aim at the idealised Mitteleuropa of prominent American conservative intellectuals, Pabst argues that while Hungary and Poland are superficially attractive for managing to “combine a protectionist state with pro-family welfare and education policies”, in reality they are largely reliant on fiscal dumping and deregulation to attract foreign capital while sliding into authoritarian nationalism that undermines constitutional freedoms.” 

“What may look post-liberal turns out to be mostly anti-liberal,” warns Pabst, arguing that “behind the simplistic slogan ‘left on the economy and right on culture’ lurks an admiration for a politics of state control and the rule of strongmen,” an “authoritarianism sliding into novel forms of fascism” in which “authoritarian systems extend state surveillance into all spheres of societal and personal life, co-opting any independent movement and persecuting non-conformist groups.” 

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Yet the obvious retort is, of course, that this system of surveillance and enforced conformity is a perfect description of actually-existing liberalism, at least in its deranged 21st-century incarnation. For the unfortunate reality for a viable Left-wing post-liberalism is that, as Rutherford laments, it is an entirely marginal force on the political Left. Even Blue Labour’s relatively anodyne platform of worker-led cooperatives, state support for family formation, reshoring vital industries and enforcing currently-existing immigration laws sees them consistently called fascists or even Nazis by their own party’s activist base. 

A wild and paranoid recent review of Pabst’s book illustrates the problem. “The truth is,” writes the reviewer, “that he has hitched his wagon to the post-liberal narrative of the national-populist right assiduously promoted by the UnHerd website,” whose “editors and contributors formed the core participants at the Windsor Castle symposium acknowledged in Pabst’s preface as the inspiration for his book.” 

I should probably add here that I attended this conference, and while membership of some secretive reactionary cabal under royal patronage would be a gratifying experience, it is as divorced from reality as the rest of the review, which is a classic example of the conspiratorial hysteria with which ageing liberals console themselves for the collapse of their ideological dreamworld.

Despite Pabst taking great pains to demarcate a Left-wing post-liberal space from that of the national populist right, the reviewer goes on — and on, and on — to claim that he “can’t resist the temptation to promote national-populist — and alt-right — conspiracy theories about ‘the fusion of woke capitalism with extreme identity politics’” that “Post-liberalism is a right-wing, nationalist project seeking to incorporate and hegemonise sections of the left by splitting it from its social liberal base.” 

If this is the Left among which Blue Labour aims to carve out a post-liberal movement, then the project surely has little chance of success. With Labour so internally divided, and further from power than they have been in decades, the chances of guiding the party towards a humane post-liberal ethos and then leading it to electoral victory seem impossibly remote. So why waste time on a failing political party whose activists hate you and everything you stand for? 

This is the essential conundrum of Blue Labour, and the reason for its perpetual marginalisation. Post-liberals should leave political tribalism to Americans: politics is simply the means to reshape the state in your image, and parties are merely useful vessels to do so. Logically, the conclusion is that the only current means of shaping British politics is as a faction within the ruling Conservative party, whose dominance of British politics is unchallenged; it is already making post-liberal noises to anchor its new hold on the post-industrial north, without any serious intellectual direction or engagement. 

Whether we like it or not, post-liberalism’s greatest opportunity to sway the course of politics is on the centre-right — and the road to doing so is through ideological capture of the state’s institutions, just as the neoliberals did forty years ago. 

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The key to victory is surely to utilise the power of the state through democratic means to break the anti-democratic liberal hold on the political system and advance post-liberalism from a matter of debate among a tiny handful of academics and writers to a functioning political programme. Yet Pabst, with a watchful eye on the authoritarian statism of China and Russia, and on the illiberal democracy of Hungary and Poland, views the untapped power of Leviathan with alarm. “Unmediated state sovereignty on the model of Machiavelli’s Prince or Hobbes’ Leviathan risks authoritarian control at home and anarchy abroad,” he warns,  so “the challenge before us is to turn the existing platforms into public utilities owned by the people, not the state, and to run them as mutuals – with private providers competing on the provision of services.” 

These are noble goals and a vast improvement on the alternatives, yet there is an avoidance of the practical path towards implementing them. How do you break the power of global corporations and the tech oligarchs? How do you unprise the grasp of what Pabst terms the “sham clerisy who dominate much of the media, education and the civil service” on the national institutions they have commandeered for themselves? 

Little platoons, however right and just their cause, can function only within a broader army structure to nurture and guide them. The only viable means to victory, then, is surely by employing the power of the state just as the neoliberals did, and the most realistic means of doing so is through the nascent statist centre-right. The managerial-technocratic Labour Party, which has junked the economic radicalism of the Corbyn manifesto while doubling down on liberal identity politics, certainly doesn’t intend to. 

If post-liberals do not do this, authoritarians will, as we see in China’s crackdown on oligarchs like Ali Baba’s Jack Ma and on tech platforms. Paradoxical though it may seem, the path to a radical localism surely lies through a resurgent state which must then give away the power it has reluctantly assumed to bring about necessary reform. It is as if post-liberals have adopted the teleological assumptions of liberals, that the arc of history will drop power into their laps, without also adopting their hunger for power, and their willingness to use the state to achieve it.

Pabst is correct to state that both the Conservative party and the Republicans remain beholden to capital, and superficially adopt post-liberal language to win popular support while continuing disastrous liberal policies. Yet there are reasons for hope. As the Marxist Italian sociologist Paolo Gerbado observes in his new book The Great Recoil, the new statism is a distinct phenomenon from the crude populisms of the decade’s first half and is still a malleable force, waiting to be shaped. 

The task of doing so can be taken up by either Right or Left, or by a post-liberal synthesis of the two. Younger conservatives in America, as defined in Park McDougald’s incisive survey of the New Millennial Right as the conservative analogue of “millennial socialism”, are “frustrated with the politics of their elders”, and want “a more solidaristic conservatism that is less libertarian, both culturally and economically, and in some ways less liberal”. In time, they will capture the institutions of conservatism, just as in time the millennial socialists will capture those of the Democrats. 

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In Britain too, much of the energy on the younger Right is towards forging a confident, developmentalist conservative state that corrects the most harmful errors of liberalism, and spreads economic growth and social solidarity across every corner of the nation. Time may be on the post-liberals’ side, in the long term, but only if they do not waste today’s narrow window of opportunity on either preaching to the unconvertible or shrinking from their most viable path to power.

Throughout his book, Pabst diagnoses the problems with unerring accuracy yet avoids the obvious conclusion. There is a missing element, the how, by which post-liberalism triumphs. A war only ends when one side wins decisively: post-liberals are unwilling to deliver the final blow, instead mourning their ostracisation from a rump political left which despises them as existential enemies. 

Without a Constantine to convert, without the power of a Rome behind them, post-liberals will find themselves trapped in the political catacombs forever, meekly hiding from a savaging in the amphitheatre. They cannot convert the liberal clerisy from within: they will be forced to defeat them from without, before authoritarians do. The gap between conservative and socialist post-liberals has always been largely cosmetic: perhaps the future of Blue Labour now lies in shaping a dirigiste, paternalist and communitarian Red Toryism.

But before “neoconservative” became a byword for the utopian, interventionist, nation-building foreign policy that was fatally discredited by the Iraq war, it described an entirely reasonable generation of American intellectuals who became disenchanted with the liberal domestic policies and the cultural changes of the Sixties. And their thinking, unlikely though it may seem, bears uncanny similarities with post-liberalism today. In fact, whether the post-liberals realise it or not, this group of writers, editors and thinkers from both the Left and the Right — Irving Kristol, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, James Burnham, Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer, among others — are the closest thing they have to intellectual predecessors.

Consider a few parallels. First, neoconservatism and post-liberalism both emerged as critiques of their era’s dominant liberal ideology in politics, culture and economics. Indeed, many neoconservatives started political life on the Left. In his 1979 essay “Confessions of a True, Self-Confessed — Perhaps the Only — ‘Neoconservative’”, Kristol, a former Trotskyist, wrote that the neoconservatives were “provoked by disillusionment with contemporary liberalism”.

Similarly, the sociologist Nathan Glazer’s neoconservatism took form after observing the intolerance of campus radicals. A left-liberal at Berkeley, he became concerned in the mid-Sixties about threats to free speech and free expression on campus. By the end of the decade, he had fallen out not just with the activist Left but mainstream liberals too. Writing in The Atlantic at the time, he delivered a prophetic warning:

“The students who sat in, threw out the deans, and fought with the police have, after all, been taught by American academics such as C. Wright Mills, Herbert Marcuse, Noam Chomsky, and many, many others. All these explained how the world operated, and we failed to answer effectively. Or we had forgotten the answers. We have to start remembering and start answering.”

Glazer’s rightwards journey was typical. Peter Steinfels, a critic of the neoconservatives whose book on the movement provoked Kristol into writing his “Confessions” essay, explained that the neocons actually “set out to defend liberalism from the radicals’ attack”. But as they did, they were faced with a question: “Why had a liberal society produced a wave of political criticism which they perceived (in many cases quite accurately) as so illiberal and destructive? Having begun as defenders of liberalism, they too ended, to some degree as critics of it.”

Not all of today’s post-liberals started life on the Left, but their critique of liberalism often follows a similar path. It looks at the ways in which liberalism has failed, and asks how it birthed an illiberal strain on both the Left and the Right. Its exponents, as a result, often end up with a more profound critique of liberalism that they went looking for.

Pabst, for what it’s worth, argues that “genuine post-liberalism draws on the best liberal traditions but corrects liberal errors and excesses”. The same could be said of traditional neoconservatism. Daniel Bell described himself as “a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture”. Kristol claimed that neoconservatives were “not libertarian in the sense, say, that Milton Friedman and Friedrich A. Von Hayek are” and had no problem with “a state that takes a degree of responsibility for helping to shape the preferences that the people exercise in a free market.” Kristol did, however, go on to embrace Ronald Reagan’s free-market economic agenda, much to the dismay of Moynihan, a New York Democrat who confirmed his break with the liberal Left and confirmed his neoconservative credentials when he accepted a job in the Nixon administration; he later wrote how he watched his neoconservative friends siding with Reagan “with a combination of incredulity, horror and complicity”.

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But even the most market-friendly neoconservatives had their concerns with capitalism, viewing it merely as a means to an end. Kristol described the neoconservatives’ relationship with business as “loose and uneasy, though not necessarily unfriendly” and argued that economic growth was important “not out of any enthusiasm for the material goods of this world, but because they see economic growth as indispensable for social and political stability”.

There is a similar range of economic views among today’s post-liberals: some are on the Left, some are on the Right. Pabst’s Left-leaning flavour of post-liberalism emphasises “economic justice”, “social solidarity” and “ecological balance”. Right-leaning post-liberals argue that excessive economic freedom has shifted resources and power away from communities and families. What both sides share, then, is a suspicion of top-down central planning of the socialist Left and the reflexive libertarianism of many on the free-market Right.

Neoconservatism and post-liberalism are also both moods or instincts, rather than fully-formed programmes for government. Kristol called the former a “persuasion” rather than a movement. The latter is similarly disorganised, representing a loose collection of beliefs and a shared impulse as opposed to a group that meets up, agrees a manifesto or seeks office.

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Both also have a complicated relationship with populism, on the one hand seeing the rise of populist movements as a symptom of liberalism’s failures, and on the other embracing some of populism’s critiques of the status quo. Responding to the criticism that there was “a populist temper to the neoconservative impulse”, Kristol acknowledged that “any ideology that gives politics a priority over economics is bound to have a populist hue”. It was the job of neoconservatism, he wrote, “to explain to the American people why they are right, and to the intellectuals why they are wrong”.

Though many post-liberals will balk at the populist label, I suspect they have assigned themselves a similar role. If they are serious about a political project that takes on what the American historian and author of The New Class War Michael Lind calls a technocratic neoliberal elite, it’s hard to see how post-liberalism won’t have the same “populist temper” as neoconservatism.

Another important parallel is their shared respect for the institutions that sit between the state and the individual. As UnHerd‘s Peter Franklin wrote in 2019, he was drawn to post-liberalism’s “respect for human dignity” that “distinguishes [it] from populism”, is “incompatible with collectivist ideas that instrumentalise the individual in service to some group identity; and also at odds with atomistic individualism”.

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Such a claim would no doubt leave Kristol and co. nodding vigorously. Writing 50 years earlier, Kristol described family and religion as “indispensable pillars of a decent society” and confessed that neoconservatives “have a special fondness for all of those intermediate institutions of a liberal society which reconcile the need for community for the desire for liberty”.

These neoconservative/post-liberal parallels are more than just a niche, extremely wonky parlour game. They are an antidote to an amnesia that infects a lot of post-liberal writing. Franklin, for example, calls post-liberalism “a genuinely new kind of politics” that “is tantalisingly close to breaking through”. But the many echoes of neoconservatism refute these claims of novelty and suggest that the post-liberals are the inheritors of a richer intellectual than many of them seem to realise.

Given that “neoconservative” is little more than an insult these days, I suspect most post-liberals will resist this comparison. But that would be a mistake. Half a century ago, some of the West’s sharpest minds assembled an incisive critique of post-war liberalism. Today, post-liberals are trying to do the same thing to post-Cold War neoliberalism. They would be foolish not to learn from those in whose footsteps they are following.

The book had been published in Britain in the spring of 1995 but as February and then March 2020 came and went, we were all rather distracted. For a few months the pandemic was so overwhelming that even normal politics died down — only for it to inflame again, more incendiary and toxic than ever, at the beginning of June.

Across the US — and around the world — graduates and young professionals took to the streets, leading a bizarre anti-revolution in which immigrant shops were ransacked and working-class neighbourhoods forced to defend themselves from violent college-educated protesters and their allies.

Here was a revolution backed by almost all billion-dollar businesses and public institutions bar the US presidency, and whose leaders had almost nothing to say about poverty or unemployment. Their demands were for more diversity and racial equality, already sacred ideas among the cognitive elite, all of it accompanied by bizarre, quasi-religious public declarations of faith.

It was the Revolt of the Elites.

Christopher Lasch never lived to see his great work published, but since his death from cancer in February 1994, it has developed a cult following among unorthodox sections of Right and Left. The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy warned of a growing cultural and social divide caused by a rapacious free market and the radical politics of the Sixties, one that would lead to extremism and division.

Yet what Lasch saw in 1994, but which has only now reached its apogee in 2020, was how social revolution would be pushed forward by the radical rich and resisted by the rest. “It is not just that the masses have lost interest in revolution,” he wrote: “their political instincts are demonstrably more conservative than those of their self-appointed spokesmen and would-be liberators.” If this continued, then the top strata of society would become increasingly alienated by their society and country, and turn against it, something that has come to pass with the first corporate-backed revolutionary movement in history.

Lasch was born in 1932 in Omaha, Nebraska, the heart of the original populism movement in the Midwest, and it was populism and the progressive era that would be the focus of his teaching, at the University of Iowa and later Rochester, New York.

He came from one Left-wing intellectual family and married into another; his father Robert was a Pulitzer-winning journalist, and after Harvard the younger Lasch married Nell, the daughter of Harvard historian and prominent liberal intellectual Henry Steele Commager (who, like Lasch’s father, outlived him).

Lasch was thoroughly on the Left during the 1960s, indeed he moved further in that direction, but as Alan Ryan wrote soon after his death, he “emphasised what many on the Left have thought to be the guilty secret of American liberalism: its affection for corporate organisation, and a thoroughly manipulative view of the relationship between the new social sciences and the populace whose lives the liberals wanted to improve”.

Lasch’s most successful book, the 1979 The Culture of Narcissism, was highly critical of American society’s self-obsession and was hugely influential, partly thanks to the support of President Jimmy Carter. Indeed, Carter so liked the book that it inspired his election speech on “the American malaise”, a misjudgement said to have cost him support against the cheery, optimistic Ronald Reagan.

The Culture of Narcissism is still read and widely quoted, although the heavy reliance on psychoanalysis seems somewhat dated (or at least out-of-fashion) today. Yet Roger Kimball wrote of it that “What one witnessed in its pages was the spectacle of an intelligent, politically committed man of the Left struggling to make sense of a culture in the grip of a radicalism that had turned out to be almost entirely bogus.”

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As the Reagan era went on, Lasch was increasingly critical of, and criticised by, both of the mainstream camps in American thought. His opposition to divorce alienated feminists, as did his assertion that economic integration into the workforce did not necessarily mean emancipation; but neither did his thinking chime with the mainstream conservative movement then dominated by the legacy of William Buckley.

Tragically, by the time that Lasch came to write his great work, he was dying of leukaemia, and the book was completed only with the help of his daughter Elizabeth. The title was a play on Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses, written in the inter-war period when it seemed reasonable to worry that liberal values might not survive democracy and the rise of the workers. Yet by the end of the century Lasch observed that it was the rich who threatened democracy.

Revolt of the Elites comprises 13 essays on America’s “democratic malaise” — he liked that word — divided into three parts, the “intensification of social divisions” in America, the decline of public discourse and finally the spiritual core of the country’s crisis, headlined “The Dark Night of the Soul”.

Throughout the book runs Lasch’s moral core, his support for the average man, something which inspired his hostility to the dominant ideologies of Left and Right. He strongly opposed economic inequality because it was corrupting; highly unequal societies tend to bring with them graft, extremism, violence and outside interference, eliminating Republican virtue. Lasch lamented that in America, the top tenth owned more than half the country’s wealth, a warning that now seems as quaint as newspapers in the placid 1950s worried about Teddy Boys. The decline of pensions and savings, and the rise of what we now call zero-contract hours, would lead to the collapse of the middle class and with it the decline of the nation.

Lasch also saw that the eroding of a common culture, values and standards, which was the major legacy of 60s cultural radicalism, ended up creating a gulf between social classes. If there were no common values to hold people together, what was to stop the rich and powerful trampling over the rest of society, cloaking their self-interest in furious self-righteousness?

And so it has come to pass, with the rise of woke capital, an amoral business model in which CEOs make thousands of times more than their lowest earners, all the while distracting attention with support for therapeutic but increasingly extreme politics.

It was Lasch who saw more clearly than anyone that the New Left had a symbiotic relationship with the culture of modern corporate capitalism — emphasising choice, therapy, self-actualisation, narcissism and the rejection of limits, not just physical but financial and moral.

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Lasch also saw meritocracy as a sham, or at least “a parody of democracy”, because neither social nor geographic mobility were adequate substitutes for real social justice. “Social mobility does not undermine the influence of elites,” he wrote: “if anything, it helps to solidify their influence by supporting the illusion that it rests solely on merit. It merely strengthens the likelihood that elites will exercise power irresponsibly, precisely because they recognise so few obligations to their predecessors of to the communities they profess to lead.”

Although not a Marxist, Lasch saw politics through the prism of class, arguing that elites of both Left and Right had the same economic interests. “Even when they disagree about everything else,” he argued, they “have a common stake in suppressing a politics of class.”

Indeed, the fashionable social causes of the 21^st century not only ignore class, but actually further increase hostility to the poor. Evidence suggests that thinking about “white privilege” reduces sympathy for people struggling in poverty, while the association of bigotry with the non-college educated has normalised snobbery to an almost pre-modern degree. People once might have sneered at less educated people, but they would have done so privately at least; now comedy routinely makes the less educated and less geographically connected its punchline.

“The culture wars that have convulsed America since the sixties are best understood as a form of class warfare,” he wrote: “in which an enlightened elite (as it thinks of itself) seeks not so much to impose its values on the majority (a majority perceived as incorrigibly racist, sexist, provincial, and xenophobic), much less to persuade the majority by means of rational public debate.”

Yet whereas conservatives at the time saw the market as the solution, Lasch often viewed it as a problem, capitalism being in symbiosis with radicalism. By encouraging instant gratification and the ephemeral, especially when it came to jobs, the market undermined the family, which he called “a haven in a heartless world”. The very things that radicals attacked — “the authoritarian family, repressive sexual morality, literary censorship, the work ethic, and other foundations of bourgeois order” — have already been “weakened or destroyed by advanced capitalism itself”.

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Because of the expansion of higher education, elites had also developed a stronger sense of their own identity and culture, spoke increasingly to each other and began to see the “people” not as a cause to sponsor but as the problem, something well-observed already during the 1968 protests.

Wealthy families had traditionally settled in one location, often over several generations. Many economic leaders were exploitative or cruel, but many others had a sense of responsibility and pride in their home towns; proximity and the idea of posterity encouraged a mindset in which elites felt some responsibility to those who worked for them, and this helped to reduce income inequality to its lowest level at mid-century. With the growing free movement of capital and of people what little connection was gone, and with it any sense of sympathy.

Lasch wrote: “The new elites are in revolt against ‘Middle America,’ as they imagine it; a nation technologically backward, politically reactionary, repressive in its sexual morality, middle-brow in its tastes, smug and complacent, dull and dowdy. Those who covet membership in the new aristocracy of brains tend to congregate on the coasts, turning their back on the heartland and cultivating the international market in fast-moving money, glamour, fashion, and popular culture.”

In contrast multiculturalism “suits them to perfection, conjuring up the agreeable image of a global bazaar in which exotic cuisines, exotic styles of dress, exotic music, exotic tribal customs can be savoured indiscriminately, with no questions asked and no commitments required”.

All of these trends, towards knowledge economy winners cut off by geography, education and sensibility, would lead to a situation where “The talented retain many of the vices of aristocracy without its virtues.”

Worse still Lasch, while not a practising Christian, understood the importance of religion, and that without it politics would inspire “the feeling of self-righteousness that is so commonly confused with religion”. It would bring all the negative hallmarks of faith, the fanaticism and intolerance, but none of the devotion, the selflessness, the agonising.

The trends that Lasch observed would only accelerate after 2001, following China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation, the further erosion of America’s manufacturing base, the collapse of its skilled working class, and the increasing radicalisation of elites who benefited from globalisation and came to identify with it. This would result in the election of perhaps the most grotesque narcissist to ever lead Lasch’s country, and when Trump was about to be inaugurated Ross Douthat identified Revolt of the Elites as one of two books that foresaw the era, calling it a “polemic against the professional upper class’s withdrawal from the society it rules and a critique of the ways in which multiculturalism and meritocracy erode patriotism and democracy”.

Lasch has also come to gather a following in Britain where thinkers vaguely described as post-liberal, Blue Labour or Red Tory follow his analysis of capitalism, radicalism and the decline of the family. But his influence has seeped into mainstream British politics, too, as the Conservative Party has begun to attract voters alienated by the increasing values divide the great social critic wrote about. This weekend, Michael Gove cited Lasch as one of the thinkers who foresaw the failures of meritocracy, the great divide between the city and the town, and the mutual alienation it would bring. A quarter of a century after his prophetic book, we’re all living in Lasch’s world now.

Mr Johnson will not be unhappy with that. He’s very interested in the “great man” theory of history — that way of understanding the world that attributes grand events and trends to the actions of a few heroic individuals. He loves the classics with their heaven-born heroes smiting each other hip and thigh in defiance of gods and fate. His hero is Pericles, the “first citizen of Athens”. He chose politics over journalism “because no one puts up statues of journalists”. He wrote a biography of Winston Churchill, the best-known great man of British imagination: he won the war, didn’t he?

Provided he isn’t seen to have screwed up dramatically over the crisis once he’s recovered, it’s quite easy to see how the story of the prime minister who led the response to a deadly disease and nearly died from it himself will weave its way into the British imagination.

But the tale of Boris and the Virus can be told in two different ways. The way Conservatives, in particular, remember it will help decide whether the story unites or divides.

It all flows from a very basic question: why did Boris survive? How people answer that question will say a lot about politics and determine how Britain changes — or does not change — when we finally put coronavirus behind us.

Some will describe a battle of personal heroism, of grit and determination. Even when the PM was in the ICU and his fate was, frankly, uncertain, many people were talking of his toughness, his vigour, how his strong character and boundless appetite for life would equip him to “fight” the virus and win.

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I don’t much like that language, though I understand why people use it. I worry it overstates the role that character and personal choice play in medical outcomes. When I wrote elsewhere about this last week, I was slightly surprised by the vehemence and volume of responses. I know that Twitter isn’t Britain and all that but it’s still a bit striking to see people arguing that yes, some people die of various diseases because they just don’t want to live. That even life and death are ultimately a matter of choices made by individuals.

Others, though, will describe how he survived thanks to a huge infrastructure of medical support, provided and funded by many other people — as well as a bit of blind luck. To grossly over-simplify, some people will remember that Boris survived because he wanted to, because of things he did himself while others will say that it was because other people looked after him when he needed it.

The more weight you put on the first explanation, the more likely you are to be somewhere on the Right of the political spectrum. The idea that people choose their fate is popular among conservative-inclined voters. A very good study by the Bright Blue think tank in 2014 found that Tory voters were about twice as likely as Labour people to say that people in poverty are poor because of their own choices: they haven’t done enough to help themselves.

Similar evidence in the US suggests that people on the Right tend to believe that those who enjoy economic success do so largely or solely because of their own efforts.

As Bright Blue put it:

“One key conservative belief concerns the degree of power and responsibility individuals have over their own situation. Conservatives tend to see individuals as agents who can shape and determine their circumstances, and so see them as agents responsible for such circumstances.”

The other side of the old Left-Right binary is a familiar story, best articulated by Elizabeth Warren in 2012 talking about how people get rich:

“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.”

(This is the speech that led Barack Obama to attempt the same argument with disastrous consequences in his “You didn’t build that” comments. He was talking about the social infrastructure that supports business, but he botched his lines and created a meme that helped elect Donald Trump. Words matter, folks.)

Whether Covid-19 changes politics depends on how conservatives chose to explain Boris’ recovery. If they cling to the idea of people as rugged individuals deciding their own fate, politics will remain divided on its current left-right binary. If they look beyond heroic individualism and accept that individuals exist in a network of social bonds and obligations, we might just see a real realignment and the start of genuine post-liberal politics in the UK.

For the Left, the coronavirus crisis offers little in the way of intellectual challenge. A national crisis revolving around the NHS and requiring collective social effort is likely to feel like validation instead. Jeremy Corbyn’s claim that the crisis proves him right over public spending will be the foundation-stone of a myth built by his devotees that if only he’d become PM, none of the bad things would have happens.

The equivalent retreat to the comfort-zone for conservatives would be to use the Boris story as a validation of individualism. But more interesting, challenging and profitable would be to learn from the obvious fact that the PM did not win his “battle” against the coronavirus alone.

In the modern history of ideas on the Right, some of the most prominent explanations of individual agency lead to an atomised view of society and a minimal state. Think of Ayn Rand (“My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being”) or Friedrich Hayek, who said that “after creating formal equality of the rules applying in the same manner to all, we can leave each individual to find his own level.”

But more recent and more interesting thinkers have begun to test that heroic individualism. Think of John Gray’s Post-Liberalism. Gray, in turn, has paved the way for post-liberal political practitioners such as Nick Timothy, who has recently published his own book, Remaking One Nation: The Future of Conservatism.

What makes Timothy intriguing and original is that he is a Conservative (and a conservative) who enthusiastically embraces the state — and rejects the idea of heroic individual success:

“Nobody, however successful they might be, has succeeded alone. They might have relied on their families to give them love and security. They might have a school, college or university to thank. They might have benefited from the kindness or wisdom of a mentor or employer. They might have been supported by the state, through the welfare system or … a Sure Start centre. Precisely because nobody has succeeded alone, we all have a debt to others. “

Which brings us, circuitously, back to Boris Johnson and how he — and by extension his party — will remember his recovery. It is notable that his short message briefed to the Sunday papers is all about the NHS and the debt that he incurred in illness. “I owe them my life,” Johnson said simply.

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That is an acknowledgment that even the most heroic individual does not rise — or fall — alone. But will that acknowledgement carry through into a wider revision of Conservative thinking around public services and collective provision? That would be no surprise: Tories have been trying to embrace the NHS since David Cameron became leader in 2005. A post-crisis settlement where the Tories seek to define themselves as the party of the NHS would be a logical, if extremely difficult, aim now.

Most contemporary Tories would have little trouble embracing the NHS: the number of ideologues who actually want to break it up or sell it off is vanishingly small. More novel and challenging would be a Tory rethink about welfare.

Even though some Tories have recently tried a new approach to welfare — think of Iain Duncan Smith and Universal Credit — they have stuck with the idea of rational, autonomous individuals deciding their own path. Universal Credit was premised on the idea that claimants were deciding not to work more because the financial return wasn’t there. Even Tory welfare reformers thought welfare was a question of choice.

We may well be about to see unemployment temporarily pass the three million mark, with hundreds of thousands of people now needing benefits to get by. And all through no fault or choice of their own: can you really hold people personally responsible for being sacked by employers whose business has been shut down by a pandemic? Those Conservative attitudes to claimants will surely be tested in the months ahead.

So far, post-liberalism is a fringe element on the British Right, so politics remains broadly familiar. The 2019 election opened up the possibility for these things to change, but then the virus hit and all the emergent thinking about “levelling up” and the Tory embrace of the state was thrown into the crucible.

Are we heroic individuals who decide our own fate, or social animals whose outcomes are inextricably bound up with — and partly dependent on — the actions of others? Boris will likely get his statues one day. And how the story of his illness and its happy ending are told by his friends might just determine the history of Britain after the virus.

The coronavirus may be wreaking havoc elsewhere, but to those of a certain mindset it leaves all their fundamental assumptions about the world miraculously undisturbed. Indeed, the crisis positively confirms what they already reckoned.

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The remarkable thing is just how many different ideologies this appears to apply to — even those which are diametrically opposed to one another.

Maybe, just maybe, some of these partisans are clutching at straws. But which ones? Here’s my entirely objective and unbiased guide:

1. Socialism

I’m not suggesting that the lefties are enjoying coronavirus, but with the frontiers of the state rolling forward everyday, they can’t help but feel vindicated. The borrow-and-spend policies of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, so recently condemned as impossibly lavish, now look austere compared to the new fiscal orthodoxy. Magic money trees do exist after all.

But…

…some of the smarter reds have spotted a fly in the ointment — a Tory fly. Even when the country goes communist, the Conservatives are still in charge! It’s the Tories spending all that money and exercising all that power. Just think what they might do with it! Marxian economist Grace Blakeley, for one, is worried:

“Make no mistake, this pandemic is epoch-defining. It could herald the end of the era of finance-led growth and the beginning of state-monopoly capitalism.”

So, what you’re saying, Grace, is that concentrating control over the economy in the hands of a centralised state might have its downsides? Hmm, interesting idea — don’t forget to tell your comrades.

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2. Libertarianism

Oh well, it was good while it lasted. The free market, that is. Freedom of movement, too — that was fun.

Libertarians, some of whom are really quite clever, are well aware that plague socialism is the order of the day.

Still, always look on the bright side. For instance, now that it’s gone, perhaps people might realise that capitalism wasn’t so bad after all. And, who knows, the snowflake generation might just have second thoughts about socialism too — once they’ve been conscripted as farm labour.

But…

…the libertarians might like to do some thinking of their own. For instance, where would we be now without a big and capable state? It’s almost as if a complex, market-based economy survives because of strong government, not despite it.

3. Globalism

A global pandemic only goes to show just how interconnected we are. I mean, viruses don’t care about borders do they? What’s more, the only way we’re going to get through this crisis — and stop the next one from happening — is through unprecedented international cooperation.

But…

…Covid-19 has exposed the fragility of our ultra-globalised economy. We now realise just how dangerously dependent we are on overstretched supply chains — and, in particular, the manufacturing capacity of the People’s Republic of China. As for borders, the main reason why this plague spread so fast is because we didn’t seal them off fast enough.

Globalists like to present 21st century politics not as a battle between Left and Right, but between ‘Open’ and ‘Closed’. Well, yeah: we were wide open to this pandemic, and now everything is closed.

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4. Anti-globalism

Same as above, only the other way round.

5. Authoritarianism

Tell you what, those Chinese don’t mess about, do they? There’s no asking people nicely to self-isolate. Instead, it’s order everyone inside, weld the doors shut and sweat it out. Whole cities and provinces on lock-down, just like that. 

Meanwhile we stand around staring like it’s not coming for us. And, so, while coronavirus rages across the western world, China’s now recording days with no new local cases! Makes you think.

Of course, we don’t have to do the full dictatorship thing, but it’s surely time for the smack of firm government.

But…

…how did coronavirus get a head start on us in the first place? It took an authoritarian government to cover it up for several weeks. The brave doctors who alerted the world were silenced and citizen journalists have gone missing. Foreign journalists have been expelled, and if you think you can trust the official statistics, I’ve got a traffic-free bridge to sell you.

By the way, it doesn’t have to be the government in Beijing hiding the truth. It doesn’t matter how centralised a regime might be, they still rely on local agents — and where a climate of fear substitutes for democratic accountability, corners get cut.

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6. Liberalism

Progress and freedom, that’s what liberalism’s all about. When we eventually beat this thing, it’ll be because of human ingenuity — so, one up for progress. And assuming that we make it through with our democracy intact, that’ll be one up for freedom. Altogether, not too bad — despite this being the most testing of times.

But…

…while this lasts, there’s no doubting that ‘we’ has to come before ‘me’. There’s nothing like a contagious disease to remind us that individual actions have collective consequences. Not everyone’s learned that lesson yet — especially not the self-centred idiots who think that the entire edifice of democracy depends on them being able to go on the lash anytime they feel like it.

7. Post-liberalism

For post-liberals and localists of every description, this crisis couldn’t be a better demonstration of the importance of family and community. Indeed, the mutual aid networks springing up around the nation might just be the start of a lasting change in society.

But…

…it may take more than the a moderately devastating pandemic to change our ways. Liberals like David Aaronovitch of The Times reckon we’ll be back to our individualistic, globetrotting ways ASAP:

“Those who imagine that the young, freed from a psychological and social austerity imposed upon them for the sake mostly of their elders, are going to decide to live for ever in such a condition are fooling themselves.”

I wonder if this is true of all young people? The smartphone-centred post-millennial generation was already notable for its reclusive tendencies — which this pandemic will only reinforce. I wonder if risk-aversion, rather than hyper-mobility, will be the biggest long-term barrier to rebuilding community.

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8. Agrarianism

Agrarianism is a political philosophy that places a special value on farmers and farming. It hasn’t been a vital force in British politics for a very long time. Indeed, Brexit opened up a debate about whether the UK needs an agricultural sector at all. In a globalised economy why not just import our food from whoever can produce it at the lowest cost? That way we can stop paying subsidies to barley barons, and free up land for housing in some places and wildlife in others.

Well, coronavirus has put an end to that illusion. Suddenly, having a homegrown supply of food doesn’t seem such a crazy idea. Official lists of key workers (i.e. those who can still send their kids to school) include “those involved in food production, processing, distribution, sale and delivery of food”. In the post-pandemic era we won’t forget those empty shelves — nor the importance of a supply chain that’s anchored upon our green and pleasant land.

But…

… the renewed interest in where our food comes from could prove to be a doubled-edged sword. To ensure that the post-pandemic era doesn’t become an inter-pandemic era, we need to de-risk the entire global food system. The livestock industry in particular should get ready from some very searching questions about things like antibiotic resistance and the origin of zoonotic diseases.

Indeed, we could see the trend towards fake meat become a stampede.

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9. Environmentalism

The deep greens wanted a world of radically restricted extraction, production and consumption — and now they’ve got it. Global capitalism isn’t quite the unstoppable force it was cracked-up to be. Pollution levels are tumbling, saving lives even while the virus claims them. Meanwhile, governments are shifting to wartime economic policies not that dissimilar to what the advocates of a Green New Deal were calling for (albeit in the form of a mass mobilisation against climate change).

But…

…just how sustainable is this halt to the functioning of a free market economy? We’re embarking on a large-scale experiment to find out — one in which we’re all participating whether we like it or not. We’re about to discover what we can live without and what we really can’t. The environmental movement had better pay attention.

As nations fight to get through and then recover from this crisis, greens face a struggle for relevance. Yes, we need to avert the yet greater dangers that lie in the future; but, for now, people are understandably focused on the present.

With the vital COP26 climate talks facing cancellation, it’s the interruption of capitalism, not its continuation, that poses the greatest threat to the fight against climate change.

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10. Conservatism

‘There are limits’: that’s the essence of conservatism in just three words. Of course, what I’m referring to is real conservatism, not the fake stuff as peddled by various hucksters and mountebanks.

If you want more than three words, here are four: ‘progress is not inevitable’. To which one need only add a further five: ‘things can always get worse’.

But…

…there is no but.

That’s David Aaronovitch’s word, not mine. But he’s right: with liberalism visibly exhausted, post-liberalism is finding its voice. Not that this pleases him. Writing in The Times he makes his feelings plain:

“It may mean well but it’s nonsense. And this isn’t just because the ‘good old days’ before precocious childhood sexuality and drug addiction were also the ‘good old days’ of fumbling priests and unpunished domestic violence.”

Oh dear. Does he not realise that it’s possible to draw inspiration from what earlier generations got right without wanting to bring back the bad stuff? What makes this line of attack extra-annoying is that progressives have their own nostalgic streak. Yet when they talk about, for instance, the idealism of the post-war era, no one says ‘oh, so you want to bring back the ration book, do you?’

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However, Aaronovitch moves on to an argument that does require a serious response:

” … an appeal to mainly community-based decision-making cannot work. This is the world of climate change, the coronavirus, refugee surges and international trade. Pick the communitarianism out of that lot…

“Which is why, I suppose, when we get down to the new practicalities of what this ‘post-liberal’ moment might consist of, they seem… almost whimsical.”

Post-liberals don’t actually believe that everything should be decided by the local parish council. And yet, being a post-liberal myself, I have noticed a distinct tendency towards the parochial and the pastoral. There’s probably no better expression of post-liberal values than the lyrics of The Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society. But as lovely as these sentiments are, a rallying cry of “God save strawberry jam and all the different varieties” won’t change the world.

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If this really is a “post-liberal moment” then post-liberals need to explain what post-liberalism would do differently. Leaving aside the fluffy platitudes and the hobby horse policies, what would a truly post-liberal administration do to change the fundamental assumptions on which public policy is made in this country?

Here are five governing principles I’d like to see taken to the heart of power:

1) Prioritise investment in short supply chains

OK, this sounds ultra-technocratic — and that’s because it is. And yet it’s also of great importance. Globalisation doesn’t just happen spontaneously. It is supported by an underlying infrastructure of transport links, energy pipelines and digital connections.

In turn, this is enabled by government: construction projects are subsidised; operators given permission to dump environmental costs on other people and the natural world; economic policies encourage the offshoring of jobs and the avoidance of taxes; military and diplomatic resources are deployed to protect investments. However strong the market-based rationale for a globalised economy, it couldn’t exist without massive ongoing state intervention.

All of this effort and cost is what it takes to support long supply chains — which not only enable the beneficial aspects of globalisation, but also the concentration of power and wealth among the upper echelons of the knowledge class.

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Do we have any alternative? Yes — we could shift the balance of state support towards shorter supply chains — i.e. local links and connections that help to spread-out market opportunity. While a hub airport gives executives access to markets around the world, a decent bus network gives workers access to a larger number of job opportunities within a reasonable travel time. Both have the potential to boost productivity, but the rewards of the latter can be enjoyed by more people and at a lower cost to the environment.

One can’t help noticing that in the current era of globalisation, inequality has increased and productivity growth has decreased — at least for us in the West. One has to ask searching questions about the fragility of long, expensively-maintained supply chains — from the cost-overruns associated with the underlying infrastructure and the vulnerability of the global system to economic, social and environmental disruption.

The post-liberal approach is to avoid overstretch, to build up our own communities first as the most secure basis on which to then build out.

2) Against the Matthew Effect

The Matthew effect is something I’ve already written about, here. The term was coined by the sociologist Robert Merton and it basically means the ‘more you have the more you get’. The name is inspired by a verse from St Matthew’s gospel — “For to every one who has will more be given…”

You can see the Matthew Effect at work in just about any field of study from astrophysics (e.g. the formation of planets through the accretion of matter) to economics (e.g. “the rich get richer” or “money comes to money”). Part of the job of government is to fight against this universal tendency — for instance through progressive rates of taxation or anti-monopoly laws.

However, some government policies make things worse. This is especially true when it comes to allocation of capital spending. Just think about all the public investment that’s focused on London — on the grounds that new infrastructure generates more returns when it joins up with existing infrastructure. The reason why we’re building HS2 (a connection from the North to London) before HS3 (connections within the North) is that the value of the former is supposedly multiplied by its connections to Heathrow, Thameslink, and so on.

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It all seems so logical, until you see where the logic takes us: an ever widening gap between London and rest of the country.

Letting the Matthew Effect guide public investment might make sense in a world where superstar cities were succeeding as centres of breakthrough innovation (e.g. like Manchester during the industrial revolution). Unfortunately, in the midst of the current Great Stagnation, that’s not our world.

Real growth, as opposed to the mere hoarding of capital and talent in a few favoured urban centres, is achieved when untapped potential is released. It’s how previously under-developed countries have been able to grow so much faster than we have. It’s also why we should see neglected communities in the West as a better opportunity for growth than inflating asset bubbles in London and other centres of neoliberal excess.

The current government’s talk of “levelling up” is an encouraging sign. Let’s hope there’s some deeper thinking behind it — an economic philosophy that understands the essential sterility of the established economic order.

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3. The median versus the mean

It’s not that the basic assumptions of neoliberalism go entirely unquestioned. Indeed the radical Left, once all but banished from the political stage, has found a new audience for socialist ideas.

Even among the most unadventurous of conservatives we’ve seen a search for new directions. For instance, at one point David Cameron dallied with the idea of an index of general wellbeing as an alternative gross national product (GNP). The initiative came to nothing, as such ideas usually do, because wellbeing is too subjective to be measured in a meaningful and consistent fashion. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need better indicators.

As the saying goes, “what gets measured, gets done” — therefore if a post-liberal government wanted to do things differently it would need a different set of measures.

GDP is an aggregate measure of economic output, while GDP per capita is an average one. As such they can conceal great inequalities — as when most of the benefits of growth are captured by then very rich. One way of correcting for that is to focus on household income and to use the median instead of the mean to calculate the average.

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The median is the exact midway point in the income distribution — the level at which half the country has a higher income and half a lower one. Therefore unlike the mean, it isn’t flattered by windfalls for the very richest individuals.

An even better measure than median income is median earnings. Post-liberals, who place great value on the dignity of work, would seek to boost the earning power of ordinary working people in preference to merely compensating them through the redistributive power of the state.

Of course, no statistical measure is perfect. But an economic policy that targeted median earnings and not just GDP would be fairer and more relevant to the great majority of working people.

4. Radical localism

We’re all localists now, aren’t we? After all, who describes themselves as a centralist?

And yet decentralisation hasn’t gone nearly far enough. The welcome progress made in the first half of the last decade more or less came to a halt in the second (unless one counts Brexit, of course).

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By Peter Franklin

Rebooting decentralisation within the United Kingdom requires a new approach. Instead of home nations, regions and communities petitioning Westminster for control over resources and policies, the process needs to be turned on its head.

The default position should be that control over each aspect of domestic policy starts at the most local level of government — and that a credible case has to be made for centralising it. This reverses the burden of proof — forcing civil servants and ministers to justify their existence before doubting the ability of local people to direct the activities of the state with their own communities.

For instance, it shouldn’t be for the cities and towns of northern England to argue that Transport for the North should have more power. It should be the Department for Transport that has to explain why it should have any say at all in a part of the country that it’s let down so badly.

Neither the conventional Right nor the conventional Left can be trusted to relax its grip on the levers of power. Only a post-liberal government would rethink the machinery of government from the bottom-up.

5. Deep optionality

To conventional thinkers, communitarianism is, if not sinister, then irredeemably twee. Admittedly, post-liberals are partial to the small-and-quirky. And why not? A world without colour and texture would be a grey and glassy place — as embodied by the architecture that the globalisers impose across the planet.

And yet nurturing “all the different varieties” is much more than a matter of sentiment. It has a deadly serious edge.

Wherever globalisation drives out distinction and diversity it creates fragility. Systems that are hailed as ‘seamless’, ‘open’, ‘efficient’ are in fact prone to catastrophic failure because they’re so standardised and integrated that when they fail they fail all at once. Indeed, worse than that, they provide a context in which risks can multiply, cascading from one level to the next.

Further reading

Why we should be worried about coronavirus

By Peter Franklin

We’ve seen enough examples in this century alone — military intervention in the Middle East, the global financial crisis, the Eurozone crisis, the rise of populism, the threat of pandemics, ecosystem collapses and the climate emergency.

To increase our exposure to good fortune, not bad, we need optionality, i.e. lots of little experiments. When failures are small and local, the costs are limited. On the other hand, the successes, no matter how few and far between, can be copied or adapted for use elsewhere.

A post-liberal policy framework is one which not only allows a thousand flowers to bloom, but also accepts that 999 of them may die. It is tolerant of failure in policy making, indeed it actively welcomes it if the negative consequences are limited, but the learning opportunities are not.

Neither the statist Left, with its blind faith in big government, nor the free-market Right, which panders to private sector monopoly, can nurture true diversity. This, by the way, is why successive governments have such a bad record when it comes to involving charities, social enterprises and community groups. 

*

Conventional governments of all colours continue with the wrong investment priorities, misleading measures of prosperity, and over-centralised, diversity-destroying systems of power.

So what do post-liberals want? We want different priorities, different measures, different systems.

And so if we’re attacked from both the Left and the Right — and by both liberals and authoritarians — then perhaps we’re getting somewhere.

Further reading

The battle for the Tory Party's soul

By Peter Franklin

Where does this leave Britain? How should it define itself and defend its place in the world after liberalism? The Defence Secretary has asserted the need for strategic autonomy. And in his maiden speech, as reported on UnHerd, Danny Kruger spoke of the need for Britain to reject “an accommodation with one of the sterile new powers of the world, America, Europe or China” and fashion “a particularly British model, independent of the great powers”.

One way to assert our autonomy, paradoxical though it may seem, would be to deepen our bilateral strategic relationship with our closest European neighbour and historic rival, France. It may seem quixotic, but it is Macron’s France that is most clear-sighted in its apprehension of the new global order. We also have equivalent military capacity and a desire to preserve a role as an autonomous, mid-ranking power on the world stage.

As Macron himself remarked: “We have unparalleled reach. Basically, only the UK, via the Commonwealth, can claim a similar reach, although it’s decided to follow a different path.”

Suggested reading

How Brexit broke up the 'special relationship'

By Mike Martin

When Macron features in British political discourse, it is most often in his role as a lightning rod for political protest at home. It is a point no less true for being made to the point of cliché by Brexiteers that France is experiencing the most violent and wide-ranging political convulsions since 1968, nor that Macron’s throne is propped up by tear gas and truncheons more than popular acclaim. Were Poland or Hungary to have experienced such political instability, or to have repressed it as violently, they would certainly have aroused the condemnatory attention of British liberal commentators far more so than our Jupiterian neighbour has so far achieved.

Yet the acclamation of Macron as the strongman of the liberal order by anxious liberals keen to reverse the political trends sweeping across Europe misses the increasingly post-liberal drift of his strategic vision. His is a realist vision, shorn of idealist yearnings to remake the world according to the teleology of liberalism. It is keenly aware both of where real power lies and how to use it in France’s interests.

As French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian remarked in a major recent speech at The Hague, Europe has suffered from “the error of believing that we can ensure our place and security in a brutal and violent world simply through the example of our model and with our words”. Europeans need, Le Drian asserted, “to open our eyes to the reality of international power relations. In a way, we need to stop being naïve”.

It is in this difference, between a realistic acceptance of how human societies function and an idealistic vision of endless human progress towards a perfect future, that post-liberalism distinguishes itself from liberalism. Liberalism derives from its distant Christian heritage a belief in the perfectibility of man, and from Enlightenment thought the assumption that history moves inexorably in one direction. A post-liberal foreign policy, like Burkean conservatism, would accept that a nation’s politics derives from its own unique historical circumstances and that different societies are unlikely to share the same visions of the common good. Therefore, a cautious realism is both safer and more conducive to the happiness of mankind than the revolutionary idealism with which well-meaning, but misguided, liberal interventionists have torn nations asunder.

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Emmanuel Macron's alienating ambition

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

Macron has considered these questions carefully. In his recent interview with the Economist in which he pronounced upon Nato’s “brain death,” he noted that:

“There is a deep current of thought that was structured in the period between 1990 and 2000 around the idea of the “end of history”, of a limited expansion of democracy, of a triumph of the West as a value system. That was the accepted truth at the time, until the 2000s, when a series of shocks demonstrated that it wasn’t actually so true.”

This is, of course, an outright rejection of the dominant ideology of late 20^thcentury liberalism: the quasi-religious belief that increasing trade would link the world in an ever-closer global system which would drag non-Western powers in the direction of a gleaming, liberal-democratic future. As Macron notes,

“The dominant ideology had a flavour of the end of history. So there will be no more great wars, tragedy has left the stage, all is wonderful. The overriding agenda is economic, no longer strategic or political. In short, the underlying idea is that if we’re all linked by business, all will be fine, we won’t hurt each other. In a way, that the indefinite opening of world trade is an element of making peace.

Except that, within a few years, it became clear that the world was breaking up again, that tragedy had come back on stage, that the alliances we believed to be unbreakable could be upended, that people could decide to turn their backs, that we could have diverging interests.”

Having perceived the direction of the Weltgeist, the former Hegel scholar has changed the course of French foreign policy towards the new prevailing winds, and not against them. Once lauded by anglophone liberals as Putin’s nemesis, Macron now seeks an accommodation with the Russian leader, attempting to draw Russia into a new security framework with Europe, and expounding his civilisationist conception of an autonomous Europe stretching “from Lisbon to Vladivostok”.

This is a vision of Europe shared, incidentally, with the Identitarian thinkers of France’s radical Right, and which perhaps accords with Macron’s recent decision to give a long, exclusive interview to the French Catholic-reactionary magazine Valeurs Actuelles, to the horror of French liberals.

Macron’s increasing references to political Islam as the dominant threat to European civilisation, and repeated warnings over unsustainable birth rates in sub-Saharan Africa have also alarmed French liberals — though they have drifted unnoticed over the heads of British Remainers looking longingly for a continental saviour.

Suggested reading

Everything you know about Europe is wrong

By Ed West

On immigration too, Macron’s once condemnatory rhetoric towards Salvini and Central European leaders for refusing to accept Third World migration has not been matched by action: in practice, France under Macron has accepted as few migrants as possible, pushing attempted arrivals back to Italy with some force. Ritual condemnation of Orbán as a threat to European democracy has been replaced by a growing warmth between the two leaders, termed by some as the “Macron- Orbán axis”, with Macron aiming to use Orbán as a means to persuade the wary Poles to embrace his vision of rapprochement with Russia. “He’s quite close to our views,” Macron has said of the Hungarian champion of illiberal democracy, “and has a key intellectual and political role within the Visegrad group, which is important. That’s also the way we may be able to convince the Poles a little more.”

Pursuing this vision, Macron travelled to Poland to heal the bad blood caused by his previous critiques of the country’s drift away from liberal norms. His aim: to secure a military partner for France to fill the massive hole left by Brexit. Forced by geography to maintain robust defence spending, Poland’s rapidly modernising armed forces are, these days, a safer bet’s than those of Germany, now a superpower only in moralising, both unwilling and unable to assert its interests on the global stage. Yet Macron’s pleas for Polish involvement in France’s ongoing war in the Sahel, and support for French ambitions in Libya, serve only to highlight the centrality of the United Kingdom to any meaningful European project for strategic autonomy.

Within Europe, only Britain can match the expeditionary capacity of the French armed forces. Indeed, France’s gruelling intervention in the Sahel was dependent on RAF C-17s to airlift troops to Mali in the first place, and three RAF chinook helicopters provide vital flexibility to French operations in the Sahel even now; the mission will be bolstered by 250 British troops later this year. On the day we left the European Union, Macron observed of the UK that “it is in our common interest to define as close and deep a partnership as possible in defence and security”, and in the Economist he insisted:

“the British must be a partner on European defence. We’re keeping the bilateral treaties we upheld at Sandhurst. I believe that the UK has an essential role to play. Actually, the UK will be faced with the same question because the UK will be even more affected than us if the nature of NATO changes. So I see the bilateral relationship as essential from a military perspective.”

Both great world empires shrunk to mid-ranking power status; both nuclear powers and UN Security Council members, with commitments across the world derived from global trade and the flows of migration which followed our retreat from empire. France and Britain share interests and ambitions we are each unable to defend alone.

Suggested reading

Macron's Brexit plan

By John Lichfield

Decades of defence cuts have whittled our armed forces to the stage where we are unable to fight as anything other than a token auxiliary force to an American effort, fulfilling a similar niche in American doctrine as the Brigade of Gurkhas do in ours. Given that the global hegemon is itself struggling to maintain its presence in Iraq in the face of Iranian pressure, and is attempting, two decades into a bloody and unsuccessful war, to negotiate as un-humiliating a retreat from Afghanistan as possible from the Pashtun farmers who have outfought it, the advisability of a British government following the United States into further military adventures in pursuit of liberal goals is questionable at best.

Chastened in Southern Iraq and Helmand, despite the tactical skill and courage of our soldiers, Britain must seek a new role on the world stage commensurate with our abilities; it’s vital we accept that any attempt at strategic autonomy is meaningless unless we repair the damage decades of neglect have wrought on our armed forces.

Our new aircraft carriers are spectacular but undeployable in combat without escort ships we do not possess. Our army has been slow to modernise in recent decades, and has fought two long and bloody counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan at America’s behest with very little to show at the end of them. Until our capabilities have been restored and the lessons of our failed wars firmly learned, sharing capability through enhanced strategic cooperation with France seems essential for both countries in preserving some measure of autonomy in a global system torn between rising authoritarian powers and an increasingly unstable and erratic United States.

Suggested reading

Why is French democracy so prone to violence?

By John Lichfield

One shared plank of a post-liberal foreign policy would surely be a retreat from military adventurism where French and British interests are not directly at stake. The failure of the Arab Spring to bring forth flourishing liberal democracies in North Africa and the Middle East has wrought great damage on the fantasies of liberal interventionists, and its baneful effects have, in Europe, been borne most bloodily by Britain and France.

It was not foreseen by the cheerleaders of globalisation that civil wars in distant lands would lead to civilians lying dead by the dozen in the streets and stadia of London, Manchester, and Paris, but this is what came to pass. The Nato operation to unseat Gaddafi in Libya, a Franco-British project which dragged in an uncertain Obama administration, has likewise led, nearly a decade on, to the grim prospect of a conflict within the Nato alliance itself, as French and Greek warships engage in a tense standoff with the Turkish navy in the Eastern Mediterranean, and to a migrant crisis on Europe’s southern border likely to turn both Italy and Spain in an illiberal rather than post-liberal direction sooner rather than later.

Furthermore, it was as an unforeseen consequence of the intervention in Libya demobilised Tuareg fighters returned home to Mali with the spoils of Gaddafi’s armouries, sparking the bloody conflict France is still struggling to end.

Macron has mused repeatedly on the failure of the 2011  intervention in Libya to secure European interests, remarking this month that “it’s a country that has never known real unity”, and that “we took a path that never seemed right to me which is to say we don’t like this leader [so we’re going to] overthrow him, except we didn’t have a better leader to replace him with, and we find ourselves in this anomie.”

In his Economist interview, reflecting on the Arab Spring in general, Macron observed that:

“We’ve sometimes made mistakes by wanting to impose our values, by changing regimes, without popular support. It’s what happened in Iraq or in Libya. It’s perhaps what was envisaged at one point in Syria but failed. It’s an element of the Western approach, I would say in generic terms, that was a mistake at the beginning of this century, undoubtedly fatal, and sprang from the union of two forces: the right to intervene with neo-conservatism. And these two forces intertwined and produced dramatic results. Because the sovereignty of the people is in my opinion an unsurpassable factor. It’s what made us what we are, and it must be respected everywhere.”

Suggested reading

Macron's cunning plan for Europe

By John Lichfield

As a consequence of this newly realist assessment of European interests, France under Macron has deepened military ties with the counterrevolutionary governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and has shunned the US-led “maximum pressure” naval mission in the Persian Gulf, now helmed by a Royal Navy admiral in an attempt to persuade wary Europeans to join it. Instead, France leads its own European mission, aiming to secure freedom of navigation while maintaining the diplomatic outreach to Iran which distinguishes British and French aims from hawkish US policy.

Sharing Britain’s bases in Cyprus with France, along with our new naval facilities in Bahrain and Oman, would do much to bolster the effectiveness of British and French forces working together to secure our joint interests, and is a policy worth considering in our forthcoming strategic review. Deepened cooperation with French forces in the Sahel, though not a vital security interest for Britain as it is for France, would win us much goodwill from a powerful neighbour consistently disappointed by its German partner, and would establish greater interoperability between British and French assets which may prove useful in some future, yet unforeseen emergency.

This is, arguably, a Burkean foreign policy fit for a Conservative government: wary of military interventions to support revolutions whose bloody and chaotic end-states do not live up to the liberal aspirations of their cheerleaders, and reliant on European states acting in concert as sovereign powers to preserve their joint security in an increasingly unstable world.

Yet despite the hopes being placed by British post-liberals in Johnson’s government to forge a new path, it is the residual ideological liberalism of the Conservative government, expressed most vividly and disappointingly by the recent Huawei decision, which may present the greatest stumbling block to a Johnson-Macron strategic alliance.

Suggested reading

Have we been played by China?

By James Kirkup

The assumption that China is a neutral or even liberalising player on a competitive global market, unwilling or unable to exert political power through its economic might, ought to have been discarded on the rubbish heap with the other fantasies of the age of high globalisation. Macron has expressed a firm stance against Huawei, observing that:

“The day that everyone is connected to 5G with critical information, will you be able to protect and secure your system? The day you have all your cyber-connections on a single system, will you be able to ring-fence it? That’s the only thing that matters to me. On the other issues I’m business-neutral. But this is a sovereign matter. This is what sovereignty is all about.”

Similarly, France is threatening to block the sale of British Steel to a Chinese state-run company on the basis that it threatens French sovereignty over infrastructure essential to its national rail network.

Analysing British politics, Macron witheringly observed that the UK:

“decided to abandon sovereignty for a Singapore-type model, I would call it. Personally, I’m not so sure that’s sustainable. I discussed this with Theresa May, and then with Boris Johnson, because I think it was the middle classes who reacted and voted for Brexit. I think the elites stand to gain from that type of model. I don’t believe that the middle classes do. I think the British middle classes need a better-functioning European model, in which they are better protected.”

It is an ironic truth then, that Macron, the soi-disant saviour of liberalism, is far more sceptical towards the logic of the unfettered market than any senior British Conservative, and far more passionate about national sovereignty than any free-trading Brexiteer.

His foreign policy has pushed him away from the twin liberal fantasies of a global market and post-historical harmony, in favour of a shrewdly realist and increasingly post-liberal desire to secure his nation’s place in the world as it is, and not as it ought to be. In observing this radical shift in French policy, a Johnson government toying with post-liberal thought has much to study and perhaps to engage with in balancing Britain’s global and national interests in pursuit of the country’s common good.­­­

To be precise, this is the West’s second class war. The first, in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, pitted the big-firm corporate managers and professionals against industrial and service workers, who had not shared in the gains of the early industrial revolution. During the Great Depression and World War II, that class war came to a negotiated end in Europe and America, thanks to cross-class peace treaties such as Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the British welfare state.

Today, many people consider those postwar ‘settlements’ solely in terms of safety-nets that redistributed income or expanded public services like Britain’s NHS. But the class peace that lasted for a generation after 1945 in the West was based as much on power-sharing as on wealth-sharing.

By the mid-20th century, universal suffrage ensured that all working-class citizens in Western democratic nations could vote (a goal finally achieved for nonwhite Americans in the civil rights era). Yet working-class citizens exercised power in the three realms of government, the economy and the culture by more than votes alone.

Thanks to what I describe in The New Class War as ‘democratic pluralism’, non-college-educated workers had their own mass membership organisations that represented their interests between elections. Local political parties were the basis of national party federations, in which messages went up the chain as well as down.

Suggested reading

Today's liberals dream of a workerless paradise

By James Bloodworth

In many major industries, corporate managers were compelled to negotiate with trade union representatives. On top of this, religious and civic organisations policed the movies and the media and education, to align their content with the values of working-class majorities.

Today, the petty tribunes of yesterday’s working class — the local party officials, private trade union officials, and, yes, the censorious church members —are all but extinct as social types in many Western democracies. Power has migrated upwards to national political, economic and cultural elites. At the same time, these have grown more homogeneous and insular, fusing into a single, college-credentialed, managerial overclass clustered into a few major hub cities including New York, San Francisco, London and Paris.

Neoliberalism, a combination of free-market libertarianism in economics with social liberalism in culture, has been the orthodoxy shared by Thatcher and Reagan conservatives with centre-Left leaders Blair and Clinton and Obama.

On both sides of the Atlantic, national elites have promoted the technocratic neoliberal vision of a glorious globalised future of dissolving borders, free migration of goods and people and ever-growing demographic diversity — combined, it was assumed, with monolithically liberal values and opinions.

Today’s populist politics is best understood as a counter-revolution from below against this neoliberal revolution from above. Some try to explain populism solely as a backlash by native working-class whites against increasing racial diversity driven by immigration, but this cannot explain why a third of BAME (British, Asian and Minority Ethnic) voters supported Brexit, or why nearly 30% percent of Hispanics in the U.S. voted for Donald Trump in 2016.

Suggested reading

How I overcame my class stigma

By Roger Scruton

Those who argue that economics is the key to understanding populist revolts are closer to the truth, since across the West, the heartlands of populism are often deindustrialised former manufacturing regions such as the North of England and the American Rust Belt.

Centre-left parties have lost their working-class constituents to populists and conservatives, replacing them with a new alliance of highly-educated white managers and professionals allied with native minorities and many upwardly-mobile immigrants, for whom even low wages and poor working conditions in Western hub cities are better than their former circumstances.

What an exclusive emphasis on economics misses, however, is power — or its absence. Human beings care about power and agency, not just as means to income and wealth, but as ends in themselves. In otherwise quite different societies — many nations in Latin America, the states of the Southern U.S. between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Revolution, and the immigrant-packed Northern cities in the U.S. in the early 20th century — a feeling of powerlessness and exclusion by large elements of the population drove conditions in which demagogic populists thrive.

Populists such as Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and Matteo Salvini sometimes represent the legitimate interests and values of groups that have been excluded by a closed and nepotistic power elite. But history also suggests that populist insurgencies usually fail, through cooptation by the existing establishment or corruption by demagogues who build their own ephemeral cults of personality and personal patronage systems.

Suggested reading

How to understand the rise of national populism

By Matthew Goodwin

A new democratic pluralism is needed to bring today’s class war to an end in the way that the power-sharing pluralism of the 1950s and 1960s ended the first. This is a challenge far greater than merely revising trade or immigration or social welfare policies to win over populist voters. It requires compelling corporate executives, media tycoons and high-ranking civil servants who have grown accustomed to a lack of pressure from below to show deference to less-educated people in the national heartlands beyond a few economic, cultural and administrative capitols.

This, in turn, requires creating the functional equivalents of yesterday’s trade unions, local political machines and civic pressure groups, in forms suited to the twenty-first century. This would allow those citizens who today are alienated and atomised members of an anomic population, disconnected from the centres of national power, to once again belong to organisations that can pool their numbers and amplify their influence.

With their own lesser, local tribunes to represent their interests and values, members of the working-class majority are likely to be less attracted to Caesarist demagogues who claim to speak for the virtuous people as a whole against the treacherous few.

The details of a new democratic pluralism cannot be specified in advance, and by nature must be negotiated by different actors in society, rather than drawn up in advance in 10-point plans by intellectuals or committees. These new class peace treaties will also vary among Western democracies, depending on local conditions and cultures.

Suggested reading

Will Boris save social democracy?

By David Goodhart

It is possible that Britain, the mother of parliaments and the first modern industrial nation, and the one that pioneered neoliberalism under Margaret Thatcher, will now blaze the trail for what has been called “post-liberalism”. Modern British history is rich in traditions that reject the extreme aspects of liberalism without rejecting democracy, from the One Nation Toryism of Disraeli to the guild socialism of members of the early 20th century English pluralist school like Cole and Laski. More recently, Maurice Glasman’s Blue Labour and Philip Blond’s Red Toryism have sought to correct the excesses of neoliberalism while avoiding the trap of demagogic populism.

Can a new cross-class peace settlement unite those whom David Goodhart has called communitarian, working class “Somewheres” with metropolitan, libertarian “Anywheres” in the UK and other nations? Failure is always an option. In this case, failure would consist of a few token gestures towards alienated populists by establishment elites who remain committed to the neoliberal consensus of the past generation and have no intention of sharing real power with the powerless of all classes and ethnicities.

But we can be certain of this: the political earthquakes of the past few years are not the last. It is not the beginning of the end of a new era in Western democratic politics, but the end of the beginning.

“Everyone aligned themselves — whether they wanted to, or merely pretended to want to — with one or other of the many peoples there used to be in the old monarchy. For it had been discovered in the course of the nineteenth century that every individual had to belong to a particular race or nation, if he wanted to be a fully rounded bourgeois individual… All those people who had never been other than Austrians … now began to call themselves part of the Polish, the Czech, the Ukrainian, the Slovenian, the Croatian ‘nation’ — and so on.”

Born in 1894 into a Galician Jewish family and growing up to be a Left-leaning liberal journalist, Roth came to regard the empire of Franz Joseph as the embodiment of a civilised order. Its replacement by self-determining nation-states would not enable individuals to live more freely. Instead, there would be anarchy, a struggle for power and an era of barbaric dictatorship. Writing to Stefan Zweig in 1933, he warned: “We are drifting to great catastrophes … I won’t bet a penny on our lives.”

Roth understood the dangers of identity politics long before the term was invented. What he grasped is not only that societies that secure personal freedom are easily broken. There is an inherent instability in the liberal project that promotes the freedom to shape your own identity as you please.

With all of its faults — including a virulently anti-Semitic mayor in fin-de-siècle Vienna — the Austro-Hungarian Empire allowed its subjects to live with one another without having to define themselves as belonging in any particular group. It was not the Great War alone that killed off the Habsburg realm. Its collapse illustrated a self-defeating logic in liberalism. The pursuit of national self-determination in the disintegrating empire — aided and abetted by the US President, Woodrow Wilson — revealed a fatal contradiction in the liberal understanding of human identity.

by the same author

Our illiberal empire of rights

By John gray

For liberals, human beings fashion their identities according to how they choose to think of themselves. Any attempt to obstruct this choice is an assault on freedom. But as Roth knew all too well, human identity is not a unilateral act of self-assertion. It requires recognition by others, and this is a process fraught with difficulties. Not only is recognition sometimes denied — as when demands for nationhood are rejected by existing states. Worse, people find projected onto them identities they do not themselves recognise.

Defining yourself as part of the Polish, Czech or Ukrainian “nation” doesn’t only exclude being a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It means you don’t belong in any of the other nations either. Electing to have an identity for yourself inescapably entails attributing a different identity from other people. Having one’s identity defined by others is rarely auspicious, and during the 20th century was often lethal. What is choice for some, is fate for others.

As a person of Jewish origins, Roth was acutely sensitive to these dangers. Unlike others in the Habsburg realm, Jews had no territory they could claim as their own. They were a minority in every aspirant nation, and their future was uncertain. Did being Polish or Ukrainian include or exclude being Jewish? Could Jews assimilate in the new nations, or would they be at best second-class citizens? In interwar Europe, these were existential questions for millions of people. Not only Jews but also other minorities found themselves straddling newly created states. Where non-ethnic, civic conceptions of national identity existed they proved unsustainable in the conflicts that followed.

The contradictions of liberal autonomy have returned a hundred years later in the EU. Liberals regard the rise of nationalism in the EU as a reversion to what they see as the tribalism of the interwar period. But this is at best a half-truth. As Roth observed, European national identities originated as expressions of bourgeois individualism — the self-assertion of those who believe they have fashioned a self that transcends local communities and archaic allegiances to monarchs and emperors. The end-result of the attempt to actualise this imagined self was violent conflict on a large scale.

suggested reading

A post-liberal reading list

By Giles Fraser

The European project is an attempt to construct a polity that transcends the national identities of the last century. The trouble is, this is in effect another kind of nationalism, one that cannot be reconciled with democracy. For all their human costs, the nation-states forged in Europe in the 20th century did eventually become vehicles of democratic government. A few multi-national states — the UK and Spain, for example — are functioning democracies, but they are relics of empire and monarchy. Cosmopolitanism has survived better in these archaic, mini-Habsburg realms than in many modern nation-states. Nothing like democracy has been achieved in the EU, or anywhere else, at a transnational level.

The EU is an attempt to create a state for a nation that does not exist. Like nationalism it is an expression of bourgeois values, but its political base is smaller. Aside from the Brussels elite, it consists of employees of highly mobile corporates, the woke intelligentsia and sections of the middle classes. In David Goodhart’s typology, these are all Anywheres. The rise of national populism in Europe is largely a reaction against the attempt by these groups to create a European identity that majorities in existing nations do not recognise.

If the project of nationhood in the late Habsburg Empire eventuated in the ethnic conflicts of the interwar period, the European project of a transnational polity has created the identitarian movement today. Most clearly articulated in Italy, where it occupies a political space opened up by Matteo Salvini’s Liga, identitarianism claims to represent groups that are being marginalised by the EU. Some identitarians deny being nationalists, arguing that the nation-states constructed in the 19th and 20th centuries repressed local and regional cultures.

Actually, identitarian movements have close links with far-Right national governments and parties. Their ideas are echoed by Victor Orban in Hungary, the Austrian Freedom Party, AfD in Germany and Vox in Spain.  Identitarianism is a pan-European movement, with outreach in many countries (including Australia and New Zealand) facilitated through the internet. It has succeeded in attracting significant support among young people — “Generation Identity”, as they call themselves.

In practice, identitarianism is principally a movement hostile to Muslim immigrants. Beguiled by the French sociologist Renaud Camus’s fantasy of a “great replacement” in which native Europeans are being “colonised” by a new population of non-Europeans, identitarian groups aim to reassert Europe’s Christian heritage, including traditional forms of marriage. All have undercurrents of anti-Semitism.

suggested reading

Don't let the liberals write our constitution

By Peter Franklin

Movements like this are not unfamiliar in post-war Europe. The far Right did not disappear along with Nazism and fascism, but carried on in a variety of guises in Italy, France, Germany and other countries. What needs to be explained is why these forces have extended their political reach over the past decade, and now find expression in identitarianism.

Part of the explanation is the rise within liberalism of a parallel current of identitarian thinking. Both in Europe and the US, the liberal project has shifted from aiming to enable peaceful coexistence among individuals and groups with divergent identities to one that seeks hegemony for a single kind of identity—that of the autonomous, self-fashioning individual. One may think, as I do, that autonomy is an illusion that can never be embodied in human flesh. But illusions may have great power, and one of the consequences of pursuing them is to intensify opposition to the unrealisable goals you are trying to achieve. What is commonly called populism is in large measure a reaction against an attempt to impose a liberal identity on people who demand respect for the identities they already possess.

A mark of the identitarian liberal is the belief that the autonomous individual is what all human beings truly want to be. Anyone who wants to be anything else is irrational or otherwise deplorable. Liberals who define themselves as autonomous beings cannot help defining others as lacking in what they believe to be the most important attribute of humankind. Liberalism then becomes the project of enabling the mass of semi-humans to catch up with those in whom the quintessence of humanity has been revealed. Obviously, this kind of liberalism offers no escape from the toxic politics of identity.

The abuse heaped on more than 17 million Brexit supporters in the UK and 60-odd million Trump voters in America by liberal exemplars of universal humanity is telling. Liberals who insult their fellow citizens in this way see themselves as promoting universal human solidarity, but liberalism of this kind is necessarily a pose struck by a few. The American writer Adam Gopnik’s book A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism illustrates this point. Much of it consists of a eulogy of life in Manhattan. “Self-organising liberals” have created communities that reflect their values in the affluent East Side neighbourhood where Gopnik lives, in Greenwich Village and Cape Cod. Without enclaves like these, he tells us, American liberalism would be inconceivable.  If those who subsist in the intercoastal badlands appear at all in this story, it is as examples of underdevelopment.

suggested reading

John Clare, poet of the Somewheres

By Mary Harrington

Rightly, Gopnik identifies John Stuart Mill’s as one of the inspirations for this sort of liberalism. But he seems not to see how it has contributed to the current condition of American politics. Mill’s conception of individuality is a prototype for the intolerant missionary zeal that drives woke warriors in universities, the media and the social justice movement. Polarised between censorious elites and insurgent populism, the US is more ravaged by identity politics than any other advanced country. American liberalism is rapidly unravelling.

The autonomous individual is a fragile construction. In metaphysical terms, it is a pale shadow of the soul as imagined in monotheism — a spectral entity, possessed of a mysterious freedom of will that cannot be empirically explained. In historical terms, the autonomous self is a by-product of a liberal form of life that is passing away. Though liberals continue to tell themselves a Mill-like story in which the rest of the species is slowly catching up with them, their hysterical response to their recent political defeats suggests they secretly suspect their day is over.

Liberalism began in wars of religion as an attempt to achieve peaceful coexistence among communities that defined themselves by reference to rival systems of belief. A 21st-century successor to liberalism would enable devotees of individual autonomy to inhabit the same society as people who define themselves by other values — inherited codes of conduct of settled communities, revealed religions or noncommittal pragmatism, for example. Basic freedoms would allow people to move from one identity to another, but there would be no attempt to convert everyone to a life of self-fashioning autonomy.

Even if it were possible, a universal Greenwich Village is not self-evidently the most desirable political ideal. A world that contained and protected many different identities would be more interesting and more worth living in. Of course, achieving anything like this is an almost impossibly daunting task. But it is unavoidable if we are not to share Roth’s despairing conclusion that murderous collisions between identities will shape the human future.

By contrast, positive freedom is the sort of liberty that various forms of un-freedom make possible: the freedom expressed by your fingers dancing up a keyboard is made possible by years of disciplined practice; the freedom of running a marathon is made possible by years of not smoking or drinking or lazing about on the sofa. As the lonely commitment-phobic bachelor may someday come to realise, you can pay a very heavy price for choosing the wrong sort of freedom.

More from this author

Why won't Remainers talk about family?

By Giles Fraser

Liberalism is the politics of negative liberty. And it cuts Left and Right — broadly speaking, going Left on culture and Right on economics. On culture, it seeks to dismantle the cultural impediments to minority flourishing and emphasises the importance of individual choice. It is pro-gay and pro-choice. Many are comfortable with all this, but become distinctly less comfortable when words such as “family” and “motherhood” are considered to be a part of the whole apparatus of oppression and in need of deconstruction.

On economics, liberalism seeks to dismantle the barriers to free trade. With free-market capitalism, the human subject has broken free of the restrictive chains of tradition and religion, those of place and community, those of the family, even of one’s own biology. And with the inevitable forward march of globalisation; the collapse of restrictions on capital flows and financial deregulation; the disintegration of nation state borders, soon the values of the unencumbered self would stand victorious over the whole earth.

A few years after the collapse of the Berlin wall, Francis Fukuyama was so confident that Western liberal democracy had become the only show in town that he declared history to be over — and at its zenith stood the liberal subject triumphant.

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How motherhood put an end to my liberalism

By Mary Harrington

He spoke too soon. Whether history will record its crisis as the financial crash of 2008 or the Trump/Brexit revolts of 2016, liberalism is no longer as cocky as it used to be. Despite its many undoubted gains, liberalism is now recognised as coming with a heavy price tag. In the name of negative freedom, it hollowed out many of the conditions of human flourishing: the solidarity of community, the importance of place and roots, spirituality and religion, the family, the nation state.

Post-liberalism is the attempt to resurrect many of these ideas, not because it is hostile to freedom, but because it seeks to articulate a deeper sense of freedom: positive freedom.

Suggested reading

Call yourself post-liberal?

By Peter Franklin

The peculiar thing about post-liberalism is that even though it aligns with many (perhaps even the majority of) people in the West — Right-wing on culture, Left-wing on economics — few, if any, mainstream political parties have moved in to occupy this space. Gramsci could so easily have been talking about the present moment when he said that a political crisis “consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born”.

The following is an attempt to stake out something of an intellectual tradition for post-liberal thought, as it has expressed itself over the last 50 years or so. These are, for me, the top 10 texts that could help us consider the present moment in post-liberal terms.

1. After Virtue, by Alasdair MacIntyre

Top spot must go to Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981). A former Marxist turned Thomist, MacIntyre argued that the moral inheritance of the Enlightenment — the crucible of liberal values — was to strip human life of a sense of purpose or teleology. When morality is rendered merely a question of individual choice, the moral life becomes grounded in nothing other than subjective opinion. And on this flimsy basis, it has struggled to survive.

The choice we have before us, MacIntyre claimed, was Nietzsche or Aristotle (or St Benedict). He prophetically expresses the Gramscian moment as us waiting not for Godot but for a new “doubtless very different, St Benedict”. By which he means, the “construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness”.

Another book worth reading alongside After Virtue would be John Gray’s Enlightenment’s Wake. Having been a J. S. Mill scholar for much of his academic life, Gray knows the enemy better than many of its proponents (Mill is a poster boy of classical liberalism). Given the preponderance of religiously minded people in the post-liberal quadrant, it is worth noting that atheists like Gray can equally flourish in this space.

2. Why Liberalism Failed, by Patrick Deneen

Second spot is shared by two very contrasting approaches, one from the Right and one from the Left. Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed (2018) is a bracing attack on the borderlessness of the liberal self. It argues that what was designed to promote freedom instead undermined the very conditions — social, educational, religious — that made genuine freedom possible.

Deneen defends the importance of social institutions, from unions to churches to the family, that sustained human flourishing. And he points out that as human beings come to see themselves as fundamentally separate from each other, only the increasing power of the state can impose order on anarchy. Ironically, then, in the name of (negative) freedom, liberalism stimulates the state into greater acts of control.

Suggested reading

Liberalism: the other God that failed

By John Gray

By contrast, Nancy Fraser’s essay in American Affairs ‘From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump—and Beyond’ (2017)  carefully articulates how progressive liberalism came to form an alliance with neo-liberal economics, to create what she calls the progressive neo-liberalism of the Clintons and Blair.

Not only does she show how the populism that catapulted Trump into the White House was built upon a dissatisfaction with this alliance, but also, more philosophically, how Left and Right liberalism are brothers-in-arms — a fact that is currently most obviously expressed in the woke capitalism of Silicon Valley and Big Tech.

3. The Road to Somewhere, by David Goodhart

The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart (2017) is credited with the introduction of the important terms ‘somewheres’ and ‘anywheres’ to distinguish between those who are bounded and rooted in place, and those who are mobile and rootless. Many smarted at this distinction, with its implication that those who have benefited from social mobility — or, at least, geographical mobility – have expressed some fundamental lack of loyalty to their community.

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It's a bad time for an illegal immigration amnesty

By David Goodhart

Theresa May’s well known comment: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world you are a citizen of nowhere” presses further on this sensitive spot. But there is little doubt Goodhart’s terminology illuminates a central aspect of the populist complaint against liberal politics. This book can be usefully paired with Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots, first published in English in 1952.

4. Hillbilly Elegy, by J. D. Vance

The defence of these ‘somewheres’, often derided as small-town, small-minded ‘deplorables’ is vividly captured by J. D. Vance’s brilliant Hillbilly Ellegy (2016), a sympathetic portrait of his upbringing in the Ohio rustbelt.

Likewise, Christophe Guilluy, in his The Twilight of the Elites (2019), describes how France has been fundamentally divided between the economically successful metropolitan centres and the un-chic periphery — a distinction he uses to explain the whole gilets jaunes phenomenon.

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Test article

By J. D. Vance

5. Red Tory, by Phillip Blond

In the UK, the post-liberal moment was anticipated by Phillip Blond in his Red Tory (2010) and later by the Blue Labour movement. In the old terms of Left and Right, both were seen as political cross-dressers. Both regard capitalism and socialism as equally flawed, preferring instead something more like an economics of distributivism, where economic activity is subordinate to human interest — see Hilaire Belloc’s The Servile State (1912). For a quick guide to Blue Labour you could do worse than listen to Maurice Glasman’s Confessions or read Adrian Pabst’s The Demons of Liberal Democracy (2019).

A post-liberal reading list

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6. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, by Michael Sandel

Earlier philosophical attempts to expose the limits of liberal politics included the development of communitarianism, associated with thinkers like Charles Taylor and (his student) Michael Sandel. Sandel’s Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982) is a more difficult book than one might expect from Radio 4’s user-friendly ‘public philosopher’, but it is an important milestone in the tradition — not least in the way that Sandel takes on John Rawls, in many ways the master thinker of 20^th century liberalism.

And, qua Rawls, a special mention here must go to Katrina Forrester’s recently published In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (2019). But for my money the two great books of this tradition are Taylor’s magisterial Sources of the Self (1989) and his brilliant little polemic The Ethics of Authenticity (1992).

7. Theology and Social Theory by John Millbank

There is no doubt that post-liberalism — in contrast with many other 20^th and  21^st century ‘isms’ — has an influential and functioning theological wing. John Millbank’s Theology and Social Theory (1990) is a formidable statement of the argument. It is noteworthy that Phillip Blond began as a theology academic, Red Tory being in many ways an extension of the whole Radical Orthodoxy school that included people like Millbank and Rowan Williams.

Suggested reading

How beauty shapes our fates

By Phillip Blond

Within the church itself, it is Catholic social teaching, growing out of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891) and latterly expressed by Benedict XVI, that has proved to be especially influential. From Dorothy Day to Rod Dreher, it is not possible to capture the influence of Catholic social teaching in simple Left/Right terms. These are all Christian references, but pretty much all systems of religious belief carry both pre- and post-liberal convictions.

8. Why Love Matters, by Sue Gerhardt

Family life is often the entry point of former liberals into a more post-liberal sensibility. Having children often necessitates a certain rootedness, but also the lack of choice involved in who your children are or who your parents are exposes the limits of the liberal idea that we are all contractually related.

Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby’s Brain (2004) by Sue Gerhardt is an important take on the science of early mother/child relationships. Pretty much anything by Donald Winnicott and John Bowlby on attachment would fit well under this category.

Suggested reading

Why liberal feminists don't care

By Mary Harrington

9. The World Beyond Your Head, by Matthew Crawford

The tradition which follows up on John Ruskin’s emphasis on beauty also feeds into post-liberalism. Roger Scruton on architecture, Jane Jacobs on the importance of neighbourhoods, and increasingly those who try and capture something of the dignity and spirituality of work.

Matthew Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head (2015) is a brilliant diagnosis of the way in which the liberal Kantian self finds it hard to concentrate in a world of perpetual distraction.

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The rise of the hippie conservatives

By Freddie Sayers

10. Prosperity without Growth, by Tim Jackson

Finally, the environment. Here, above all, the liberal idea of continuous and perpetual growth runs up against the distinctly post-liberal idea of the existence of limits. Tim Jackson’s Prosperity without Growth (2011) is of particular interest here. But the person I would read first is the Kentucky poet/farmer Wendell Berry. The World-Ending Fire (2019) is an astonishing collection of essays; The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (1977) is a work of genius.

This list is very much my own. Others will point to how much has been missed out. But if I were to design a kind of post-liberal curriculum, this is where I would start. In the UK, probably the most successful attempt to translate these ideas into some sort of political programme is that of the SDP’s New Declaration.

But despite the fact that many people exist within the quadrant it describes (Left on economics, Right on culture) it is still struggling to break through. It’s perhaps because it’s easier for the Right to break Left on economics than for the Left to break Right on culture — which is why the Conservative and Republican parties may be more amenable to this sort of thinking than their opponents. But even this is not a natural fit. Which brings us back to Gramsci. The old is dead. The new is yet to be born.

Tibetans are no longer à la mode, though the destruction of their civilisation by the Chinese state continues, and few opinion-formers consider the persecution of Christians in the Middle East worth mentioning. Little is heard any more of the Yazidi, despite their still being a target of genocide by Isis. The Kurds are receiving media attention following their betrayal by Trump, but it will surely not be long before they are re-forgotten. Being identified as a victim of injustice has become a kind of privilege, handed out to favoured groups and denied to others according to the shifting diktats of progressive opinion.

A certain arbitrariness goes with demands for social justice. Possibly for this reason, SJWs (social justice warriors) are intolerant of criticism. In the US, anyone who argues that despairing Appalachian proles might be more deserving of concern than middle-class student protesters is condemned as a white supremacist, and their views suppressed. The suggestion that individuals and groups may suffer different degrees and kinds of injustice is rejected as reactionary thinking. Overthrow the prevailing power structures, and injustice will simply vanish. Anyone who questions this vision is not just wrong but evil.

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How the liberal West is dismantling itself

By John Gray

The trouble is that the imperatives of social justice are inherently conflicting. Distributing the goods of society according to equality and merit are not just competitors in practice. Merit and equality are inherently antagonistic values. A number of recent studies have argued — correctly — that the meritocratic claims of western liberal societies are at best partly justified, if not actually fraudulent. But a society that was perfectly just by meritocratic standards would be extremely unjust in egalitarian terms. Some injustices may be worse than others, but no world is imaginable which all the demands of social justice are fully realised.

Markets are condemned because the distribution of income and wealth is partly random. But so is the distribution of genes. If you aim to correct randomness in human fortunes, you may end up in the dystopian world of L.P. Hartley’s Facial Justice (1960), in which people who are “facially over-privileged” are encouraged to have their looks surgically altered. Conversely, gross disparities in educational opportunity are accepted as long as they cannot be defended in terms of merit. In the 1830s Lord Melbourne declared he liked the Order of the Garter best of all his titles because there was “no damned nonsense about merit” attached to it.

Egalitarian thinkers take a similar line today. Selection by ability by grammar schools is rejected by large swathes of progressive opinion. Quite a few seem to find it less objectionable to send their children to schools where selection is by parental income.

Contrary to a familiar line of criticism, there are few signs of hypocrisy in these people. Hypocrisy requires a measure of self-awareness, and there is little evidence of that in them. When they buy an expensive education for their children, might they not be expressing their conscientious revulsion against the evils of meritocracy? No doubt egalitarians who send their children to private schools — or are well-heeled enough to buy a house in a catchment area containing a socially selective comprehensive — are stacking the life-chances of their offspring against those of the majority. But why should any child be denied the good fortune of having progressive parents?

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Who will resist the great awokening?

By Eric Kaufmann

When it does not lead to tragedy, the pursuit of social justice quickly turns to comedy. It is tempting to conclude that the very idea should be junked.

That was the argument of F.A. Hayek, strongly articulated in his magnum opus The Constitution of Liberty and reiterated in the second volume of his trilogy Law, Legislation and Liberty: The Mirage of Social Justice. Market processes emerge and operate spontaneously, and the resulting distribution of income and wealth does not correspond to any criterion of a just distribution. Markets reward luck as well as talent and hard work. Being in the right place at the right time is as important in determining anyone’s fortunes as their abilities or virtues. The defence of free markets turns on their superior productivity, not any theory of rights or justice. For the same reason, Hayek opposed any attempt to correct market distributions for the sake of fairness. In his later writings he showed some sympathy for John Rawls’s theory of justice, but this was because Rawls rejected the idea that justice meant redistribution according to what people may be thought to deserve.

Like Rawls and the egalitarian left, Hayek rejected any ideal of meritocracy. In conversations I had with him in the Eighties, he often observed that the fact that the free market operated without regard to anyone’s beliefs about the good life was for him one of its advantages. The price of a virtuous economy would be stagnation. A certain moral indifference was necessary for continuing economic progress. In praising the amorality of free markets, Hayek was influenced by the Anglo-Dutch economist and satirist Bernard de Mandeville, author of the early-18th-century poem Fable of the Bees, which argued that the driving forces of wealth creation and prosperity were needs and impulses that Christianity condemned as vices.

Because it invokes values that are inherently antagonistic, social justice is indeed a mirage. But so is Hayek’s libertarian ideal of a social order in which the market operates without any controls. It is striking how little Hayek learnt from the political disasters of his lifetime (1899-1992) in which liberal regimes were repeatedly swept away by malfunctioning markets. The Nazis came to power on the back of massive economic dislocation. Roosevelt’s interventionism and British social democracy were responses to the Great Depression and the experience of full employment during the Second World War.

Hayek opposed government intervention in the economy because he believed it to be a threat to liberal values. The message of history, however, is that the surest way to overturn a liberal regime is to let the market rip. Events after Hayek’s death confirmed this lesson. The anarchic capitalism of the Yeltsin era produced Putin’s authoritarianism, and post-communist Europe’s populist regimes came to power partly because former communist officials so often benefited most from the shift to a market economy.

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Why I've reported Douglas Murray to the police

By Titania McGrath

If capitalism is legitimated solely by its productivity, anyone who fails to benefit from the wealth it creates has no reason to support a market system. A free market regime will be stable only if it delivers more or less uninterrupted growth and most people benefit from it. Except for a minimum income that protected against destitution, Hayek rejected any kind of intervention in the distribution of income produced by free markets. Yet as he acknowledged in his nod to Rawls, policies that alter market outcomes need not serve ideas of merit or moral deserts.

At present, when large sections of society have failed to benefit from many years of economic growth, measures going well beyond securing people against destitution are required. The goal must be to ensure a decent measure of economic security to everyone. Such policies need not invoke any ideal of social justice. The NHS does not exist in order to transfer resources from the healthy to the unwell, or even to provide medical care to those who cannot afford it. It is there to enable everyone to share a part of their vulnerability in common. Institutions of this kind do not serve distributive ends. They promote social cohesion, and thereby political stability.

Thinking about common institutions in this way is not another iteration of liberalism. The liberal preoccupation with distributive questions is part of the problem. What is needed is to shift to a way of thinking that is clearly post-liberal. Security and the need for a common life must be acknowledged as values that are as compelling as personal freedom, and frame a more coherent picture of a liveable society than inchoate visions of social justice.

The shift may be too great for liberal societies to accept. Protecting people from market-generated insecurity may involve some reduction of overall economic growth. In turn, any long-term slowdown requires high levels of solidarity among those affected. The social democracies of the past were all relatively closed societies — avowedly multi-ethnic but not radically multi-cultural. In practice, multi-culturalism is not so different from anomic individualism. Many are caught between communities and left without a common form of life. Yet that does not mean that large numbers yearn for release from the moral poverty of individualism. Many want greater security than they enjoy now, but not at the price of sacrificing the liberty to live as they please. It is a mistake to think most people in the affluent west want a different way of life.

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Taking on the Social Justice Warriors

By Eric Kaufmann

The largest obstacle to a shift in thinking on these issues is the zeal with which ideas of social justice are held and promoted. The goal of most SJWs is not to repair or improve society. Instead, they want to overthrow the existing social order. Accordingly, they are untroubled if pursuing social justice is actually socially divisive. Like Lenin before the revolution, they believe “worse is better”.

If there is anything approaching an iron law in history, however, it is that revolutions are followed by injustice worse than existed in the ancien régime. The French Revolution produced a war against the peasantry in the Vendée (1793-1796) which cost somewhere in excess of a hundred thousand lives. The Russian Revolution produced a lesser known peasant rebellion in the Tambov region (1920-21) in which similar or larger numbers perished. The American Revolution is no exception. For indigenous peoples, which under British rule were sheltered from settler expansion, it was an unmitigated disaster.

But history has no lessons for the “woke”. To accept that revolution only multiplies injustice would destroy the meaning of their lives. The social justice movement is not based on errors in fact or reasoning. It is a cult, whose chief beneficiaries are the SJWs themselves.

At this point we are back to Pascal. He was able to view the shifts and turns of human ideas of justice with equanimity because he was confident a higher justice existed. Lacking any such belief and incapable of living without a surrogate faith, SJWs find meaning in the fantasy of a secular millennium, a battle between good and evil followed by a world they cannot imagine.

That’s the lesson I took from Tanya Gold’s bracingly unsentimental portrait of Cornwall for UnHerd. It is, she says, a “lovely but hard” place – the two qualities existing side-by-side, but experienced in differing proportions depending on whether you’re there for a holiday or to make a living.

Further reading

Why the Cornish must accept the tourists

By Tanya Gold

But what happens when the tourists don’t leave, but move in? Answer: house prices go up, even while local wages remain low. Property markets in some Cornish communities have been utterly distorted. According to The Economist, “at the last count, a quarter of the dwellings in St Ives were second homes or holiday lets”.

Gold says that fatalism is in the Cornish character. But if that’s true, then the people of St Ives are going against type:

“Locals worry that the town is becoming a playground for rich Londoners… So in May 2016 locals decided to do something about it, voting in a referendum to introduce a ‘principal-residence policy’, which stops newly built houses in the town from being used as second homes. The thinking went that by stopping holidaymakers from snapping up new-builds, housing would become more affordable to people who live in St Ives all year round.”

Three years on, has the policy worked? Yes, is the short answer:

“…official statistics suggest that excluding second-home buyers from the new-build market has removed a big source of demand. The price of new homes in the town is 13% below what it might have been if the previous growth rate had continued.”

We’re also told that “other Cornish towns have introduced their own versions of the policy”. However, there is a complication – the level of house building in St Ives has, apparently, “slumped”. The Economist describes this as an “unwelcome side effect”, suggesting that the outcome was both harmful and unintended.

Here’s an alternative interpretation: in some situations, deliberately slowing down the pace of development may be just what’s needed.

Obviously, this runs counter to the conventional wisdom – which rests on two fundamental assumptions: firstly, that the only way to solve the housing crisis is to build more houses; and, secondly, that property prices are a function of supply. Look more closely, however, and we can see that the first assumption is wrong and the second incomplete.

The housing crisis is first and foremost a crisis of affordability. The basic problem is that homes are too expensive, not that there too few of them. The basic solution, therefore, is to make them cheaper – or at least hold prices steady so that wages and savings can catch up.

Ah, but wouldn’t building more houses increase supply and therefore bring down prices? Not necessarily. Prices are a function of both supply and demand. If demand runs ahead of supply, then it doesn’t matter how much you build – prices will still go up. Because supply is physical (requiring bricks and mortar, workers and equipment) and demand is financial (requiring only the electronic transfer funds from one bank account to another) the latter always has the potential to outstrip the former. Never forget: money flows faster than concrete.

Further reading

Sun, sea, sand – and shooting up

By James Bloodworth

That’s why you see property markets overheating even during construction booms – or, rather, especially during construction booms. That’s because supply has a tendency to generate its own demand. In the context of housing, a building boom is its own best advert. It provides visible evidence of a thriving economy – and thus attracts further investor interest, which bankrolls more construction and so on and so forth.

It’s a process best served by the most noticeable kinds of development. Visibility may come from the architectural form of the buildings (the flashier the better) or the concentration of activity in certain hotspots or the already established prestige of certain locations. A measure of controversy also helps – there being no such thing as bad publicity.

Demand can be further enhanced by selling a development as a generic investment product – and not necessarily as a primary residence requiring a full time commitment by the purchaser. Hence the attraction to investors (and thus developers) of holiday homes, time shares, buy-to-let flats and so on.

When some or all of these factors align in a particular place it can be impossible to satisfy demand. Prices therefore keep rising – attracting even more speculative attention and making life ever more expensive for local people.

In these circumstances, it is entirely rational for the community to do what St Ives did and use the law to selectively curb demand – in this case by freezing out the second homers. By disrupting the circular relationship between development and speculation, prices have a chance to subside back to affordable levels.

The Economist, being a liberal publication, plainly doesn’t approve. And, to be fair, place-specific restrictions on second home ownership, buy-to-let landlords and other unwanted categories of demand do represent a barrier to the free movement of people and capital.

However, the right to free movement is not absolute. All liberals would uphold the right of individuals to restrict access to their own private property; and most liberals, apart from the ultras, believe that nations (or groups of nations like the EU) should be able to control their own borders.

And if such rights are justifiably exercised at the level of the individual and the nation, then why shouldn’t they also apply at the intermediate level – that of the community?

Further reading

Control mass immigration? Europe can’t even control mass tourism

By Peter Franklin

At some point, the debate over who governs Britain will be resolved. We’ll then have to decide what to do with ourselves (assuming Brexit isn’t cancelled, which would put our future in others’ hands).

So, what sort of country do we want to be? Or, to narrow things down, what sort of country does the Conservative Party want Britain to be?

Suggested reading

Ten vested interests the Tories failed to tackle

By Peter Franklin

That has yet to be decided. Indeed, it’s not even being debated – at least not openly. Interrupted by Brexit, the old arguments haven’t been had for years – key protagonists have retired from combat and frozen conflicts have lost their relevance.

Yet, in quiet corners of the Westminster village, there are people thinking about the future and drawing new battle lines in readiness for the world after Brexit.

*

Hence last week’s clarifying moment: the publication of The Politics of Belonging by Onward – a Conservative think tank.

The report, which is centred on a Hanbury Strategy opinion poll of 5,000 people, defines the impending struggle for the soul of the Conservative Party: a struggle between those who emphasise security and those who emphasise freedom.

This is how the report’s lead authors, Will Tanner and James O’Shaughnessy, put their case:

“After decades of liberalising politics, from the cultural shifts introduced by Roy Jenkins on divorce and abortion in the 1960s, through the Thatcherite economic reforms of the 80s and 90s, to the social liberalism of the Blair government, the polling reveals a sea change towards a new era in which the politics of security and belonging are becoming more important.

“In fact, it suggests the pendulum of liberty is swinging back the other way and that voters are now looking for a government that will protect them and their families, and provide a greater focus on place, community and security – the ‘politics of belonging’.”

These words are a direct challenge to the Conservative Party’s libertarian tendency. Furthermore, they come from an unexpected quarter.

When it was founded last year, many people (myself included) assumed that the think tank would represent the party’s self-described ‘modernisers’ – who aren’t libertarians, but who are economically and socially liberal. The Chairman of the advisory board is Lord Finkelstein – a moderniser grandee and wise counsellor to David Cameron and George Osborne. Baroness Fall and Neil O’Brien, two other bright lights from the Cameroon golden age, are also on the advisory board.

And yet The Politics of Belonging takes Onward deep into post-liberal territory; and not everyone is pleasantly surprised. For instance, the Guido Fawkes website expressed its consternation at the “remarkable change in Onward’s outlook”. The report is diametrically opposed to the libertarians.

*

In effect, the report is a counterblast to Britannia Unchained – a book published in 2012, but newly relevant because four of its five authors are now in Boris Johnson’s Cabinet: Dominic Raab (Foreign Secretary), Priti Patel (Home Secretary), Liz Truss (Trade Secretary) and Kwasi Kwarteng (Energy Minister).

Britannia Unchained is a source text for Boris Johnson’s libertarian-lite ‘Boosterism’, which envisages too big a role for government to count as fully libertarian. However, the sort of state intervention it supports is exemplified by hyper-capitalist Singapore – and contrasts with continental-style social democracy.

Suggested reading

Who wants to be 'boosted' by Boris?

By Freddie Sayers

As for the moral values that underpin this vision for humanity? Perhaps those are best encapsulated in the immortal words of Liz Truss:

“This generation are #Uber-riding #Airbnb-ing #Deliveroo-eating #freedomfighters”

But are they, Liz? Are they really? Let’s take a closer look at the Onward survey results, which are broken down by age group.

The most significant question was a choice between two statements: “I would rather live in a society based on freedom” and “I would rather live in a society that focuses on giving people more security.” Every age group favours security, though the older age groups more so than the younger.

On a number of questions about specific social and economic issues, people were asked to choose between statements associated with the ‘pro-freedom’ and ‘pro-security’ sides of the wider debate.

On most of the social (or cultural) issues – including community integration, urbanisation, marriage and university versus technical education – there was a general preference for the pro-security statements, which is pronounced in the older age groups. On criminal justice, however, the age groups were split – younger people favouring rehabilitation over punishment and older people the opposite. On the issue of equality between the sexes, the generations were united in believing it hadn’t gone far enough.

On economic issues – such as attitudes to technological change, immigration and the privatisation of utilities – there was a clear preference for the pro-security statements, though again it was generally stronger among the older age groups. The main exception was on the issue of ‘flexible working’ – to which there was more openness.

The generation were also united in prioritising the reduction of economic inequality over the maximisation of growth – and in supporting the claim that the wealthy obtain their wealth by exploiting others rather than by working hard. There was similarly strong backing for the proposition that “making a decent living has got harder for people like me” (as opposed to easier).

So while we can discern some comparatively stronger tendencies towards social liberalism and techno-optimism among the young (as one might expect) – there is no groundswell of support for the gung-ho capitalism espoused by Liz Truss and her colleagues – quite the opposite, in fact. On almost every issue people of all ages want more security not more freedom.

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At this point I need to declare my own ideological inclinations. I’m very much at the communitarian (and therefore anti-libertarian) end of the conservative spectrum. Indeed, some might say I’ve fallen off it altogether and should go and join Blue Labour.

Suggested reading

Call yourself post-liberal?

By Peter Franklin

Certainly, I’m delighted by Onward’s turn toward post-liberalism and find a lot of encouragement in The Politics of Belonging. However, it’s when your biases are being most lavishly confirmed that you need to be on your guard. Indeed, one should go out of one’s way to focus on the things that most challenge your beliefs.

For instance, like a lot of people, I was taken aback by the evidence that younger people are less supportive of democracy than older people. There’s a lot to unpack here.

First, let’s not panic – the overwhelming majority (76%) of under-35s support “having a democratic system”. As for the finding that 64% of under-35s “want a strongman leader”, we shouldn’t interpret that as support for dictatorship. If I read it correctly, the survey gauged support for “having a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament”. Clearly a strong leader is better than the alternative; and effectiveness, not tyranny, is surely what most people have in mind when expressing their approval.

As for “not bothering with parliament” – I’m not sure that this indicates a preference for undiluted executive rule, but rather a reaction to the recent experience of a weak prime minister (Theresa May) frustrated at every turn by the House of Commons. There’s evidence to suggest that voters are heartily fed-up with this cynically obstructive, grandstanding parliament – and just want Westminster to get on with the job of leading the country.

That said, young people do appear to have less patience with the to-ing and fro-ing of representative democracy than older voters do. To me that’s evidence not of latent fascism, but of cosseted individualism – a somewhat solipsistic desire to have everything your way; or, failing that, to detach oneself from the messy give-and-take of the democratic process. Democracy, being a communal activity, doesn’t really fit with youthful self-absorption – but then neither does dictatorship. Rather, what is wished for is a free society that just sort of happens, especially if it comes with various ‘free’ material benefits. Hence the appeal of the EU as a distant, but benign, source of liberal authority.

Suggested reading

Can we tame democracy's demons?

By Adrian Pabst

The Onward survey therefore reveals a hybrid instinct, especially among the young, for both freedom and security, but without accepting much in the way of personal responsibility. Though this ought to disappoint libertarian hopes, it also presents a challenge to the communitarian position.

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Another challenge arises when the survey asks people to choose between a “society that embraces change” and a “society that preserves tradition”. Most age groups, and especially the younger ones, prefer change to tradition. Of course, a lot depends on wording. A different question asks people to choose between “radical change” and pursuing “gradual change to protect what is important”. In this case, it is the latter – and definitively conservative – option that wins heavily, even among the young.

Breaking down the results another way reveals a crucial difference between how different social classes respond to the freedom-versus-security and change-versus-tradition choices. As mentioned, the survey finds a clear preference for more security over more freedom. This is especially strong among those with fewer qualifications, but present across the entire educational and occupational spectrum.

However, there is much less of a consensus when it comes to the preference for change over tradition. The preference is strong among university-educated professionals – but weakens to the point of disappearing the further one goes down the socio-economic pecking order. To put it another way, the more privileged you are, the easier you find it to reconcile change and security. Almost everyone wants more security, but while some welcome change, others see it as a threat. This, in a nutshell, is the “open versus closed” spectrum currently redefining our politics.

Suggested reading

The battle for Brexit Britain

By Matthew Goodwin

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The libertarian agenda, which embraces radical change and values freedom over security, is doubly out of tune with the spirit of the age, then. It appeals neither to the younger, middle-class remainers who see their security as anchored to internationalist, liberal institutions such as the EU nor to the older, working-class leavers who believe that the forces of globalism (including the EU) have undermined their security in the economic and cultural spheres.

For both groups, Britannia unchained is Britannia adrift. The only way forward, therefore, is the politics of belonging. But belonging to what, exactly?

The future of the Conservative Party depends on finding a credible and unifying answer.

“On the eve of the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, the Russian president said ‘the liberal idea’ had ‘outlived its purpose’ as the public turned against immigration, open borders and multiculturalism.”

Noting the cracks in western democracy, Putin proceeds to insert a crowbar and waggle it around:

“Mr Putin branded Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to admit more than 1m refugees to Germany, mainly from war-ravaged Syria, as a ‘cardinal mistake’. But he praised Donald Trump for trying to stop the flow of migrants and drugs from Mexico: ‘This liberal idea presupposes that nothing needs to be done. That migrants can kill, plunder and rape with impunity because their rights as migrants have to be protected.’”

Suggested reading

Our illiberal empire of rights

By John Gray

This is obvious rubbish. No western politician of any standing, no matter how liberal, argues that migrant rights involve allowing them to “kill, plunder and rape with impunity”. The various failures we’ve seen in policing, criminal justice and border control don’t change that fact – especially as these haven’t all been on the side of excessive leniency.

But, of course, there’s little point in exposing the errors and exaggerations in Putin’s comments, they’re not intended to be a reasonable critique, but a provocation. Their purpose is to invite condemnations, such as those already issued by the Donald Tusk and Boris Johnson.

It suits Putin to place himself on one side of an argument and the western political establishment on the other. His real message is to western voters who feel their concerns on issues like immigration are being ignored – ‘look at me’, he’s saying, ‘I’m the one speaking up for you, not this cabal!’

Suggested reading

Will Russia's Rust Belt rise up?

By Felix Light

Of course, such voters can’t back him directly, but they can support the ‘national populist’ politicians who make a point of not joining the chorus of anti-Putin liberals. In other words, he’s manipulating all of us – critics and sympathisers alike. One only has to look at the way the FT presents the interview to see how easy it is to fall into his trap:

“Mr Putin’s evisceration of liberalism — the dominant western ideology since the end of the second world war in 1945 — chimes with anti-establishment leaders from US president Donald Trump to Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Matteo Salvini in Italy, and the Brexit insurgency in the UK.”

Notice how Brexit is casually placed into the same category as Trump, Salvini and Orban.

Brexit was a vote for self-government not a particular programme of government – on which there was, and is, no consensus among Leavers. But never mind the nuance, to the absolutists one is either with the liberal establishment (which in Europe means the EU) or the national populists. And once Putin steams in, it’s a case of choose your team: “ever closer union” or Mother Russia.

But how about neither? How about a free association of nations who trade and cooperate with one another – but which also respect one another’s sovereignty? It’s an approach which, in their very different ways, both the EU and Putin’s regime seem to have a problem with.

Suggested reading

Will the West ever understand Ukraine?

By Roderic Braithwaite

There’s another false binary at work here: that between liberalism and anti-liberalism. Again we’re invited to pick a side, but one can reject the liberal idea that individual freedom is ultimately the only thing that matters and the anti-liberal idea that it doesn’t matter at all. Indeed, western democracy is the product of political traditions that seek to balance the ‘I’ and ‘we’ of human existence without crushing either. Conservatism, decentralised democratic socialism and continental Christian democracy are some of the attempts to find this balance. None ever entirely succeed, which is why we need to maintain democratic and peaceful competition among them – both within and between nations.

However, this competition is under threat from liberals who seek to embed their ideology within national and international frameworks that exclude other democratic traditions.

In his interview with the FT, Putin remarks that: “The liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population.”

A system that still commands majority support is hardly obsolete. For all its faults, the western establishment still submits to free and fair elections – unlike certain other regimes one could mention. As for “conflicting with the interests of the majority” that’s an inevitable feature of liberalism, because individual interests inevitably and continually conflict with one another.

Suggested reading

The dark genius behind the destructive creed of Putinism

By Ian Birrell

Liberal systems therefore have to find a way of bringing order if not resolution to these conflicts. As things stand, it is clear that most people still think they have more to gain from the established order of priorities than any alternative. The danger though is that there is a growing number who don’t – hence rising support for the kind of politics that promises a substantial reordering of priorities. The identity politics of the woke Left and the chauvinistic protectionism of Donald Trump might not seem to have much in common, but both are about changing the rules for arbitrating the conflicts of liberalism.

Rather than becoming obsolete, the real danger facing liberalism is that it will become inflexible – fossilised around a particular framework of rules, which an angry minority feel they have no chance of ever changing.

That gives a rule breaker like Vladimir Putin a lot to work with.

Or is it?

I’m not going to argue that Blairism and 21st-century populism are much of a muchness. Obviously, they’re not. They represent either end of the open-versus-closed spectrum. And yet there are echoes: in their own way, the Blairites embraced patriotism (“Cool Britannia”), law and order (“tough on the causes of crime”) and a performative disrespect for the establishment (“the forces of conservatism”).

And, as with populism today, there were hints at a deeper philosophical challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy of economic and social liberalism (at least as far as liberalism can be understood as individualism). Blairites in the UK, and their New Democrat counterparts in the US, flirted with a political philosophy called communitarianism – which, as the name suggests, emphasises the importance of community.

Further reading

Who's most intolerant in America?

By Peter Franklin

Fashionable thinkers at the time included Amitai Etzioni and Robert D Putnam (author of the highly influential Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, which was published in 2000). Their communitarianism was not anti-individualist, but was as much about the responsibilities of individuals as their rights. Though certainly not conservatives in the American sense, they were unafraid to talk about concepts of duty and virtue and how these might contribute to progressive ends.

In a timely article for Quillette, John R Wood, reminds us what happened next:

“…the communitarian spirit and the intellectual forces gathered around atrophied with the turn of the new century. One of the likely causes of this shift was the trauma of 9/11, which refocused… the country as a whole away from parochial matters of community and towards a War on Terrorism, a development that would consume our national consciousness and further polarization for years to come.”

The War on Terror would also derail Blairism in the UK. The micromanaging Brownite tendency of New Labour took over, leaving little room for community empowerment. Then the Financial Crisis erupted followed by the Great Recession followed by austerity. Economic matters reasserted their supremacy over social concerns and communitarianism was forgotten.

But the tide turned again in 2016  – when the voters made it clear that the loss of community has political consequences. Brexit, Trump and the other populist shocks of the last few years have left moderate political thinkers scrambling for a response. Wood argues that communitarianism is back in vogue – though not under that particular label.

Further reading

Does Britain need a post-liberal party?

By Peter Franklin

Communitarianism includes just about anyone concerned by the coming apart of society. It is therefore a broader category than post-liberalism and at odds with the division-sowing of the national populists. Indeed, many of the most interesting communitarians today are Left-leaning liberals (just like the first time round).

Wood gives the example of Pete Buttigieg – perhaps the most unexpected of the Democratic front runners:

“As Buttigieg himself has said, it is unlikely that, under ordinary circumstances, a 37-year-old mayor of a relatively small city would receive serious attention as a candidate for president of the United States. This is obviously true. But a large part of Buttigieg’s unique appeal hinges on his focus on the very values of localism that in other times might make a politician seem too parochial for federal office. ‘We need,’ he has argued, ‘to rally people around the sense of identity that we’re building each other up, because community is part of how people explain how they fit in to the world.'”

What Buttigieg understands is that progressive politics absolutely depends on a shared sense of identity and values – because people don’t vote for redistributive policies that benefit people they feel no connection to. He also understands that a decline in the theory and practice of the common good opens the way for divisive identity politics and political polarisation.

It’s pretty obvious that many of the voters that once made up winning progressive coalitions – including sections of the working class, older voters and religious voters – have found themselves on the other side of the culture war divide (and thus easy pickings for the likes of Trump).

Further reading

The fall of social democracy

By Peter Franklin

It’s not that Buttigieg and those who think like him want to switch sides in the culture war. They remain liberals (they haven’t, alas, turned post-liberal) and aren’t about to confront the culture warriors on their own side.

Rather their focus is on reaching across divides, engaging in dialogue and rebuilding trust. Wood mentions a few of the US conservatives, including David Brooks and Ben Sasse, who are doing the same from their end. However, progressives have a particular reason to do so, because they’re never going to build majority support for an activist state without sufficient trust in at least some public institutions.

In this respect, they’re well-advised to work towards this goal at the local level. Whereas the national and international politics of the social media age consists of strangers screaming at each other from behind anonymous accounts, local politics at least allows for the possibility of civilised deliberation and cooperation between neighbours. It’s so much more difficult to be rude to someone you might meet on the street.

I grew up in a small town in southern England. It was, and still is, a community-minded place with thriving local institutions. On one occasion, the local freesheet gave a less than glowing review to a play put on by the local amateur dramatics society. This did not go down well. People complained that what might be acceptable from the theatre critic of The Times about a disappointing West End show was simply inappropriate for a small community where public slanging matches were not the done thing.

Similarly, the town council, though solidly Tory since the Stone Age, was just about the least partisan forum on the planet – and mostly a means of having one’s say on parking spaces and bin collections.

Further reading

What's the point of central government?

By Peter Franklin

The cynics might say that local democracy is more civilised because there’s nothing much in the way of real power to fight over – and if ever the real decisions were devolved then things would turn nasty. That, however, hasn’t been the experience of the decentralising reforms of recent years. And as Twitter proves on a daily basis, a complete lack of significance is no guarantor of polite discourse.

Perhaps it’s time to give up on bringing peace to the disembodied battleground grounds of the internet. If the communitarian Left and the civically-minded Right want to re-civilise our politics, then they must make sure that as much it as possible happens locally.

These are the strange times we live in. It’s hard to look at British politics right now and not see a system in meltdown. Remarkably we have not one but two hard-Brexit parties – the Brexit Party plus UKIP; and not two but three anti-Brexit parties – the Lib Dems, Change UK and the Greens (plus of course the SNP and Plaid Cymru in Scotland and Wales). Then, of course, there’s Labour and the Conservatives straddled painfully across the fence. It’s quite conceivable that all nine of these parties will win seats in the forthcoming Euro-elections (and, with the exception of what’s left of UKIP, in the next general election too).

In fact, we’ve never been closer to a wholesale realignment of the post-war party system. The Conservatives are already in existential crisis territory – and if Labour is finally forced off the Brexit fence, then we could see the existing cracks and splinters in both parties develop into wholesale disintegration. That would mean multi-party politics across the whole of the political spectrum, but under first-past-the-post (FPTP) rules. Expect the next general election to be the most unpredictable in British history.

Further reading

Call yourself post-liberal?

By Peter Franklin

Almost anything could happen except, it would seem, the one thing that needs to happen – which is the emergence of a sane and sensible post-liberal party.

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As I’ve explained before, the polling evidence keeps showing that the most under-served portion of the electorate are culturally conservative voters who lean to the Left on economic matters. As I’ve also explained, post-liberalism shouldn’t be confused with anti-liberalism. Rather, what post-liberals recognise is that while freedom matters, it’s not the only thing that matters – and especially not when it’s hitched to a self-serving ‘open-vs-closed’ agenda designed to benefit those already best-placed to take advantage of globalisation.

Despite the emergence of numerous new parties and movements in Britain and elsewhere, it’s hard to find any that qualify as post-liberal. New centrists such as Change UK or the Macronistes in France offer establishment liberalism in undiluted form. The radical Left, as exemplified by the Corbynised Labour Party, is a toxic cocktail of cranky foreign policy, extreme political correctness and the sort of borrow-and-spend economics that would pawn the country to the money markets. As for ‘national populism’ on the Right, that’s all about exploiting and exacerbating resentments, not offering any positive way forward. Can you think of any populist movement overseas that would provide a model for what we’d want see over here? Trumpism in America? Le Penism in France? Orbanism in Hungary? No. Non. Nem.

Further reading

Five reasons why populism isn't up to the job

By Peter Franklin

These forces wouldn’t have been unleashed if the failures of the political and economic establishment weren’t so obvious – and yet they only provide an outlet for anger, not any kind of solution. What the world needs now is a democratic, inclusive and post-liberal alternative – and Britain has a key role to play in building it.

Whether Brexit goes ahead or is smothered to death, the need for the fresh start that post-liberalism can provide is pressing.

Furthermore, post-liberal thinkers are finding their voice in the UK – both in the Conservative and Labour parties. An honourable mention should also go to the modern-day Social Democratic Party, which has yet to make a significant electoral breakthrough – but which has a post-liberal platform and a growing membership.

But can post-liberals afford to divide their forces? Has the time come for them to join together in a unified political movement? It’s easy to think of reasons why not. Here are three to start with:

Firstly, breaking through as a new party isn’t at all easy – not in a FPTP electoral system and especially not when you can’t rely on the simplicities of single issue politics or the attention-grabbing tactics of an anger-based campaign.

Secondly, post-liberals also believe in loyalty to institutions, thus for those rooted in traditional Toryism or the Labour movement, it goes against the grain to sever oneself from time-honoured connections.

Thirdly, the current disruption of politics might bring about a positive realignment within the existing parties rather than to the party system as a whole. At the very least , there’s the chance for renewal that comes from a change in party leaders. Theresa May’s leadership is already tottering and there’s talk of Jeremy Corbyn wanting to retire. Red Tories and Blue Labourites can therefore dream of better times around the corner – just imagine how much better things would be if, say, Johnny Mercer and Lisa Nandy were leading their respective parties. So, with change of one sort or another on its way, why not stick around for another throw of the dice?

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Then again, it’s the hope that kills you. Also not good for your health is repeatedly banging your head against a brick wall. Sooner or later, you have to decide when to stop – unless, that is, the wall decides for you.

Political parties, especially long-established political parties, are not stand-alone institutions. They are part of a much wider system encompassing economic and cultural interests deeply opposed to the values of post-liberalism. You might imagine that you’re working for change from within, but, honestly, how’s that working out for you? Has our politics become more responsive to public concerns? Has it become humbler in the face of its manifest inadequacies? Have we seen the political establishment rise to the challenge of Brexit? Have we seen our politicians set aside their factional interests to work for national reconciliation? Have they inspired you lately? Have you been wowed by the effectiveness of government or by the constructive engagement of the opposition?

Further reading

A party for the politically homeless

By Giles Fraser

To put it another way: have you lived through any point in our political history when you’ve been less impressed by the system, less inspired by those chosen to lead?

No, I didn’t think so.

As well as asking yourself what you think about your party, it is also worth pondering what your party thinks of you. Of course, the big parties are broad coalitions, so you can’t expect everyone in the tent to be the same as you. But even if they don’t agree with you, they should at least respect you – but do they? The nastiest things I’ve ever read about Red Tories or Blue Labourites have come from within their respective parties.

But even worse than the contempt is when they try to steal your clothes. There’s been at least two occasions when the Conservative leadership has dressed-up in Red Tory red – David Cameron’s Big Society phase and when Theresa May was persuaded to give Nick Timothy’s ‘Erdington Conservatism’ a go. Meanwhile, Labour leaders don Blue Labour blue everytime they worry about losing their working-class supporters – most notably during Ed Miliband’s One Nation phase. Still, whatever the occasion, it always but always comes to nothing. A sincere engagement with post-liberal ideas is simply too challenging to the core ideologies and embedded vested interests of both parties. Like any other presentational fad, the moment passes and some other gimmick takes its place.

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Of course, it’s not as if post-liberals all believe the same thing. Some are socialist, others capitalist; there are post-liberal remainers and post-liberal leavers. And despite their stereotyped reputation as ‘faith, flag and family’ stick-in-the-muds, there’s a wide range of perspectives on those issues too.

So a unified post-liberal party would itself be a broad tent. However, I’d argue that someone from Blue Labour has more in common with a Red Tory than with a Corbynite or a Blairite; and that, equally, Red Tories have more in common with Blue Labour than with the liberal, libertarian or reactionary wings of the Conservative Party.

Further reading

Liberalism: the other God that failed

By John Gray

I’m not saying that agreeing a joint platform would be easy; I’m saying that post-liberals of all shades share enough in the values that matter most to make cooperation on policy not only feasible, but positively fruitful. After all, its not as if the country’s current situation calls for the same old tired ideas.

Though loathe to let go of long established loyalties, I’m not sure it calls for the same old tired parties either. As I’ve already said, post-liberals have a natural affinity for venerable institutions, but if we’re being realistic, political organisations are the least of these. If no one had ever put country before party we’d still be stuck with Whigs and Tories – if not Roundheads and Cavaliers or even Yorkists and Lancastrians.

In times of trouble you have to decide what to hold on to. If that forces a choice between outward forms and essential truths, I’d rather go with the latter and make a virtue of it.

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose“

Attributed to the 19th-century writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, it loosely translates as “the more things change, the more they stay the same”: perfect for a worldly-wise 900 words on why the latest brand new thing isn’t so new after all.

Now that the internet has turned comment journalism into a blood sport, world-weariness and using French words is, I regret, passé. And yet Karr’s epigram is as relevant as ever.

Last week, the MPs that formed the breakaway Independent Group announced the creation of a new party, Change UK. The irony, as many people have pointed out, is that the party’s purpose is to undo change – by keeping Britain inside the EU and by refloating the wreck of Blairism. Perhaps, as good Europeans, they should have called themselves Plus Ça Change UK.

Further reading

Liberalism: the other God that failed

By John Gray

It’s not as if renewing New Labour is even a new thing to do. When Gordon Brown took over from Tony Blair in 2007, he promised a “new kind of politics”. When, just three years later, Ed Miliband became leader, he dropped the ‘New’ from New Labour, but claimed to represent a “new generation” with “different ideas, different attitudes” and a “different way of doing politics.”

Five years later, the Labour Party was bored with that and turned to an old leftie, Jeremy Corbyn. But even he promised a “new kind of politics” – a “kinder politics”. By the start of this year, Chuka Umunna, Luciana Berger and the others could take no more of their comrades’ kindness and left to form The Independent Group – recalling the events of 1981 when the ‘Gang of Four’ quit a leftwing Labour Party to form the SDP. Plus ça change…

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Though we seem to be stuck in an unending cycle of confected newness, a genuinely new kind of politics is tantalisingly close to breaking through.

It comes in several varieties and therefore has different labels attached to it – ‘communitarian’, ‘Blue Labour’, ‘Red Tory’, ‘hard centre’, ‘post-liberal’. Some or all of these have caught the attention of the mainstream political parties. For instance, Tony Blair flirted with communitarianism, as did Ed Miliband. The Conservative Party had its ‘Big Society’ moment under David Cameron, with related ideas influencing the early part of Theresa May’s leadership (i.e. when she was still popular). However, in each case it soon became clear that the party establishments were only after a fresh semblance of ‘newness’. Once it all got a bit too challenging, the same old same old reasserted itself.

So is the post-liberal agenda an ideological mirage – a vague set of ideas that appear on the horizon of politics only to vanish as one gets closer?

I wonder if a map would help. If we were to triangulate from the familiar points of the political spectrum, might we find the post-liberal promised land? Perhaps, but the traditional Left-Right political spectrum (past its sell-by date anyway) is of no use. If post-liberalism fits anywhere along the line, it is somewhere in the middle. Blue Labour would be a bit to the Left, Red Tories a bit to the Right – but overall they’d occupy the space as, er, the liberals they disagree with.

Further reading

Vanilla liberalism is past its sell-by date

By Peter Franklin

Maybe we need to add another spectrum. The first is reserved as a spectrum between the economic Left and the economic Right – partisans of public ownership and state planning at one end and fans of the freemarket and laissez- faire at the other. The second spectrum is about social and cultural issues. This would run from support for constraints on individual action (e.g. drug laws, immigration controls) through to opposition to such restrictions.

The intersection of the two spectrums creates the familiar ‘Political Compass‘ chart, which is divided into four quadrants – representing the socially conservative and socially liberal tendencies of the economic Left and economic Right. At first sight this would appear to solve our problem. We can put liberals in the bottom right quadrant and post-liberals diametrically opposite in the top left. No more occupying the same space. Meanwhile we can put conventional conservatives in the top-right quadrant and their ‘progressive’ opponents in the bottom-left. Nice and neat.

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But there’s a further problem. In fact, several further problems.

The first problem is that mainstream parties of the centre-Right and centre-Left aren’t quite as distinct from one another as they would seem. Basically, they are all liberals on economic and social issues alike – meaning that what they’re mostly interested in is individual freedom of action in both spheres. The main thing they disagree about is to what extent the state should get involved in order to facilitate that freedom of action. In general (though not in every case) the liberal Left favours a bigger, more active state, while the liberal Right a smaller, less interfering one. For instance, the former emphasises redistribution to give the poor economic agency; while the latter emphasises the right of people to keep the fruits of their own enterprise.

This is not an insignificant difference in perspective; until recently it was the defining issue of politics. However, it boils down to an argument over means not ends – the ultimate and shared objective is the maximisation of personal autonomy.

The second problem is something I’ve written about in more detail here. It’s to do with the mismatch between where most people place themselves on the political compass and where the political and cultural elites place themselves. The latter are heavily biased to the bottom-right liberal quadrant – though the leftier ones spill over into the neighbouring progressive quadrant. In some countries, especially America, the conventional conservative quadrant also claims a corner of the establishment – think Fox News and the Republican National Convention.

Further reading

Can we tame democracy's demons?

By Adrian Pabst

However, when the Voter Study Group asked the American public to place themselves on the chart, a very different distribution was revealed. There were a load of people in the progressive quadrant and unsurprisingly most of them voted for Hillary Clinton. There were another bunch of voters in the conservative quadrant – almost all of whom voted for Donald Trump. The liberal quadrant was mixed but there were very few people in it – and most of those tended towards the centre of the chart. But the real surprise was the much larger number of people in the fourth quadrant – those who were neither economically nor socially liberal. In 2016, Trump won significantly more of these votes than Clinton, which proved crucial in the swing states that won him the Presidency.

It is remarkable that such a large and important group of voters have no elite institutions to speak for them – no newspapers, no broadcasters, no think tanks, no mainstream political parties. It’s therefore unsurprising that in country after country we’ve seen populist movements sweep in to claim them for their own.

Which brings me to the third problem – which is that identifying post-liberalism with the fourth quadrant associates it with populism, especially national populism. Furthermore, by defining this quadrant against social and economic liberalism, the conclusion that some people will draw is that post-liberal is just a euphemism for anti-liberal. And yet to any fair-minded person it should be obvious that Blue Labourites such as Maurice Glasman and Red Tories like Phillip Blond are not of the same ilk as Donald Trump and Matteo Salvini.

What, then, separates post-liberalism from crude populism?

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Let’s start with what liberalism means in this context. It is not mere support for individual liberty, because almost everyone (except those on the furthest fringes of politics) could sign up for that. Rather, liberalism is the belief that the maximisation of individual liberty is the main and perhaps only purpose of politics. It’s not that liberals don’t believe that other things are important in life, but that they see these things as matters for the individual, and free associations of individuals, not politics.

Post-liberals, like liberals, are pro-liberty; but unlike liberals they do not believe that the maximisation of personal freedom is the be-all-and-end-all of politics. Other things are important too – like family, community, nation, fairness and beauty – and therefore there are balances to be struck and conflicts to be resolved as an essential part of the democratic process. Post-liberals therefore believe that individuals have rights and duties. Moreover, duties aren’t just about obeying the law as a mechanism for arbitrating conflicts between individual freedoms; people also owe a duty to the common good, which can be defined and justified on grounds other than the maximisation of liberty.

For instance, we should defend free speech not only because it is an important freedom, but also because truth matters and people should be able to speak it (even if they don’t agree on what it is). Another example is environmentalism – the main reason why we should protect an endangered species is not because our children and grandchildren should have the opportunity to see it, or because it plays an important role in ecosystems we rely on, but simply because we have no right to destroy it. Consider animal welfare: the reason why we should punish cruelty to animals is not primarily because it upsets people, but because to inflict suffering on a sentient being is objectively evil.

There are very few absolute liberals. To varying extents, most accept the idea that duties exist alongside rights and that freedom, while precious, isn’t everything. However, post-liberals would go further – recognising a growing imbalance between the goal of furthering liberty and the other things on which a good society depends. Indeed, they diagnose it as the primary cause of our 21st-century malaise. ‘More balance!’, not ‘more freedom!’, is the post-liberal rallying cry.

Further reading

Five reasons why populism isn't up to the job

By Peter Franklin

Therefore, we need to re-draw the political compass – instead of economic and social spectrums that run from liberal to illiberal, they should run from ‘maximising liberty’ to ‘balancing liberty’. This pushes the worst of the populists – those with undeniably totalitarian, anti-democratic tendencies – right off the chart. However, that still leaves post-liberals sharing a quadrant with the less extreme kind of populist, which for reasons I describe here is far from ideal.

*

The solution is to add a third spectrum to the chart – one that clearly distinguishes post-liberalism from populism. To my mind, it should revolve around the principle of human dignity – which is the idea that every person, without exception, is of infinite worth and must be treated as such. It is, therefore, incompatible with collectivist ideas that instrumentalise the individual in service to some group identity; and also at odds with atomistic individualism – because we can only achieve our full personhood in relationship to others. Though of infinite worth, we are, in this life, finite in our capacities. As such, we cannot owe the same duty of care to all – and therefore owe more to those relationally closest to us, starting with our families and extending outward to community and nation.

However, what we can do without limit is to recognise and respect the dignity of all people, no matter how close or distant our relationship to them. There are no good reasons for not doing so – just the dark motivations of prejudice and the cynical politics of divide and rule. It is on this spectrum that post-liberalism can be distinguished from populism, lifted not only into another quadrant, but onto a higher plane.

Suggested reading

Could Mill's model mend capitalism?

By Victoria Bateman

Those chilling words, the obliteration of the self, have stayed with me ever since I first read them as a teenager. They also came to mind when I read an essay by Graham Tomlin for Prospect magazine. Tomlin is an Anglican theologian and bishop. Not one to duck a challenge, he presents an argument against John Stuart Mill – specifically the Victorian philosopher’s influence on “our contemporary ideas of freedom”.

This is how Tomlin sums up those ideas:

“It is never justifiable to interfere with another person’s freedom to ensure their happiness, wisdom or well-being because that is to determine what that person’s well-being is. Freedom is defined as liberty of conscience, thought, feeling and opinion, as ‘liberty of tastes and pursuits … doing as we like … without impediment from our fellow creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them’.”

Liberals of Left and Right may differ among themselves as to how big a role the state should play in facilitating our freedom, but that’s a disagreement about means not ends.

Tomlin reminds us of “another, older view of freedom”:

“Found in classical literature, this version sees liberty not as freedom from the limitations and social expectations that stop us following our self-chosen desires, but freedom from the ‘passions’.”

Drawing upon both the classical and the Christian traditions, Tomlin’s definition of freedom is in sharp contrast to Mill’s:

“True liberty is, therefore, freedom from internal urges such as greed, laziness or pride that turn us in upon ourselves rather than outwards towards God and each other… It is not so much freedom for ourselves, but freedom from ourselves: freedom from self-centred desires, or the crippling self-absorption that makes us think only of our own interests. It is freedom to create the kind of society where we are more concerned with our neighbours’ well-being than our own.”

In the Gospels, Jesus is asked “who is my neighbour?” Tomlin argues that Mill’s philosophy implies the following answer: “[my neighbour is] at best a limitation; at worst a threat to my freedom.” In Tomlin’s view of freedom, however, “my neighbour becomes… a gift – someone without whom I cannot become someone capable of the primary virtue of love.”

The Bishop presents a powerful challenge, not just to Mill, but also to the way we live our lives today. On the whole I agree with it – and yet Orwell’s words continue to nag away at me.

Suggested reading

Why Sunday closing reveals the deepest divide in politics

By Peter Franklin

Some years ago I had a conversation with a Baptist minister, who politely challenged my conservative politics (which were rather more ‘big C’ in those days than they are now). In his view, conservatism was pretty much the same thing as individualism, and therefore clearly a bad thing. 

And yet, if one believes in God, and that He made us, then the fundamental unit of that creation isn’t some collective entity, but the individual. Only the person has a soul – not nations, or classes, or communities, or even families – only the self. That doesn’t mean that selfishness is good or that we should live in isolation from others; but selfhood must be good (though sadly corruptible) because that is how God made us – and in His own image too! It follows that any concept of the obliteration of the self must be evil, because it seeks to destroy the pinnacle of God’s creation.

I’m not at all suggesting that Graham Tomlin seeks such a goal, but at some points the language he uses – “not so much freedom for ourselves, but freedom from ourselves” – strays too close to obliterationism.

I also worry about the political implications of defining true freedom as the “freedom to create the kind of society where we are more concerned with our neighbours’ well-being than our own”. The historical precedents for societies of this kind are not encouraging.

Tomlin makes it clear that the kind of society he has is mind in one of mutual aid, not a ‘human hive’ in which individuals count for nothing and can be sacrificed in the interests of the all-important collective. However, that still leaves the problem of the extent to which mutual aid ought to be enforced.

Contemporary western society, for all its individualism, is highly cooperative. Never in human history has so much wealth been transferred from the rich to the poor, the healthy to the sick, the lucky to the unlucky. Furthermore, most of this is compulsory (try not paying your taxes and see what happens to you). Tomlin’s account of freedom can be used as a justification for such compulsion, but it does not tell us why it shouldn’t go much, much further. Why, for instance, should we not raise tax rates to 100% or insist that everyone is paid the same or ban people from buying things that they want but don’t need?

All the good reasons are to be found in the Christian tradition (from which liberalism is ultimately derived): we are created not only as individuals, but as free-willed individuals – whose dignity depends in part on being able to exercise that free-will.

Graham Tomlin is absolutely right in seeking a clear distinction between an authentic Christian worldview and liberal individualism, but at a time when the political extremes are mobilising, drawing a line against illiberal collectivism is even more important.

Suggested reading

Deluded liberals can't keep clinging to a dead idea

By John Gray

For instance, in America, a liberal Democrat is someone on the centre-left of the more left-wing of the two big parties. In Japan, the Liberal Democrats are the main conservative party (and the natural party of government). In Russia, the Liberal Democrats are an ultranationalist party, permanently in opposition. In the UK, the Liberal Democrats are a centrist party of protest that joined a Conservative-led government – and are now, very firmly, back in opposition.

According to a poll from ComRes, 47% of British voters believe there is a need for a new centre party. There is, it is reported, £50 million in funding lined-up for anyone who can do to British politics what Emmanuel Macron did to French politics.

‘En Marche UK’ would be anti-Brexit, pro-immigration and socially liberal. Rather like the Liberal Democrats, in fact. The main difference is that the new party would be new. This would, apparently, change everything.

Adrian Wooldridge of the Economist (writing as ‘Bagehot’) is awake to the absurdities:

“Those who say the mooted new party would be different point out that it is garlanded with big names. But the names are the very opposite of what you want in a disruptive party: fallen Goliaths rather than plucky Davids.”

He is dismissive of the potential British Macronistes – such as David Miliband (“Davos man incarnate”) and Sir Nick Clegg (“a titled throwback to the Cameron years”).

Wooldridge wonders why, in an age of disruption, the British political system seems so hard to disrupt. I would argue it has been disrupted, but from within the established party system (it’s a similar story in America).

Disruptors can only disrupt with a genuinely new product, but the much-discussed ‘new’ centre party only serves to repackage an old and dilapidated one (which, by the way, is much better described as liberalism than centrism):

“At the start of the century, centrists were convinced that they had a winning formula: a free market in morals as well as economics, and a determination to use the proceeds of growth to help the poor. This philosophy colonised all three main parties. But today it lies in ruins. The financial crisis has destroyed the centre’s reputation for economic competence. The concentration of wealth in London has undermined its claim to stand for social justice…”

Wooldridge posits a centrist split between “fundamentalists, who dismiss criticisms of the old model as manifestations of closed-mindedness, if not outright racism; and reformers, who recognise the need to fix the model’s weaknesses.”

So what is it that centrists need to fix?

“How do you remain in the sensible centre while leading a revolution against Britain’s new oligarchy, the clique of second-rate people in both the public and private sectors who have got rich by sitting on each other’s boards and marking each other’s homework? How do you address technocratic questions about the wiring of capitalism (stock options, public listings, takeover rules) while fashioning a compelling vision of a capitalism that works for everyone?”

That’s a great list, if not an exhaustive one. As an agenda for action, there really is room for a new centre party here – but not a liberal one.

This is for three main reasons:

• Firstly, as I’ve explained before, liberalism – i.e. the maximisation of economic and social freedom as if nothing else matters – is not centrist. It is extremist.
• Secondly, the problems on Adrian Wooldridge’s to-do list are the consequence of liberalism; more of the same cannot be the solution.
• Thirdly, the idea that there is a better, stronger form of liberalism to be had is a delusion – akin to the old lefty excuse that ‘real socialism has never been tried’.

That doesn’t mean that Wooldridge’s reformist project is a waste of time, just that it will, if faithfully pursued, lead to something other than liberalism.

Ensuring that the post-liberal future is not anti-liberal is what matters now.

Recommended reading

The political centre is not where liberals think it is

By Peter Franklin